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But it also lets Windows and Linux applications run at native speed on Apple hardware

Gee, you mean you couldn't run Linux on Macs before?

if you buy an apple portable, months later you will think back to your old non-apple portables, and think "boy those things sucked"

you sound like me a couple years ago. I'm a hardcore gentoo linux user. I bought an ibook to use as a gentoo machine. I kept it dual booting with os x. at first I never used os x. now I find that my ibook spends about 80% of its time booted in OS X!

OS X takes a bit of getting used to. linux on the same hardware is faster, but OS X is so convenient to use that it's worth the slight performance drop compared to gentoo linux on the same hardware.

one nice thing about os x, you can turn on 'all keyboard access' then every widget is accessible from the keyboard.

I put up a page about setting up my ibook for dual boot. the page is getting a bit old now, but it's still interesting. I post on the gentoo ppc forum a lot too, same handle as on here.

in linux and os x both, when you close the lid, the thing goes to sleep in 1 sec or less. when opening the lid, it's awake and the network is working within 2 sec. in both linux and OS X!

linux also has great support for the hfs+ (native OS X) filesystem, so when booted in linux, you can mount your os x partition and get at all your files. there is also a project called 'mac on linux' which is like vmware for ppc. it allows you to boot your os x partition on a virtual terminal inside linux. they are working on getting 'mac on linux' to run under os x, so then you would also be able to boot your linux partition when running os x.

the only bummer for you is that all the new apples come with airport extreme, which has no linux device driver. (the company that make the chip refuses to release any information). as long as you stick to an ATI video chip everything else should work fine though in linux. and of course it all works flawlessly in OS X.

oh ya, portage is being ported to os x right now! currently, it's pretty rough, but they are making steady progress. the day will soon be here when portage can be used in OS X to install anything that can be installed in ppc gentoo linux. right now I'm stuck using fink, which is similar to debian's apt-get, but not nearly as nice. I have a few packages installed via portage though.

also, several of the 'big time' Free software packages have been ported to native OS X widget sets: abiword, mplayer, gvim, emacs. And kde is on its way using the native QT port. some others are available in a nice integrated package for OS X (still on top of X11 though), like gimp and openoffice.

things to watch for: get hfstar and rsyncX. they add support for the resource forks in the hfs+ filesystem.

my main apps in os x are mail.app (a great imap client; I have my own imap server, so I can get my mail in mail.app, mutt, and kmail), terminal, zsh, screen, and the native port of gvim (carbon gui).

I've been thrilled with my ibook. if I were to buy one today, I'd get a powerbook though. It would be nice to have the higher resolution display of the powerbooks.

I put up a page with all the hard parts of the install

I agree that some $1300 x86 laptops will be faster than a $1300 ibook, but the x86 will also be much hotter and have at best half the battery life.

for serious number crunching, I'll stick to a desktop machine where I don't care about heat & power. but I appreciate low heat and a 4.5 hour battery life in a laptop.

and again, $1300 isn't a very high price. even the ibook with the 14" screen can be had under $2000. plus, you can run linux on the ibook too. (mine dual-boots OS X and gentoo linux).

also, a g3 is faster than a g4 for non-altivec operations. I even have toy benchmarks to prove it!

yes, there is a gtk+ theme called 'AquaX' which I think makes gtk+ apps blend in quite nicely with aqua. see an old screenshot, then google for it.

also, vim has a vi compatibility mode. if one of the gui versions works with your character set, you can try 'set compatible' in your ~/.vimrc file.

I can't live without the multiple undo levels, the much more convenient cut buffer handling, the syntax-directed coloring, splitting the buffer (horizontally or vertically) to show more than one file at a time, I could go on all day.

Here's a few good screenshots of gvim in action:

carbon gvim
X11 gvim running over the net, showing a diff between two files & a vertical split

also, vim has a vi compatibility mode. if one of the gui versions works with your character set, you can try 'set compatible' in your ~/.vimrc file.

I can't live without the multiple undo levels, the much more convenient cut buffer handling, the syntax-directed coloring, splitting the buffer (horizontally or vertically) to show more than one file at a time, I could go on all day.

Here's a few good screenshots of gvim in action:

carbon gvim
X11 gvim running over the net, showing a diff between two files & a vertical split

I documented my install

I dual boot with OS X. OS X is fun, but gentoo is much faster and more configurable.

how i installed gentoo: install

I ran my 700MHz ibook against my 700MHz athlon thunderbird and the AMD completed the same seti block in about half the time it took the ibook! You should make sure you have both machines processing the same data block.

for integer type stuff, the ibook is 15% faster, but floating point is another story.

I documented my install on my web page.

OS X is nice, but Linux is much snappier with only(!) 256mb RAM in the thing. I'll be upgrading to 640mb soon though.

here it is