I am thinking of getting a Macbook Air 2013 with the new Haswell chip and broadcom chip. I am not in a rush to install ubuntu so i can wait.
Just curious if ubuntu will be fully suported for this piece of hardware and run smoothly like normal laptops do?
Simply said, just install and play, no big technical tweaks to be made to work. Currently, the most cheapest haswell laptops is this, so i am considering.
Thanks.
I bought one, and its running Ubuntu right now. It's not install & play, and some bugs are not fixed (audio does not work, webcam does not work). See my write-up here: http://www.miek.nl/blog/archives/2013/08/31/macbook_air_61_2013_model_with_ubuntu/index.html
It has a bunch a links to the current bugs.
According to multiple sources, installing Ubuntu on the Macbook Air is "problematic" to say the least.
Quoting Phoronix
... that's the short scoop on running (Ubuntu) Linux on the new MacBook Air; it's possible, but it's messy. The wireless doesn't work "out of the box" and other small but usual Apple laptop shortcomings with Linux. Related to the Linux kernel, there's also some GPU hanging issues and potential thermal problems and USB issues still being investigated...
References:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=apple_mba2013_ubuntu&num=2 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1197451 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1195822 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2156747
I'm not sure 13.10 will work out of the box on a macbook air 2013 but all the showstoppers in the kernel already got a patch.
See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1197451
Apple only licenses their hardware to work with their software (and vice versa). You could create a virtual machine and run Ubuntu ontop of OSX, however.
