Same here. I installed Fedora 21 and dwm as the window manager. I didn't know this computer could be this fast (2010 MacBook Air). The bad thing is the battery duration, which is significantly worse than Mavericks (but approximately the same as Yosemite... I got around 5-6 hours of battery life with Mavericks, 3-4 hours with Yosemite and Linux).

I still remember when people were impressed by the speed and smoothness of the UI with Tiger or Snow Leopard on my first Mac, a white MacBook. Good times. Now we have faster computers, SSDs instead of hard disks, but slower interfaces.

My (March 2011) MBP with an SSD booted Snow Leopard in about 7-8 seconds from the bong sound to the complete desktop... My current (September 2014) MBP takes so much longer (just under Mavericks, haven't gone to Yosemite yet)... I find this disappointing.. not being able to upgrade the ram doubly so.

This will probably be my last mac hardware purchase... I like the screen and the touchpad so much better than any other laptop, but don't really use it that much, and even then I could have gotten something with similar hardware for half the price... I've thought about installing Ubuntu on it, but haven't taken the plunge just yet... I spend almost 2/3 of my time on my laptop in either a windows or linux vm, so it's kind of a wash.

I imagine Powertop is installed and that you have the cpufrequtils installed and set up. What areas does powertop highlight as taking a lot of power/triggering cpu higher states?

I didn't even know about Powertop! I was a GNU/Linux user before switching to the Mac but a lot has changed since then... I'll investigate, thanks!

Yosemite must be bad if you found Ubuntu good. I constantly get "a problem has been detected" messages whenever I boot. Got Manjaro (a user friendly Arch spin off) on my other laptop. Way less problematic and XFCE behaves predictably.