After a dismal showing from Fedora 11 on my MacBook, I downloaded Ubuntu 9.04 last Friday. It is slick; they’ve got a lot of stuff working very well on the MacBook 5,1. I have a few gripes about Ubuntu so far, but I am using it until somebody figures out how to get multi-touch functionality for my MacBook in Fedora 11. So, here’s the good:
- Wireless works, out of the box. Even in the LiveCD.
- Trackpad works for single-touch right out of the box (like it did in Fedora 10); making multi-touch work only takes a few minutes following the guide.
- Firefox is a stable version.
- Sound is fixable.
- While flash and pulseaudio aren’t perfect, they’re a lot better than in Fedora.
And now, the bad:
- No full-disk encryption. This is one feature that nearly pushes me back to Fedora, even with the trackpad issues.
- SELinux. Maybe it’s nothing more than a security blanket, but I’d rather have it than not.
- Aterm. For some reason it doesn’t like the “clear” command if you set the terminal name to something other than aterm; I’m still looking into it.
So far, I’m sticking to Ubuntu. However, once Fedora gets the trackpad working (and I know there are some dudes working on it), I’ll be moving back. Ubuntu is slick, but for a laptop, full disk encryption is a must.