Really? I wonder if Kubuntu has this too. The main reason I started considering non-Debian based distros was that Ubuntu seemed not to know of the existence of GUID and hfs+ in its own partition manager. I may just need to learn how to create partitions without an installer.

I'm not sweating the DE anymore. Whatever I use I will end up either using KDE or building my own from a window manager, a panel, and other components.

Does anybody know of a guide to partitioning an external hard drive for Linux with Apple EFI? That's where stuff hangs up.

gparted

GParted sounds good, but OSX already has a tool that does the same thing. If I run into problems with that, I'll check it out. What I was hoping for was more like "How Many and What Types of partitions should I use". However, that's a very different question than the initial one. I've also decided to put this on hold until I've figured out whether the external drive is actually broken or not, I have settled on using Fedora KDE in VBox. I'm going ask my other questions in other threads, and mark this as solved due to having figured out what questions I should be asking.

Of course it does it's called disk utility but it's not in the EFI its in the utilities folder and useless if you don't have OS X installed. That's why I recommended gparted because I thought you borked your install.

My Linux boxes have three partitions swap/root/home in that order.

No, my OSX install is fine. I just don't want to do anything to the disk for fear of 'borking' it, because I've got Logic Pro 9, which is a single massive app that takes maybe three or four times as long to install as OSX itself. Again, I think that the distro question is solved in that the question is now "How does EFI boot from an external disk work, and how do I set it up manually?" However, I'm going to refrain from posting another question about that in particular, at least until I can figure out whether my external disk (empty) was terminally screwed up when it fell on the floor or is still salvageable. As far as I can tell, exactly one 'block' of the device is damaged but the rest is fine. I'm currently playing around with partitioning and erasing to see if I can exclude one block.

"borked"... great word! Especially when I imagine it with a British accent.

Use refit or refind..that will interrupt the boot cycle. Use gparted to format the external to ext4 you can also use the installer to do this. When refit comes up duing the boot sequence just select the external. If that doesn't work and it won't on certain Mac's you'll need to setup boot camp to simulate BIOS Apples EFI is a Cluster F'k for anything other than OS X. My '09 17" won't install Linux not matter the distro my Wifes '11 13" did as well as my two Mac Pro's.

ext4? Okay... How do GUID and hfs+ work into this, because I heard that whatever they mean, they are involved. Just to be clear, Fedora 20 is workable, right? I like its relative desktop-agnosticness. Yes, I know that is not a word, so sue me. I'm still working on isolating the damaged block.

ext4 is the default linux file system, hfs+ is the default Apple file system and they don't play well with each other.

I know absolutely nothing about Fedora I've installed it a couple times but never on my machines so I can't help you there. You muight try MacRumors they have a whole section about running other OS's on the Mac surely someone there has used Fedora.

Get your drive stuff figured out and get refit installed and go from there.

I settled on Kubuntu for a distro, because
A. it's in the Ubuntu family, which makes a little more effort with Apple hardware than some other distros as evidenced by the lubuntu thing. It's a relatively specialist distro, and they concentrate on this!? Not saying it isn't encouraging though.
B. PPAs! The entire concept of the PPA model pretty much sealed the deal for me.

Sorry to take so long to respond. It took me a long time to test everybody's suggestions and work it into my schedule. Thank you all for the time and effort you spent moving your fingers and neurons!

Now the real battle begins. Finding resources for actually installing the thing.