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Today I picked up a Macbook Air (13", early 2015 model) because I wanted a new laptop, as my old laptop (the Samsung Series 5) has a horrible battery life, where it barely lasts over an hour and gives up early (powering down at 40% and not coming back up until I plug it in). This is also my first Apple computer. I'm the furthest thing from an Apple fanboy, but the choices I was throwing around in my head were between an Apple computer and a Lenovo Thinkpad.
I was given a Thinkpad as my work laptop, and it's by far the most impressive PC laptop I've ever used; it can drive three displays and run lots of concurrent tasks and has an insane battery life. Every PC laptop I've owned in the past have sucked in comparison. I hear people compare Apple computers to Thinkpads, so that's why the choice came down to one of these, and I didn't want another Thinkpad sitting around the house. ;)
Months before getting a Macbook I was looking into what kind of effort it takes to install Linux on a Macbook. There's a lot of information out there, and most of it suggests that the best way to go is to install a boot manager like rEFIt (or rEFInd, since rEFIt isn't maintained anymore). I saw some pages about not using rEFIt and installing Grub directly, which were from a Debian and Arch Linux perspective, and it sounded really complicated.
It seems that nowadays, with a user friendly Linux distribution like Fedora, a lot of this works much more flawlessly than the dozens of tutorials online would suggest. I just made a Fedora LiveUSB in the usual way (as if installing on a normal PC), rebooted the Macbook while holding the Option key, so that I was able to select the USB to boot from.
When installing Fedora to disk, the process was very much the same as doing it on a normal PC. I let Fedora automatically create the partition layout, and it created partitions and mount points for /, /boot and /home like usual, but it also created a partition and mount point for /boot/efi (for installing itself as the default bootloader in the EFI firmware on the Macbook). After installation was completed, I rebooted and the grub boot screen comes up immediately, with options to boot into Fedora.
One weird thing is, the grub screen apparently sees something related to Mac OS X (there were two entries, like "Mac OS X 32-bit" and "Mac OS X 64-bit", but both options would give error messages when picked).
If I want to boot into OS X, I hold down the Option key on boot and pick the Macintosh HD from the EFI boot menu. Otherwise, if the Macbook boots normally it goes into the grub menu and then Fedora. So, the whole thing is very similar to a typical PC dual-boot setup (with Windows and Linux), just with one extra step to get into OS X.
Update: I'm keeping a wiki page with miscellaneous setup notes and tips here: Fedora on Macbook
First and foremost: this requires the victim to click not one, but two random links sent to them over Pidgin (or any other program that does URL auto-linking the way Pidgin does). So it's not exactly the most severe vulnerability, but I found it interesting nonetheless.
I jumped ship from GNOME 2 to XFCE when GNOME 3 was announced and have ranted about it endlessly, but then I decided to give GNOME 3.14 (Fedora 21) a try.
I still installed Fedora XFCE on all the PCs I care about, and decided my personal laptop was the perfect guinea pig for GNOME because I never do anything with that laptop and wouldn't mind re-formatting it again for XFCE if I turn out not to like Gnome.
After scouring the GNOME Shell extensions I installed a handful that made my desktop somewhat tolerable:
(Click for bigger screenshot)
And then I found way too many little papercuts, some worse than others. My brief list:
Settings weren't always respected very well, and some apps would need to be "coerced" into actually looking at their settings. For example, I configured the GNOME Terminal to use a transparent background. It worked when I first set it up, but then it would rarely work after that. If I opened a new terminal, the background would be solid black. Adjusting the transparency setting now had no effect. Sometimes, opening and closing a tab would get GNOME Terminal to actually read its settings and turn transparent. Most of the time though, it didn't, and nothing I could do would get the transparency to come back on. It all depended on the alignment of the stars and when GNOME Terminal damn well feels like it.
Also, I use a left handed mouse, and GNOME Shell completely got confused after a reboot. The task bar and window buttons (maximize, close, etc.) and other Shell components would be right handed, while the actual apps I use would be left handed. So, clicking the scrollbar and links in Firefox would be left-handed (right mouse button is your "left click"), and when I wanted to close out of Firefox, I'd instead get a context menu popup when clicking the "X" button. Ugh!
I wanted to write this blog post from within GNOME but it just wasn't possible. With different parts of my GUI using right-handed buttons and other parts using left-handed ones, I had context menus popping up when I didn't want them and none popping up when I did. After a while I thought to go into the Mouse settings and switch it back; this didn't help, instead, the parts that used to be right-handed switched to left-handed, and vice versa. It was impossible to use. I just had to painstakingly get a screenshot off the laptop and to my desktop and deal with it over there instead.
These things just lead me to believe the GNOME developers only develop for their particular workflows and don't bother testing any features that other mere mortals might like to use. All the GNOME developers are probably right-handed, and they have no idea about the left-handed bugs. All of the GNOME developers don't use transparency in their terminals, evidenced by the fact that the transparency option disappeared from GNOME 3.0 and only just recently has made a comeback (in GNOME 3.12/Fedora 20).
XFCE is going back on this laptop.
tl;dr version: it seems that the gstreamer-ffmpeg package is required for Thunar (or tumblerd, specifically) to render thumbnails of video files on the XFCE desktop for Fedora 16. This package is provided by RPM Fusion yum repository (rpmfusion-free-updates specifically).
It seems to be pretty hard to find this information online. None of my Fedora XFCE systems were able to render thumbnails of videos, and this caused me some headaches with removable drives (when I'd be done with the drive and want to unmount it, I wouldn't be able to because "the device is still busy"... and lsof /media/Cyro would show that tumblerd was the culprit... it was trying to render thumbnails of any video files I may have seen while browsing in Thunar and wasn't having much luck with it).
The usual set of packages that provide all the video codecs for me didn't do the job (vlc, smplayer, gstreamer-plugins-{good,bad,ugly}), I even tried installing ffmpegthumbnailer and no luck. Finally I installed gstreamer-ffmpeg, and after doing a killall thumblerd and then visiting a folder full of videos in Thunar, it finally worked and started making thumbnails.
0.0021s.
