I'm going to get a lot of hate for this but if you really, honestly want a no-frills, easy to set up UNIX for your personal computer, there really is no better machine than a Macintosh.

I agree. I have an iMac and a Thinkpad; I classify these as my work computers. I really like OS X. It blends the Unix operating system with the best looks/UI of the OS market. If I could install it (easily/legally) on any hardware, I would run it everywhere.

At home I have a collection of misfit laptops that were discarded by others or sold very cheaply. It is these laptops on which I tend to run a Linux distro (because Windows tends to be slow and no SSH; because I'm not really in the business of Hackintoshing.)

Running eOS Freya on one of them now. It's not bad. Wifi seems a bit temperamental--which is astounding given that eOS is based on Ubuntu and Ubuntu had no trouble with wifi.

> If I could install it (easily/legally) on any hardware, I would run it everywhere.

That's why I said personal computer :) Another OS X pitfall is that modern, vendor-supported versions are somewhat resource-intensive and not very fit for running on older or less powerful systems.

I have to agree. As ridiculous and disgusting Apple is as a company, OSX still offers the best UNIX experience. But I applaud any attemt to change that fact.

Yeah, but that would require the distro maintainers to sell their own computers, which they support and test their distro against before releasing. Most distro maintainers don't really like the thought of that.

Or a hardware manufacturer working with them long-term. (Dell with it's "developer" XPS versions would be an obvious candidate)

I've never seen making Slackware look nice as a burden. Especially since I can generally just copy over config files.

I love Slackware for the simplicity and that's why I use it. So many of these feature filled pretty systems work nice.. until they don't. Unneeded features are just more stuff to learn and more stuff to break in my opinion. Slackware is a rock solid work horse and I know right where everything is and can change it if I need to.

But to tell the truth, just give me a nice Unix terminal and a web browser and I don't really care that much what it's sitting on.

Good pointer. I have an old laptop with Arch that basically only runs Chromium apps and terminal programs -- PapyrOS looks like the logical step up from there, when it's ready.