Don't discount, either, its astonishing abilities to breathe new life into old hardware. It's not quite as robust as OS X when it comes to certain Mac hardware, but to be fair it's almost impossible for any operating system designed to run on more than a small range of computers to be as stable. But my favourite reason is simply for the fun of dabbling around – I like to break things and fix them again, and, while Linux does make it hard to shoot yourself in the foot, when you do you'll take your whole leg off."Īs Hudson says, these days Linux is fairly easy to use as your primary operating system. "Other folks use it because they want a bit more power on their desktop: it's straightforward to set up, comes with tens of thousands of programs that are completely free to use, and is pretty much bulletproof in terms of security. Linux supports every major computer architecture in the world, you can even use a G3 if you really want to, but make sure you have at least 256MB of RAM. "The most common reason for people running Linux on their Mac," he said "is simply because they can get a bang up-to-date operating system running just fine on 400MHz PowerPC chips. We asked Paul Hudson, the editor of our sister title Linux Format.
#Install linux on old macbook air install#
Remember too that, with Snow Leopard, you can read from the Mac partition of your hard disk too.īut what about Linux? Why would you want to install that OS, (unfairly) perceived as being difficult and nerdy, onto your lovely Mac?