My latest project is to use Linux to revive a first generation iMac that my parents have at home (I'm choosing Yellow Dog Linux for that). If I can get it into a viable state, then we'll give it to a local school.
Just spreading the word of Linux...
Regards, Ivan
That sounds like a fun project. I like to take really, really old equipment and see if I can make it workable again.
I have two old boxes, 200mhz with 198 mb of ram in each, running Debian with KDE. They're actually very usable, and you can measure the uptime in months (just checked one of them -- 55 days). That, to me, is so cool.
Linux is a nice OS. It lacks some of the polish of the Mac OS, but in terms of user experience, Linux is not only usable but easy to use for basic, everyday activities.
The only thing Linux is missing is adoption by a major OS developer, just as Apple adopted FreeBSD Unix. Apple's adoption of FreeBSD has injected a lot of fuel and energy into the Open Source community, and Linux has benefited from the attention.
I've also found the Open Source icon developers to be much better than your average OS icon developers on both Mac and Windows. Some of the icon sets for Linux are beautiful.
But YellowDog on my 350Mhz B&W is rather slow. You may have to tweak your installation to get the right mix of performance and applications. But it works, and most of the problem I think with performance is the fact that I only have a little less than 300 MB of memory. I have a suspicion that performance would increase by leaps and bounds if I went out and bought more memory.
The latest issue of Linux Journal has an article about some geek with way too much time on his hands installing YDL onto an IPOD so he could boot Linux on his MAC.