Installing Linux on Macbook Pro (Parallels)

My existing personal laptop (Dell Inspiron 6400 – 2 GB RAM and 120 GB HDD) has become 9 years old recently,

I have installed 3 Linux distros on separate partitions:

1. Mint Cinnamon Rafaela
2. Elementary OS Freya
3. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (Rolling release)

Most of my usage is personal – Paying household bills, viewing photos, watching movies, browsing etc. Of course, recently  I started to learn and blog on Linux.

While looking at linux articles and reviews on internet, I realised that my laptop is somewhat outdated for modern day Linux Desktop Environments – KDE, Cinnamon. The startup time for each of these distros was anywhere between 1:30 minutes to 2 minutes (eOS was fastest and SUSE was slowest). Windows 7 was extremely slow. Also, the laptop was heavy to carry around easily. I found a reason to buy a new laptop.

Couple of Laptops I liked and shortlisted were – Dell Inspiron 3148 (2 in 1), Lenovo Yoga 3. However my brother-in-law influenced me to buy Macbook Pro 2014. It was a difficult decision as the laptop was expensive (more than double the price of Dell and Lenovo 2 in 1s with similar configration). However the primary reason for selecting Macbook was it is robust with sleek aluminium unibody design, light weight (1.58 kgs), stable Mac OS X El Captain. I felt, I need not change laptop for many years to come.

Now that a purchase is made, I was wondering if Linux can be installed on the same. I made a search on internet and realised quickly that although it is possible to install Linux on Mac but, it is not a perfect match (some known issues would remain with display, audio, network connection etc if installed directly).

There are primarily 2 websites that I went through (that gave some details on how to create partition and install along size Mac OS X):

1. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro
2. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/install-linux-macbook-pro/

These sites also listed the know issues and some sites even warned that they are not responsible if something goes wrong post Linux Installation.

Also, I came to know that Linux can be installed as a Virtual Machine on Mac. There are multiple VM softwares – Parallels, Fusion are commercial. VirtualBox (Oracle) is free

Parallels Desktop Standard Edition license costs about $79.99 (http://www.parallels.com). I have got a license for free with Macbook Pro purchase.

Installing Windows Or Linux on Mac through Parallels is supposed to be easier and convenient option for 2 reasons:

1. Linux is installed as a VM and does not require restarting / rebooting of system
2. No need of Partitioning. If you opt to uninstall / remove Linux, the virtual memory hard disk space allocated for Linux is reclaimed easily

By following the below link instructions, I installed Mint Cinnamon Rafaela 17.2 and OpenSUSE leap 42.1 through parallels:

http://kb.parallels.com/en/120327, http://kb.parallels.com/en/121370