Linux vs. OS X on Mac Mini
A Mac Mini does not only look cool, it is also very, very quiet and therefore, recently I got one 
So far it works pretty well and I like it.
However, my opinion of OS X changes over time: When I don’t use it or see somebody else working with it, I like thinking of the “eye candy” user interface and the easiness of usage. Most of the stuff in there “just works”. And, thanks to fink and other extensions, the underlying UNIX (named Darwin) is quite mighty, too. No clicking around in the GUI if you want to grep for something in a couple of code files somewhere. And it does not only work, it also looks good at doing that. In other words: OS X is fun.
Most of the time.
When it comes to details, it can become pretty annoying. Everytime I use it, I almost break my fingers using the totally unintuitive keyboard shortcuts that usually involve pressing shift, apple and some character that has nothing to do at all with the name of the function that is actually executed. What also drives me nuts is that weird spinning beach ball that appears when I do some sort of operation like accessing a network device that is currently unavailable in the OS X finder. It stops every single finder window (and some of the other applications, too) until the network device responds?!
Not to mention the response speed: I consider 1.5 GHz and half a gigabyte of RAM at least enough to have three applications open at a time. When I open another Firefox tab, though, everything apparently starts to be swapped to the hard drive. Hello? Where has all my memory gone?
To cut a long story short, just as much as the Mac Mini (the hardware) itself is what I was looking for: small, quiet, yet enough hard drive space and wireless as well as wired connections… as much the operating system keeps annoying me.
I have no problem with a GUI that “just works” (as opposed to Linus Torvalds 
), but I want it to be at least quick enough for me not to fall asleep when doing something “usual”.
Therefore I decided to give Linux on PPC a shot (the “Ubuntu for PPC” CD I picked up two weeks ago in Portland seems to be predestinated for that). It will be a dual-boot installation (just as with Windows on any of my other machines back home). The biggest problem that used to be there was that the Airport Extreme WiFi card was not supported at all on Linux. Big problem, as I use WiFi exclusively in my apartment. But this problem got solved just two weeks ago, too.
Another option would be to give Gentoo Linux a try, especially because a few of my colleagues would probably help if I asked them about it. On the other hand, the Mac is still not the fastest machine and I am not quite sure if I want to compile all of my stuff myself… you know: (“Ubuntu is an ancient African word and it means I’m sick of compiling Gentoo” – Jeff Waugh )
I will let you know about how much progress I’ve made.
I think there’s also opensuse for PPC, if Gentoo isn’t your style. (BTW I’m running Gentoo on a 1MHz pegasos right now and works quite nicely.)
Ah sounds good! Tomorrow, I am going to put a network cable through the apartment. Even though it looks bad, I’ll put it there because Airport support won’t be that good yet, especially at installation time.
However, then I am going to try Gentoo. I can’t talk about Gentoo without ever seriously having tried it. Let’s give it a shot.
You say your box is even a 1Ghz machine? This encourages me
You remind me that I still want to add 1GB RAM (in addition to the 512MB built-in) to my Powerbook…
I got along with the keyboard shortcuts pretty well after a short while, although I have absolutely no idea why $someone put the @ on Alt+G on a Swiss keyboard…
At least, on my American keyboard, the @ sign is in an easy to reach place…
Anyhow, my Mac Mini runs Ubuntu PPC now and, (not) surprisingly, it is way faster than it was before
At first, I wasn’t sure if Linux was supporting HFS+ for read/write access correctly already. It’s a little slow compared to the usual Linux file systems, but fortunately it works.
Fred!!
I just happened across your Blog. I like it. I didn’t know you would have this much tech talk!! Good stuff.
Cool, thanks for visiting, Justin. Didn’t blog for a while but will restart soon
One problem I see with the prognosis: Firefox is slow on OS X, but it does not follow that OS X is slow. I can have a dozen windows open in Safari and be programming in xCode (and more!), without any significant slowdown. (I have a 1.0 Ghz iBook.) Firefox, however, drags down my system. I certaintly agree on one thing, though: that beach-ball *is* awful.
I have found a (non-official) build of Firefox optimized for G4 processors:
http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2006/01/08/optimized_firefox_15_with_mac_os_x_form_widgets
Java is a pain in the ass on OS X — open a web page with a Java applet on it and this will eat up all your RAM, same with “native” Java applications such as Azureus.
Eric, Jean Pierre: Thanks for the information. I didn’t know that the OS X port of Firefox is particularly slow. Maybe Camino does a better job? Unfortunately, if I remember correctly, it doesn’t have Firefox’s extension engine
Java, by the way, is also and especially a pain on Linux/PPC. I think I need to blog that.
I gave Camino a try but it didn’t feel “right”. Fx extensions were not working and if you have used Firefox before — Camino behaves quite different.
I missed the Adblock extension very much so I came back to Firefox.
Safari ex-users might be happy with Camino (it seems to be Safari in a Mozilla outfit) but because I did not use Safari at all (Firefox was the first application I installed on OS X), I was not happy with Camino.
[…] After using the Mac Mini for quite a while, I switched my primary Operating System to Linux/PPC (more exactly, Ubuntu Linux, but this might change over time). […]
Give Yellow Dog Linux a try too. It’s built off the Fedora Core, and I know many people dont like the Fedora Core because of stability, but I still like it. I’m hoping to scap up some money for a mac mini also, it’s really quite a good deal now that they finally realised that when u only have 1 DIMM slot preloading it with a 256 stick isnt even an option. Just found this randomly while searching for other things, thought I’d leach something.
Ah, I already heard about YDL before. Never tried it, though. But before there was a PPC version of Ubuntu, it seemed to have been the most popular Linux Distro for the PowerPC. So, thanks, I will keep an eye on it.
[…] Fortunately, also all my data is still there, so they did not tamper with the harddrive. At least not much: The technician was obviously intimidated by the Linux bootloader I used for dual-booting my system, so as sensitively as a goat to an endangered mountain flower, he nailed the original OS X bootloader back on the system. — If he mentions that in his resume, Microsoft will immediately hire him. […]