Running Linux?

I know a guy who runs OSX and windows at the same time. He just swipes left to slide windows on and swipes right to get back to OSX. Since Linus uses a macbook for development I assume you can do the same thing with Linux.

I installed vmware fusion to run windows and linux vms on my MBP. It works great and the swiping feature is really slick, allowing me to jump between desktops as needed.

I do it, it works great. I don't run it as my primary OS only because of battery life and software support (e.g. Sketch). But those things are true of Linux in general, not the hardware.

Nice. Out of curiosity, how's the Retina display when booted into Linux? Does it work just as good as when running OS X?

When I got the laptop (back in September), it was pretty awful. No browser on Linux had proper Hi-DPI support, and very few of the desktop environments/toolkits/apps did.

Nowadays, things are much better. Chrome has native Hi-DPI support on Linux, as does Opera (which was actually the first browser to gain really good Hi-DPI support on Linux, fwiw). GNOME has flawless Hi-DPI support throughout GNOME Shell and almost all (if not all) of their apps. i3 does as well for the most part, but some aspects are limited by XOrg. Other desktops (elementary's Pantheon, KDE, et al) have decent to good support and it's improving all the time. Additionally some major apps are gaining solid Hi-DPI support, such as GitHub's Atom. I don't think LibreOffice or the major XUL apps (Firefox, Thunderbird) do yet.