How I learned to stop worrying and love the Mac.

Ok, the title is obviously over the top: I still dislike the Mac. Well, what most people mean when they say the 'Mac', at least: the combination of the Mac hardware with one of Apple's operating systems. What I do generally like is Apple's hardware (minus the absurd over-designed cases, of course). This is actually true, regardless of Elroy-the-blog-hater's repeated arguments that I secretly love OS X. I don't. Anyway, on with the story...

I've recently come into possession of four Mac G4s (don't ask, they're all spoken for). I do some freelance work for a small design company. Recently, I helped upgrade them to brand-new Mac G5s running Mac OS X. So, they had a bunch of older, approximately 450mHz, G4s sitting around and they asked me what they should do with them. I told them they could donate them or sell them on eBay. Then, they asked me if I wanted one. I said sure, and before I knew it, I was walking out with 2. I got the other 2 a couple weeks later. I think they were just happy to be able to get rid of them with minimal effort.

They had intended to reformat them before I got them, but never got around to, so I told them that that would be the the first thing I'd do. To do this, I figured I'd just install Debian (the best Linux distro) on them. I figured it'd be a good way to wipe them, and it'd give me a chance to mess around with Linux on a PowerPC system (I've only used Linux on Intel-based systems to-date). So, I just downloaded the Debian network install CD, burned it, and fired up one of the macs while holding the C key down to boot to it.

It was one of the easiest installs of Debian I've ever done. It found all the hardware and configured everything perfectly. It even configured the video to use hardware 3d acceleration, something that I've struggled with in the past. I was pretty well blown away by how easy it was, and how well it worked. So blown away in fact, that I decided to replace the kid's machine with one of them.

I've just setup a PC for the kids (running Debian, of course). It went pretty smoothly, but it has some weird problems when playing some of their 3d games (mainly Planet Penguin Racer and Armagatron). The Debian-powered Mac doesn't seem to have any of those problems.

As I went about installing Debian on the rest of the Macs to wipe them, I discovered that one of them was dramatically more powerful than the others: it was a 1.4gHz machine with a ton of RAM. So, I decided that I'd replace my wife and my main machine with it. Currently, we run an Athlon 2500 which is roughly comparable to the mac, although it has about a third as much RAM.

The coolest part about all this is that this will free my current PC to function as my MythTV box, something that the Mac can't be due to its lack of expandability (it only has room for one extra harddrive and has a minimal amount of PCI slots).

So, getting these Macs was a very serendipitous happening. I now have a machine for MythTV, so I can now focus my energies and money on the other components for it (mainly storage space, since I've already got the TV tuner card). That's a relief, because that was going to be a pretty good chunk of change, and figured I'd have to compromise on storage, at least in the short-term.