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You do not just have one choice to go with if you want to switch away from mac.

If you do not like mac nor windows, maybe give Linux a shot? If you care about the mac UI you can make Linux look like it.

For software development and normal usage I do not feel like I am missing out on something by using Debian on the desktop and Ubuntu on my laptop.

If you use some specialised software for design you might want to check compatibility though

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I'm seriously considering it now. I'm a consumer desktop software developer (making Photoshop plugins) so I'll have to use Windows & Mac at least in VMs, but maybe I can run Linux on the metal.

I haven't given Ubuntu a proper try, except the one time I tried to make my plugins work with GIMP & Wine. Elementary looks interesting as well - their website mentions some of the Apple attention to design detail that I appreciate.

After years of thinking and consideration, I switched recently. And behold... it is great. Just do it - there is so much choice that I am sure you will find your sweet spot.

My suggestions: Xubuntu or Ubuntu w/o all the nasties, Elementary OS, Debian, Arch Linux or a BSD flavour.

Only if you don't have AMD hardware. I bought a laptop with some AMD A10 APU, integrated R7 graphics and a 1366x768 display. Installed Ubuntu to use it instead of Windows 10 because Windows 7 doesn't want to install on a UEFI machine where the HDD is somehow invisible to it and you can't use a USB 3 port because the installer fails to boot and all other nasties.

So I install Ubuntu and am greeted by a broken screen, where 2/3 of the screen are on the right and 1/3 is on the left, like somebody cut a piece of film badly so it's the previous frame and the current frame together.

I asked around and apparently Ubuntu 16.10 doesn't do AMD anymore because AMD didn't write a proper GPU driver, and the old driver for Ubuntu 12.04 (that's from April 2012 haha) is broken totally for new hardware.

So here am I using Windows 7 Pro in a virtual machine on Windows 10 home which constantly bugs me with notifications, is very slow, eats battery and is generally horrible.

Meanwhile my MacBook Air (which only has 4GB of RAM because I bought it with my own money and I'm freelancing and am 16 years old) is laughing in the background...

So, no, Linux is not the solution... :/

This seems to be a problem with the APUs then. I have a Linux-based home server with an AMD CPU that works just fine, and a dual-boot gaming PC with Intel CPU and dedicated AMD GPU that also works wonderfully. (With the open-source drivers. Don't even bother with the Catalyst shit and go straight for Mesa.)

Use 16.04 for now. I have the same chip and the driver from here works on 16.04 flawlessly - http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMD-Radeon-GP...

Proof: http://i.imgur.com/3wlPZZE.jpg

I see. Sad to see this development, and thanks for bringing this up. The ability to run linux flavours is now definitely a purchase criterium for me when it comes to new hardware.

I actually quite enjoyed running Windows 10, but have linux installed on all my machines.

Having said that, battery life on my laptops are terrible with linux out of the box.