Installing Kubuntu fixed all of the issues at once, and should I decide to fix the issues it introduced at least I'm improving open source software.
There's such an extreme lack of decent laptops around that working around the limitations of OSX seems to be the only option for now.
Maybe the next version of the Pixel will be more suitable as a general purpose development machine or someone else will make a decent linux laptop (if Google can do it, why can't Dell?)
Haha! High-end Dell and ASUS machines are good, but the lack of Apple competition is why Microsoft made the Surface Book. "We gave you nearly twenty years to make something good! Fine! We'll do it ourselves."
With the way MS is going maybe they'll introduce official support!
OTOH it is pretty easy to run just about any OS in a Hyper-V VM. My SP2 has FBSD running most of the time. One use is letting the VM act like a remote node that clients on the host OS can access. Makes a convenient arrangement for server development and testing in a way that dual booting would not accomplish.
On the downside MS hardware means running Windows 10 on new machines, which I'm not happy about. I won't go into details re: Win10, it's been discussed plenty. When it works the hardware's great, though MS firmware skills are marginal at best, it's bitten me a few times, but there's another bunch of long stories that ATM I'll refrain from telling.
I'd rather deal with these issues and run a ubuntu VM for some things than deal with the cornucopia of crap that is the PC laptop market but hopefully some day that will change.