The road to running a 100% Linux shop started for yours truly last year when I dumped my MacBook for a cheap and cheerful Eee PC; it proved itself worthy of world travel during Nokia’s N97 24/7 tour.

The next piece in the puzzle was my wireless router — a ridiculously-overpriced AirPort Base Station and Express that were handily replaced by a FONERA 2.0N over Christmas.

Next up was freeing my music from the clutches of iTunes. All that remained was the computer itself.

I first saw the Lenovo A600 in Singapore last November and wanted it, badly. And when I saw that my local Tiger Direct had an insanely cheap open box deal I knew it could be mine!

So what justifies sending a $4,000 Mac to the curb and replacing it with a $750 all-in-one? Two things:

1. Like any other power user I loaded up my Mac Pro with as many internal hard drives as it could stand (in this case 4). And like any other Mac user I initialized the extra hard drives in Apple’s HFS+ format — not realizing that it was proprietary to the point of being unreadable by a Linux-powered computer.

Because I need to move my data off of the drives to reformat them I now have the opportunity to house them in a separate RAID enclosure. This made an all-in-one a viable contender.

2. Anyone cursed with a Mac tower will know exactly what I mean when I say this: Mac towers are LOUD. So loud that I can hear the screaming fans of my Mac Pro from the other side of my two-bedroom condo. From the moment I power it up in the morning the fans kick in and wail all day long. At best they wheeze like an old man in his sleep; at worst they are so loud that I cannot effectively have a conversation on the telephone while sitting at my Mac. Even with a headset.

My Lenovo, on the other hand, emits a quick grunt on start-up as it checks for the presence of a disc in the slot-loading drive, and is never heard from again.

Currently it’s running Linux Mint, with an eye towards taking the new Ubuntu for a spin when the release version drops later this month.

I’ve owned Macs since 1995 — 8 of them, to be exact. And the saying that “Macs just work”? That hasn’t exactly been my experience:

iMac DVSE (1999) – needed new motherboard out of the box;

iBook 2nd-gen (2001) – needed new speakers out of the box;

G5 Tower (2003) – needed new motherboard out of the box;

PowerBook (2003) – needed new screen out of box.

Meanwhile the Lenovo laptop I bought in 2006 is still tucked away in a closet in case I ever need (ugh) Windows for some specific task. And really, my only complaint with the A600 thus far is all the Microsoft stickers on it… 😉