Looking, but...

[byroniczero]

I getcha. Not bashing Ubuntu. The fact that Apple made the hardware and software to work together was one of the main reasons I dropped $2,000 on a MacBook in the first place. Got tired of using stuff that was just thrown together.

Tweaking I don't mind, and hooking the laptop up to the router wouldn't be a problem at all if I only had to do it once. Are you sure that's how it works, though? I'm looking at what you said ("depends on chip", "often", etc.) and wondering. Is there a way to find out?

I ask (and to answer your question) because yes -- OS X works great, but I could always run Ubuntu from an external drive or something, right? I wanna play around with it, want to learn. OS X and Ubuntu share a lot of similarities (my first thought was that, in a lot of ways, OS X was "Ubuntu, finished") in look and feel...but there are differences, and while I can see a few big, glaring problems with the Unity setup...I like the ideas driving it.

(Plus, I have about $450 in software (Scrivener, MS Word 2k11, Adobe Fireworks CS5) that I need for work and that are Mac only (at least the versions I have serial numbers for are).)

So is it really difficult to install to an external drive, like a USB flash stick?

Thanks again for all the helpful replies.

[Irihapeti]

Assuming that the Mac will boot from USB, or can be made to, yes, you can run Ubuntu on an external drive. A flash drive mightn't be the best idea for a longer-term install, because of the wear issues, but just for having a more in-depth look at how Ubuntu behaves on your system, it should be fine.