Best way to get Linux on a Macbook Air I have aquired a macbook air from work after a collegue left.

I have tried, but I can't deal with the locked down nature and lack of customization available in OSX, so I want to get Linux on as soon as possible.

There seems to be two options, dual boot as I have on my other laptops, or running it in a virtual machine. 

So will it be fast in a virtual machine? It seems to be reasonably recent, OSX 10.8.5 (Mountain Lion), 8gb Ram, 128GB SSD.  If I use a VM, do I still need to boot in OSX, and essentially have Linux running in "another window"? Do I loose out on anything hardware wise, or can I still access everything as I could from Linux?

Or would I be better with a normal install (this looks to be difficult from teh searching I have done so far). Assuming I partition the disk, will I be able to read / write both partitions from Linux easily?

I will likely use the machine for the usual websurfing, plus a bit of python development. Nothing heavy, and number crunching.

Any recomended tutorials to expalin how to do it along with your answer would be greatly apreciated.
VM

Running in a VM would be the easiest way to go. There are a number of virtualisation apps available on OS X, but I recommend Parallels Desktop. This lets you use OS X and Linux at the same time, but it means that you sacrifice some performance in the VM.

VMs are very simple — select the ISO as the install media, and let Parallels Desktop's automatic install do the rest.

Dual-boot

Alternatively, you can dual-boot using Boot Camp. Begin the Boot Camp process as normal for Windows, but when you reboot after the partition has been created, simply insert your Linux media instead of Windows install media.