http://developer.apple.com/darwin/
I'm looking for first-hand experiences.

p.s. I didn't post this so you could laugh or whatever. For my graphic & music production purposes, as close to a mac as possible is best. And I can't afford a stupid 3 grand ibook and the moment

Wow, that sounds cool.

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<kyle90> i got my SAT scores back
<kyle90> according to the sheet i got sent in the mail, I did "better than 99% of all college-bound seniors"
<kyle90> of course, thats comparing me to americans
<kyle90> so its not really a fair assessment

It's basically the kernel and core os, none of the gui stuff is included. That's proprietary apple stuff. So you can't run apple applications on top of darwin without the cocoa/carbon toolkits, which you can only get through apple.

I've never heard anything but good things about it. And unless I misunderstood (I just browsed the page briefly) I do believe you have to have a Mac do work with Darwin. Like I said, I may have misunderstood you, and I only scanned the page.

Oh, an Apple 12" 800Mhz iBook is $1,099. Still not very cheap, but I bet it'll last you a hellova lot longer than a PC will. I've got an anchient Apple Powerbook 109CS (like, 33Mhz) that still runs like a charm. Granted, all I really use it for is word processing and when I need a computer to lug to school, but the simple fact that it's THAT old and still runs I find amazing.

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Frogblast the Vent Core!

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It looks like it's just a mutilated version of BSD. It can't run any Mac programs, it only runs on basically one kind of x86 computer, and it doesn't include any of the OSX GUI code.

Not worth it, and it won't give you any Mac experience anyways. You'll be running the same kernel and X server, but you'll probably end up with the same WM as BSD users.