About a week ago, a 15" G4 PowerBook fell into my lap, like manna from heaven. This may be a death knell to me using an actual linux distro.
The PowerBook (G4 1.25 Ghz) is faster than my desktop (P3-800) and Mark's VAIO (P3-430). It also has lots of nifty built-ins like a dvd/cd burner, 802.11, bluetooth. Oh, and it has 1GB of RAM! My desktop can only hold 512MB! And the hard drive is 80GB (I thought the VAIO was nice because it had 30GB!). As you can probably tell, I'm not a bleeding edge hardware kind of gal...
Because I did get news of a manna storm approaching, I asked that if possible the hard drive be split in half with one partition for macOS 10.4 and the other unformatted so I could install gentoo linux. After using this puppy for a week, I'm leaning toward skipping the linux install and just formatting the rest of the drive to use for OS X. He who sent this mac to me will do a Joyous Dance of Triumph when he learns that I'll be using OS X rather than linux. :)
Other than the fumbling around learning a new OS, the only real problem I have is the ergonomics of using a 15" laptop. I'm pretty sure this would be the case with most machines of this form factor. The edge of the case hits my wrists in an uncomfy place for someone with RSI issues. Other than that, I really dig this mac. The backlit keyboard is spiffariffic. And I *love* the smallness of the battery charger (not to mention a laptop with a working battery! The VAIO was pretty much tethered to its clunky charger all the time).
I have to admit that I'm officially swept up in Apple infatuation at this point. The evil plan appears to have worked. :)
UPDATE: OS X and I have now made it through our first quarrel (mounting SMB shares is somewhat broken in 10.4), it turns out we were both at fault (I had configured WINS but was still trying to use the IP of the server) so we're gonna give it another go now. And I've found many support websites that will definitely help in the future. For now, the install of gentoo has been pushed off again (there are some nasty problem bits with it, most notably lack of airport extreme support).
