Ubuntu on Apple hardware (early 2011 MacBook Pro)

Solution 1:

The explanation you've heard is highly suspect. While installing an alternate OS might (if you're not careful) hose the partition table on your hard drive, I highly doubt you'd accidentally over-volt the CPU so hard it breaks.

There might be issues with power management (or a lack thereof) running the CPU too hot and not running the fans at full-tilt, but that oughtn't ruin the machine.

Solution 2:

Well, there is a distro called Yellow Dog which is supposed to work with Mac systems. It is designed for Mac, but what I have seen on most modern day Macs that the kernel is Linux 2.4. So burning out a system with a Linux distro seems kind of odd. Mac like these are designed from Unix, if these work that would mean that BSD will work too. Best way is to check out a site called http://distrowatch.com. Here they have plenty of distributions to pick from.