Kubuntu on Apple. The good and the bad.

A few months back, I announced I was going to give Ubuntu Linux a whirl on my old Macintosh hardware just to see which runs better, Mac OS X or Ubuntu. Well I finally did, but I went with Kubuntu - just for grins.

Well honestly, the winner is Kubuntu in the speed war, but not by the huge lead I was hoping for.

Except for the DVD issue I will tell you about later, the installation of Kubuntu was a breeze. Boot disk, Click "install," loading.... done (after a half hour or so).

Off hand comparisons (sort of apples to penguins):

OS X has a much faster boot up time, but after you have booted up, regular programs started up slow. Macs do have an advantage here in that when you open a program - the program leaves a trail that OS X commits to memory for that session - then when you reopen the same program, the program starts much faster.

Kubuntu, on the other hand, takes about three minutes to boot. Once it boots, though, the programs are comparatively snappy. This was especially true with Open Office 2.0 which has a notoriously long startup on any platform. With OS X it takes about one minute before it becomes usable, with Kubuntu, it was about 30 seconds. Though, there is no speed gain on reopening of programs like on OS X.

My only other argument against loading Kubuntu on a Macintosh is, well, you bought a Macintosh because it is a Macintosh - why would you want to run Linux? I have 2 reasons.

Reason #1: Because you can.

My conclusion is if you do not mind the long startup time (just leave the darn thing on if you do), Kubuntu makes machine quite snappy, and Kubuntu will add a few more years of life to what will probably be an "obsoleted" box with the next version of Mac OS X, to be announced this week at Macworld . That was Reason #2.

(Update 1/11/07: OS X .5 was not announced at Macworld, but it is coming and soon.)

(Update 1/13/07: for aprigliano's further adventures with Kubuntu, click here.)

The one note I want to leave here is that the Apple branded DVD drive (Model: SR-8583-B) did not play well with Kubuntu - and I really cannot say exactly why. I eventually took a Lite-On CD burner out of my old Dell, put it in the Mac and then everything went swimmingly. But after I got Kubuntu up an running, the Apple Branded DVD still refused to play well with Kubuntu. I have been through the Ubuntu forms and have seen others having similar odd problems trying to load Ubuntu and various other PPC flavors of Linux. The DVD drive may be an issure.

It is not exactly a solution but if you have an extra or spare CD or DVD ATAPI drive laying around - put it in. It is the difference between looking through forums and reading up on all the documentation of Yaboot, which Kubuntu configures automatically anyway, or just getting the job done.