I have aquired a macbook air from work after a collegue left.
I have tried, but I can't deal with the locked down nature and lack of customization available in OSX, so I want to get Linux on as soon as possible.
There seems to be two options, dual boot as I have on my other laptops, or running it in a virtual machine.
So will it be fast in a virtual machine? It seems to be reasonably recent, OSX 10.8.5 (Mountain Lion), 8gb Ram, 128GB SSD. If I use a VM, do I still need to boot in OSX, and essentially have Linux running in "another window"? Do I loose out on anything hardware wise, or can I still access everything as I could from Linux?
Or would I be better with a normal install (this looks to be difficult from teh searching I have done so far). Assuming I partition the disk, will I be able to read / write both partitions from Linux easily?
I will likely use the machine for the usual websurfing, plus a bit of python development. Nothing heavy, and number crunching.
Any recomended tutorials to expalin how to do it along with your answer would be greatly apreciated.