One of the coolest things about Intel-based Macs is that with the aid of Boot Camp or VMware Fusion, you can easily have several different operating systems running at once, all of them working pretty much at full speed with full compatibility. I’ve had a copy of Red Hat Linux Fedora Core 5 on DVD that came with a book I bought a while ago, and today I used it to install a VMware Linux partition with a full GNOME/KDE environment. Everything went flawlessly, although it did take a while.

Now I can enjoy such ground-breaking software as Konqueror, pirut, yum, and the GIMP—yes, and you were there too, Firefox!

I have to admit that running a Linux desktop environment is a pretty pale shadow of the Mac OS desktop. There are commonalities, but the Linux side is just different (and inconsistent) enough to make it challenging.

UPDATE at 5/5/08 11:07:08 am:

Yes, I know that Fedora 5 is way out of date; that was just a test setup. I’ve now installed Ubuntu 8 (the KDE version, called Kubuntu).