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Let's see it in another way. You aren't permitted to run MacOS (or what's called today) on HW of your choice but only to HW chose for you by Apple. If you try t

Let's see it in another way. You aren't permitted to run MacOS (or what's called today) on HW of your choice but only to HW chose for you by Apple. If you try the Hackintosh route, you'll probably find enough little issues like your girlfriend's laptop and you'll next update will always be a leap of faith... There is a bunch of HW vendors that sell devices with Linux support, like Dell and System76 (the only two that I recall at the moment), I'm happy with a Dell XPS running Debian Stretch.

pjmlp 8y ago
And having bought one with Ubuntu pre-installed (ASUS 1215B) they aren't without their own little set of issues, like non working wlan drivers 'cause lets just replace the existing working one by a WIP FOSS variant on an OS update,or GPU support that gets removed because AMD decided to reboot their drivers development.
- IronBacon 8y ago
  Well, I would say then that Asus after sale support is kinda bad... ^__^; I think I've read that Dell send all their drivers patches upstream, so you aren't stuck with devices that use a kernel blob that stops to work next time you install a new kernel. I've an Asus EeeBook (NetOne?) hidden somewhere, I bought it because I wanted to show demand for Linux supported HW but it had too little RAM for my taste and I also had to replace the "NVME" like SSD because it was unbearable slow.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Those two issues were caused by Canonical and AMD. The wlan driver was when they decided to replace the proprietary one by the FOSS variant, without taking care feature parity was achieved first. The other one when AMD replaced their drivers, but the new open source one for older cards doesn't provide 1:1 feature parity with their former one, thus preventing the same level of hardware acceleration and OpenGL support. In both cases the only solution is to dig out old unsupported kernel versions.
    - pxc 8y ago
      I'm thinking about switching from fglrx to AMDGPU with an old Radeon HD 7870 atm. Mind sharing more details? Anything I should watch out for? Btw there are two open-source drivers for older AMD graphics cards; one is their current, officially-supported open-source driver which had support for a couple of older generations added, and the other is an independent open-source driver which is much older (and supports the _really_ old cards).
      - pjmlp 8y ago
        On my case it is an AMD Brazos APU E450. The new open source driver for older cards does not have the same OpenGL support level, nor video acceleration. I had to force enable HW acceleration on Firefox, and sometimes it does bring X down when watching videos. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-16.04-Dropping-fglrx https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-1...

pjmlp 8y ago

And having bought one with Ubuntu pre-installed (ASUS 1215B) they aren't without their own little set of issues, like non working wlan drivers 'cause lets just replace the existing working one by a WIP FOSS variant on an OS update,or GPU support that gets removed because AMD decided to reboot their drivers development.

IronBacon 8y ago
Well, I would say then that Asus after sale support is kinda bad... ^__^; I think I've read that Dell send all their drivers patches upstream, so you aren't stuck with devices that use a kernel blob that stops to work next time you install a new kernel. I've an Asus EeeBook (NetOne?) hidden somewhere, I bought it because I wanted to show demand for Linux supported HW but it had too little RAM for my taste and I also had to replace the "NVME" like SSD because it was unbearable slow.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Those two issues were caused by Canonical and AMD. The wlan driver was when they decided to replace the proprietary one by the FOSS variant, without taking care feature parity was achieved first. The other one when AMD replaced their drivers, but the new open source one for older cards doesn't provide 1:1 feature parity with their former one, thus preventing the same level of hardware acceleration and OpenGL support. In both cases the only solution is to dig out old unsupported kernel versions.
  - pxc 8y ago
    I'm thinking about switching from fglrx to AMDGPU with an old Radeon HD 7870 atm. Mind sharing more details? Anything I should watch out for? Btw there are two open-source drivers for older AMD graphics cards; one is their current, officially-supported open-source driver which had support for a couple of older generations added, and the other is an independent open-source driver which is much older (and supports the _really_ old cards).
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      On my case it is an AMD Brazos APU E450. The new open source driver for older cards does not have the same OpenGL support level, nor video acceleration. I had to force enable HW acceleration on Firefox, and sometimes it does bring X down when watching videos. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-16.04-Dropping-fglrx https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-1...