What do you mean by borked? Did it actually cause damage somehow or did it just not run well? I wouldn't expect something so resource intensive to work well on that computer just as I would be amazed if you could smoothly run mountain lion on an 8 year old mac. It's actually a major strength of linux that you can run modern software versions on even extremely outdated hardware; you just need to choose an appropriate desktop environment.

Borked: Unable to boot into the GUI, unable to downgrade properly or go back to the earlier version of Gnome. Tried doing stuff manually, ran into a bunch of dependency issues, gave up. So then I loaded up XFCE and after a while of using it, saw a mac, liked it, and moved. Also I guess I had moved on from the time I was more of a hobbyist and just wanted a dependable system. I had backed up all my config files just in case as well.

XFCE continues to be the only usable UI for laptops IMHO. XFCE actually rescued said R50e, and yes, I am amazed by the fact that it is usable. But given that I had been using Gnome for years and years, I personally was not comfortable with XFCE. The mac gives me what I want, a unixy system and a stable GUI without the hoop jumping tricks.

> Borked: Unable to boot into the GUI, unable to downgrade properly or go back to the earlier version of Gnome.

Gnome 3 didn't bork your system, your distro's upgrade path/lack of testing did.

http://clonezilla.org/ has saved my bacon a couple of times when having upgrade problems with distributions or other radical changes.

Mint/Cinnamon provides Gnome2, which is more like Gnome than OS X is.