You say "Installing Linux is really easy", but in my experience installing Linux on a Mac is really involved. It could be the case that it has become easier. Would you say it has become significantly easier with newer models?

There are some instructions for installing Ubuntu on a Mac here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MactelSupportTeam/AppleInt...

It involves installing a bootloader (rEFIt, which starts GRUB), partitioning in OSX, partitioning in Linux and variants for different possible desired outcomes. After this, one should consider model-specific instructions for getting more details right (See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro)

Finally, in my experience, it will be a little off. The trackpad won't act just right, the backlight of the screen will have full brightness when starting X, etc. ("Thunderbolt Support Still Has Problems On Linux", December 2012 http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI1M...)

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Is this what you consider "really easy"? Does it fulfill the requirement "The hardware must work well with linux"?

As far as I can tell it isn't, and it doesn't, but please enlighten me if you disagree :)

Messing around with grub is always going to be painful, but this guide[1] worked decently for me and I've not had any driver problems (the backlit keyboard doesn't work very well, but I don't really care enough to fix it)

[1] - http://lifehacker.com/5531037/how-to-triple+boot-your-mac-wi...

I've been looking at getting a macbook air recently (because shiny), specifically to run linux on it. However, I couldn't find much about driver support for recent airs. How well does linux run on it? Is there much that doesn't work properly, or is there really great support for it?

I'd be interested in an answer to this too. Especially about support for multitouch gestures (that could be mapped to keyboard shortcuts, at least).

At the moment I use a debian VM inside OS X when I need to.

It runs fine (i haven't tried many multitouch gestures).

Most hardware is Intel (except wireless card, which is a b43, also supported).

With a few simple tweaks I can achieve equal or better battery consumption than OS X.

I have MacBook 11 and dual-boot with Linux Mint 14. It runs great, much prefer it over OS X. If there was one thing I could steal from OS X though it would be the trackpad and multitouch implementation. On all the distros I have installed it sucks, it is truly awful. This is the only real deal breaker holding me back from using Linux primarily on the Air at the moment, I am not going to carry a mouse around.

Does it really work that long with Linux? I have the 13" Air(2012 Ivy Bridge model) and while on Mac OS and only using Eclipse/XCode for work I never get it past 6 hours mark.

But in any case, I honestly don't see many reasons why would I install Linux on it in favour of Mac OS. I can see why would I swap Windows for Linux,but I find myself able to do 99% of linux stuff on MacOS just fine. It's got the terminal, it's got mostly the same tools, so why?

It's really a preference thing. I have the opposite feeling, i.e. why keep OS X when you can run Arch?

As for battery life, Linux can very greatly depending on settings and distro. Don't expect to beat Mac OS without any configuration/tweaking, but if you go far enough you can get match it or do better.

Someone that thinks like me! I'm not alone!

Agreed with you, totally off topic, but I spend most of my days doing web development. I opted for OSX over Linux because I wanted to run Photoshop (Gimp sucks), native Word/Excel (LibreOffice sucks), etc. and got tired of constantly rebooting to Windows to export an image in Photoshop.

As I said in the first post, "why not MacOS" is not the question right now. Please, stick to the topic.

Well, it kind of is a question, since I asked it as I would like to know why people do it. Feel free to ignore it though, there's plenty of other comments more on topic for you.

My work (and hobbies) involve lots of linux specific programming. Most of the things (but not all) can be done on MacOS, but almost always linux is the better tool for me, getting my work done. Developing blindly on MacOS, not knowing whether (and how) will it run on linux can't be as good as developing on EXACTLY the same OS that will later run the production version. Using exactly the same (to the exact version) diagnostics tools as on the production server is a thing that I prefer. Especially having seen bugs that only show up on specific versions of the platforms.

Sorry if my previous comment was rude. Didn't mean to.

Thanks a lot for the answer, it makes sense. And don't worry,no offence taken ;-)

Why not use virtualization?

Running native gives increased battery life and makes multiple-monitor support generally easier.

From the sounds of your battery usage, you don't run linux on your macbook air, so recommending it is rather strange.

I run both Linux and OSX, but yes, my battery usage isn't as good under linux, but it still sits at around 5+ hours

Have you tried diagnosing with powertop?

Does hibernation or maybe even some kind of hybryd-sleep works well for you?