Snow Leopard vs Linux for old macs
I have an old Mac Mini (Core 2 Duo, 1G ram) and recently put Mint Linux on it with Mate as the desktop. This is a desktop designed for low power machines and I was pretty impressed with how well it worked. Basically it could run a browser (Firefox), email (Thunderbird), word processor (Libreoffice) and music player (Banshee) with no problem and memory use stayed will within the 1G limit. The Mate UI is pretty plain but works ok.
Obviously we are mac fans here but since this machine can't run up to date software it seems like a good way to keep it useful. Especially if I was using this to give a computer to a non-computer savvy relative I think it would great, especially since it would auto-update all the software. I'm not sure about how well all that software would run at once in snow leopard but I thought this computer was pretty slow before.
What do you guys think? Any upside to using Snow Leopard in this kind of context? Normally, I'd promote Macs for non-computer savvy relatives but that would mostly be for iPhoto etc. I don't think linux is good for that kind of stuff but a lot of people only need a browser and email.
Comments
When you know exactly what you need, you will get the idea.
This just depends on you.
That sounds interesting. I have a MacBook Pro running the latest Mavericks, but use an old PPC G4 Cube running OS X 10.4.11 as a media server. It's connected to my 40" LED TV and stereo, playing my rather large iTunes Library. I have an external DVD R/W drive connected to it also.
It does the job, but can't run a lot of newer programs. I was thinking of getting my feet wet with Linux and playing around with it. I assume there is lots of software available for Linux, but can it run iTunes and other Mac software? Or, can you only run software written for Linux?
Hmm. I just did a little research, and if I'm correct it seems that Linux only runs on Intel based machines. So that's a no for my PowerPC Mac.
But, it remains an option in the future, as there are dozens of used Intel based Macs listed on eBay for cheap.
If you had done a little more research, then you would know that this is not true.
Really? That's good to know. Maybe Wikipedia should be updated with that info. Or, maybe it's just the latest version of Linux that's not backward compatible with PPCs? I don't really don't know much about Linux, but I'm happy so far with Tiger OS X.