Yellow Dog Linux 3.0 Hits Mirrors 71
Morganic writes "After checking periodically for the past couple days, I noticed that YDL 3.0 has hit the mirrors, a day early (in fact, the page above still says it's not available, but the mirrors at the bottom are carrying it). Anyone got a BitTorrent?"
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
Some Linux die-hards buy Apple laptops because they are the nicest laptops around. These people are just really into Linux, so they don't want OS X.
Another major use is for older computers. Pretty much any OldWorld machine is going to be too slow to enjoy OS X. Throwing Linux on these machines can extend their usefulness. They can be used as fileservers, routers, mp3 players, etc. Some people also use them as their main desktop, although I personally think Mac OS is just fine for older computers.
However, I think it is rather foolish to run Linux on newer Apple hardware. OS X is just too uber-cool. Besides, the only thing I've found that runs on Linux but not on OS X is MOL, but amazingly I've gotten by so far without it.
Re:All iMacs are supported (Score:3, Insightful)
However, the idea I tried to outline is still valid. On older macs , installing Linux may be a better investment than Mac OSX:
(1) On such computers Mac OS X is slow, even after upgrading memory, there's still bottlenecks like bus speed, slow CPU, slow I/O, while linux can accomodate itself of such low-end config. Sure, as you say, KDE and Gnome should be avoided, but twm for example run correctly. On the other side, we cannot change the window manager of Mac OSX.
(2) They have not very standard memory extensions and it's not that cheap to upgrade (when it's possible) them to a point that you can use Mac OS X without pain.
Regarding Darwin, I don't know much but may be it's an alternative for server use. I haven't chosen it, because at that time I didn't trust him enough and used Mac OS X as a development platform only.
By the way, my imac is "really" headless because the screen is dead (THT problem, I was told it often happened on this model). I had to borrow 6500's monitor to do the Linux installation. (Hopefully, The internal video connector in the iMac was the same - DB15)