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I'm a student who does a fair amount of programming. I'm looking forward to install Linux on my Macbook 5,1 (Late 2008 Aluminum model), because it's a very developer friendly OS.

But before doing that I have some questions for people who have Macs and have installed Linux on it:

  1. How is the hardware support? Do fans, keyboard special buttons, backlighting, webcam, trackpad, sound, etc. work out-of-the-box? Does Linux support multi-touch gestures?

  2. How is the graphics performance? I'm not a gamer but I can't stand a system that lags or is not smooth as butter when scrolling a web page for example. OSX is flawless in this regard.

  3. Does the machine overheat when running Linux? What about the battery life? (I've heard these kind of complaints from a fellow Mac user who tried Ubuntu a couple of years ago).

Lastly, I've heard that the Linux installation process on Apple hardware is different from normal laptops. What are things I should know or keep in mind? Are there any good guides about this? I've looked at the Ubuntu wiki pages but the info there is mostly outdated.

Thanks.

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closed as not constructive by Jorge Castro, Eliah Kagan, fossfreedom♦ Feb 2 at 9:30

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