So... I'm looking at getting a MacPro 1,1 (2006 Mac Pro) to run as my daily
driver, with my iMac becoming an also-run beside it. My brain keeps telling me
this is a bad idea. It'll just end in disappointment because I can't run Mojave
or 64-bit Windows 10. I'll be stuck with Mac OS 10.6.8. I'll just regret my
decision...
The model I'm looking at has dual Xeon 5150s (dual-core 2.66GHz), 32GB of
PC2-5300 memory, 4 drive bays, and a 256MB GeForce 7300GT. That's far more
power than what I have possible in my iMac, and I can upgrade the video card
later on.
I'm running MacOS 10.6.8 on both my iMac and MacBook, and they can both go up
to 10.11.x without patching (or 10.14.x with patching). The MacPro can go to
10.7.5 without patching, but I'll likely just run 10.6.8 on it anyway since I'm
not a fan of Lion, and I really like Snow Leopard. With patching, I could go to
10.11.x without issue, though I'm not a fan of anything past Maverics anyway,
so that's pretty moot. I could also throw Xubuntu on there as a side-OS in a
spare drive, as it should run fairly well on such hardware.
Which is why I'm questioning why I have such a hard time saying "Yes" to this
machine. With that extra memory, I could work on finally learning programming
like I keep wanting to, without having to deal with my system chugging as
something large compiles like it does on both the iMac *and* my Core2Quad Dell
machine.
Hell, it might even get me to finally work on writing my own text adventure
engine, which is one of my big goals for getting into programming. Quest and
Inform are nice, but I want more, and writing my own system is one way of
doing that.
I think I'll try and go for it if I can scrounge up the money to do so. I
really would love to have some honed skills outside of my fiction writing.
