Someone HAD to ask this huh???
Honestly, on a new Mac that can run the latest version of OS X (or even the previous OS X release) at a snappy pace, I wouldn't even bother installing Linux because you basically have everything that Linux is trying to be, but better. I
love using Linux, but on my new 17" iMac G5, I wouldn't even think about putting that there. OS X does everything I need and has most of the stuff I would do on Linux anyway. So for a new Mac, unless you wanted to use it as a server without paying for OS X server, I would skip Linux.
However, on an older Mac, Linux takes great advantage of the hardware that the latest version of OS X struggles on or won't run on at all. Most of this is mainly because of Apple wanting to march on without supporting hardware acceleration (2D and 3D) on older video chipsets or other devices. A lot of the eye candy on OS X definitely requires this hardware acceleration, and unfortunately you can't disable it. With X.org's X11, you don't need the eye candy effects if you don't want it. And while the generic kernels shipped with today's distros are quite optimized, the fact that you can go in and reconfigure the kernel (granted you have the expertise) to support whatever hardware you want is a wonderful thing. This is how people were able to support NuBus PPC Macs even though the main distros claim that they won't install on those Macs.
The other nice thing about running Linux on your Mac is that a lot more hardware is supported that normally wouldn't be supported under the Mac OS. I've used devices that normally would work on a PC running Windows on my StarMax 4000 with Debian, and it worked alright. Mind you, this doesn't work with everything (like some video cards) since they would have to recognize the Mac architecture in the firmware, but it does work.
As for desktop environments, that's up to the eye of the user. I have my praises and gripes for KDE, GNOME, XFCE, and other desktop environments. Lately i've been leaning more towards KDE, since it seems like they are headed in the right direction as opposed to GNOME, but others might think differently. There are still some interface issues to tackle, like when you're running GTK applications and a dialog box comes up with the buttons. In GNOME, the order of the OK and Cancel buttons is reversed from that of KDE (more Mac-like in GNOME as opposed to Windows-like in KDE). This is a minor issue, but something everyone using Linux is affected by and needs to be addressed by the desktop environment developers. There are various other issues, but that would go beyond the scope of this post (and would make it more long and boring than it alredy is
).
The great thing about being able to run Linux on your Mac is the simple fact that you have the choice to do so. This is the case on the x86 side, and we might see more of this once the Macs do switch processors. This is the wonderful thing about open source: where there's a will, there's a way. And from the quality of some of the software, you can tell that it works (not for all FOSS, but in general it does).
It also provides a good learning experience on how a UNIX/Unix-like system functions. My only wish is that someone would revive the
Slackintosh project since Slackware was how I became more adept at using Linux in the first place (believe me, I've thought about taking up the task, but I have too much on my plate at the moment
).
THIS JUST IN!: The Slackintosh project has been revived! See the link above for details! WISHES
DO COME TRUE!!
If you have an old Mac lying around that won't run anything higher than 9.1 or 9.2, give the latest Linux/ppc distros a try. You might just enjoy the journey.
