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I'm wanting to install a couple drivers like the keyboard, trackpad, airport card, etc to another operating system (Ubuntu 16.04 LTS). I saw some stuff about drivers for other models on the Ubuntu website but this model was never listed. Am I missing something?

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  • Personally I found it to be less of a hassle to use a virtual machine over installing Linux physically on my MBP. For me, Linux runs much better virtualized and doesn't have any of the issues it did when trying to run in natively on Apple-branded hardware.
    – user3439894
    Commented Aug 16, 2016 at 1:21
  • But the driver issues would probably remain and then graphical drivers/processing would be dramatically decreased. I know virtualising is safer but its also clunky and usually has the same problems as when not virtualised. I'll check it out though just incase it is a solution. Do you have a recommendation for a virtual machine?
    – user191609
    Commented Aug 16, 2016 at 1:59
  • Depending on exactly why and for what you need a different OS then OS X running on Apple-branded hardware, there may/may not be trade offs, may/may not be benefits to running natively/virtually. All I can tell you is that for how I use Linux, the VM outperforms a native install without any of the issues I had with the native install. YMMV! I use VMware Fusion most of the time but I do have Parallels Desktop and VirtualBox installed too.
    – user3439894
    Commented Aug 16, 2016 at 2:07
  • The driver issues would not entirely remain. When running virtualized, most of the drivers needed inside the guest (Linux) would be for the virtualisation system - and not for the actual Apple hardware. So drivers for the disk, network interface, graphics, etc. would be for example VMware, VirtualBox or similar drivers.
    – jksoegaard
    Commented Aug 16, 2016 at 10:12

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I don't think you're missing anything, no. The Retina MacBook 8,1 is not listed as a compatible hardware model for Ubuntu 16.04.

Indeed the Ubuntu bug tracker has open bugs for support for stuff like keyboard, touchpad and others:

TouchPad doesn't work

Keyboard doesn't work

The same issues exists in the Linux kernel bug tracker, so they might be generic Linux issues and not Ubuntu specific.

I have seen reports from others that sound is not supported and that the SSD is hard to get working.

So all in all, unless you're willing to put in effort to fix these issues yourself - it is probably not going to be a good experience running Ubuntu natively on the MacBook.

Instead you could look at virtualized options.

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