GTK 3-based apps support HiDPI screens well. I’m still struggling to find good sans and serif fonts, though :( With Source Han Sans font (thanks to Adobe and Google), Chinese characters never look so good on Linux. Both GDM and GNOME Shell render beautiful. GNOME supports HiDPI since 3.10 and improves in 3.12, but I haven’t had chance to try it with my old laptop. Texts are sharp and UI elements are crisp. One of the reasons I bought MBP is its retina display. GNOME supports HiDPI out of box, some apps don’t At the time of writing this section, there is 60% battery with 4 hours 13 minutes estimated battery life. After using it for a while, the estimated battery extends. Gnome underestimates remaining battery time at startup, showing only 3 to 4 hours with full battery. Sometimes I think it’s faster than booting OS X.īattery life is awesome. It took less than 10 seconds to get to GDM login screen. Thanks to SSD, starting up the system is pretty fast. xf86-input-synaptics is less annoying than libinput for touchpad support. Just simply follow the instructions on the wiki pages. My choice of desktop environment is GNOME. I still have problems booting into Arch, which I will explain later. The generic Macbook wiki doesn’t help though. Keep the MacBookPro11,x wiki handy, I find it very useful. I followed this article for partitioning and installing GRUB: Arch Linux on a MacBook Pro Part 3: Base Installation. The exceptions are, as I mentioned above, partitioning and booting. Or, you can simply use dd, as documented on USB flash installation media wiki page.Īrch’s Beginners’ guide and Installation guide still work for most of the cases.

My old experience of partitioning and GRUB installation doesn’t help at all.Įverything starts from creating a bootable USB with Arch’s ISO image. Macbook is even more special - It’s using a special EFI implementation that’s not the same as PC laptops. Things has been changed a lot, everybody is using EFI now. The last time I installed Arch was on my 2009 Acer laptop, which was still using BIOS. OS X is still the best OS for this awesome hardware. Since it’s not issued by my company, I can do whatever I want to it, including installing my favorite linux distro - Arch Linux. I’ve been using the 2014 version for work for a while and I’m very satisfied with its screen, touchpad and battery life, so I bought a new one for my personal use on this Thanksgiving.

Arch linux macbook retina