So I have a a friends macbook pro retina 2015, and they want Linux on it but I am unsure of what to recommend them here, they want decent battery life (So possibly a light weight distro with TLP/Powertop enabled) and some basic programming tools, I have recommended Vi as its already in Linux and decent tool. They also want to be able to play videos and music, so Full open source is out of the window here I think. He also wants a fair bleeding edge system, Arch or Fedora sort of bleeding edge.
What could you suggest for this? Don't really have much to do with Linux + Mac
why would you want to switch to linux from a mac(unix based)? serious question. you can do the exact same things as far as speaking in the development side
Running "MAC", they'd be better off investing in a newer generation PC(Apple really sucks donkey balls, its all marketing) if they want to run Linux. Albeit if it must be so, wipe their harddrives of the apple cancer and install a ubuntu distro, i like the Lubuntu/Xubuntu distros(They're really light weight both off em), but with their hardware, any distro would do. proberly most their porblems would be solved using virtualbox. I Dont know the exact usecase, but apple is cancer, and uses linux at 50% functionality, why not go 100%(e.g. remove the cancer)
I wanted to do that on my 2014 rMBP, and I tried it a few times but kept going back to OS X because it has a lot of the same functionality and is really well optimized for their hardware. I have started playing around with automator to create keyboard shortcuts for various things, amethyst for automatic window tiling (so nice to have, basically replaces the cinch+spectacle combo I was using), hiding the menu bar and dock, and switching my main terminal to iTerm2 instead of the built in one because it's so meh...
While the hardware is definitely overpriced for what you get from a raw power standpoint, I'm satisfied with it from a build quality, optimization, and customer service standpoint.