Just hoping someone might know if Linux, generally, runs appreciably faster on the Mac platform than on the "equivalent" Wintel platform.

More specifically, if I were to take a fairly cutting edge Mac from, say, 3yrs ago and installed a generic Linux on it, would it run faster on that than on an equivalent Wintel box from that era?

(and, yes, please assume I will be using X)

Linus Torvalds himself switched over to PPC architecture recently as he announced this week. Its difficult to say without knowing the specs. Yes I'd say it almost definitely would, especially if its a G3 or above. Try Ubuntu's PPC verson of Hoary if you want which has been getting rave reviews.
Cheers
Chris

Thanks, sneck. That certainly is an interesting development re Linus and Apple. What I was thinking of doing was getting a old-but-still-cool ibook and putting some version of Linux on it. But I didn't want to bother if it wasn't going to be any faster than that same Linux on a similarly powered (e.g. processor speed, ram) Wintel machine.

Although I'd seen a number of reports of ppl doing just this (Linux on Mac), I wasn't able to find much info on this specific comparo. That's why I'm here hoping one or more of you bright folk have done it.

Check my bookmarks out. One of them is for the linux link tech show. Download some episodes if you can -one of the presenters, Dann, is a Mac nut and runs Ubuntu on his powerbook. He's usually happy to get emails and stuff as well.
Cheers
Chris

Many benchmarks has shown that a dual Athlon MP processors performed better than dual G4 processors. Also the Opterons are faster than the G5. George Lucas picked Opterons instead of G5 to simulate the scenes for the next Star Wars movie. If you compared Apple processors to Intel processors its a different story. Apple is getting back on their feet because people hating Windows XP and switching to another OS like Mac OS X. Probably Apple is going to use IBM's "The Cell" processor to put them in the lead.

IMHO, Putting Linux on a Mac is useless. No software support and no software to emulate MAC OS like the program WINE that emulates Windows for the x86 platform. Also there is a program called Fink that makes compiling and running Linux programs a little easier.

I am think of buying a powerbook so that I can use Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Flash, Macromedia Dreamweaver, and Blizzard games without using a software emulator.

Hmm. That's some interesting info re the Athlons Electro, but the rest doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. I can live without an OS X emulator (let's pretend I'm willing to go Linux-only), if that's only major sacrifice (and mac on linux -- tho not an emulator -- is close). And I think there are enough forums around -- generic ones like this and distro specific -- that I can probably get by (I'm no corporation).

Also not sure why you're buying a mac JUST to run those applications. You can run them just as well on a Windows box, no?

Anyway, it's kind of surprising no one's done this comparison yet. I may have some luck on a dedicated Mac board, but I'm afraid it may be just a teensy bit biased.

It's usual that a PPC chip runs faster than an Intel chip of the same speed (i.e. the same MHz)

I think twice when I use Windows. Windows is pathetic. That is why I use Linux 99.99% of the time. MAC OS X again is as reliable as Linux, running those programs that I mention will be a lot less troublesome in MAC OS X than in Windows. You should know better not to say Windows.

Yes, Intel's processors do not have any performance to beat PowerPC chips, but AMD processors has performance that can beat PowerPC chips. There were some rumors going around that Apple is thinking of using AMD's 64-bit processors for future systems. I normally buy AMD processors.