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I'm a 2011 MacBook Pro (8,1) owner who, due to some lapse of rational thinking, bought the laptop with the intent of running Linux on it from the get-go. tl;dr -- Natty was a horrible experience for Sandy Bridge systems, but Oneiric has been much, much better. I think this was the case for all SB systems during the Natty cycle. When SB dropped in the beginning of this year, the Intel code throughout the kernel (graphics, as well as general processor stuff) was pretty bad. I had a lot of lock-ups and freezes with those kernels back in the Natty beta (I got my MBP in early April, IIRC). Even after upgrading to the bleeding edge kernel (to get extmon support with integrated graphics), things were still pretty ugly (the biggest insult was the wireless card not working). Suffice to say: I ran back to OSX screaming like a big, first-world-problem-having baby. So, I labored until the hateful gaze of Cupertino for those six months (my work is done in a Windows VM so the host system doesn't matter, beyond what "makes me happy".. pleasure coding happened in an Ubuntu VM running awesome-wm). When Oneiric came around, I decided to give it another try and, I'm happy to say, they finally got their shit together. Anecdotally, I haven't had a single lock-up. I've gotten wireless working (was a bit of an effort and I have to rebuild kernel drivers whenever the update manager installs a new kernel) and the remaining issues are pretty minor: inferior battery life (paradoxically with better resource usage for my workflow), sub-optimal resolution on monitors, OSX vs Linux trackpad drivers, etc. But, overall, I'm much happier that I was able to stick it out (I was this close to offloading the machine on craigslist). |