Is there anyone who got Linux to work full on a Macbook or MB Pro? I get most flavors of Linux to boot and get a nice X running, however, things I cannot miss like the touchpad control, screen backlight controls and keyboard backlight are completely not working. Also the battery is falling faster than my Android under Linux.
Is there any Linux working well? I have no problem with tweaking (I hacked on device drivers on previous laptops when they didn't work), but even with tweaking I never managed to get it working well. Otherwise I can have nice Apple hardware with my favorite OS....
I have a late 2008 unibody Macbook running Ubuntu + Gnome3 (no Unity). Almost everything worked without configuring. Brightness control required one line to xorg.conf and Airplay required installation of one Pulseaudio module.
I really like Gnome 3. It's much faster than Lion in that machine (4 GB of RAM, SSD), the battery lasts the same in my normal use as in Lion, the user interface fits for my freetime use, the visuals are simple and pretty and best of all: Nvidia has much better drivers for Linux than for OSX, so I'm actually able to play Minecraft without any hiccups.
I ran Ubuntu 9.04 and 10.04 successfully on a MacbookPro 5,4 with very few hiccups for ~2 years. There's a bit of community support around Ubuntu for getting it running on Mac hardware, but your results may vary. rEFIt and friends are a bit difficult to get working initially, but it's not impossible.
I had the same feeling as the author: displays are a pain in Linux. The sound, wireless and touchpad support weren't as seamless as they are in OSX either.
Even now I've just switched back to OSX because my Ubuntu partition stopped booting, and I do most of my work over ssh on an Ubuntu VM with gnu screen / bash / vim.
The thing I miss most from running Linux desktop is the highlight to copy, middle-click to paste clipboard.
Is there any Linux working well? I have no problem with tweaking (I hacked on device drivers on previous laptops when they didn't work), but even with tweaking I never managed to get it working well. Otherwise I can have nice Apple hardware with my favorite OS....