As I’ve mentioned for the last week, I’m writing a large article explaining how to install Linux on your Mac.

The main question that people ask me is “why?” Many Mac users are 100% satisfied with OS X and don’t see any reason to install Linux. There’s a good article here that gives ten reasons to use Linux.

I’m going to add a few of my own reasons to the list.

1) Customizability: On Linux, nearly everything is open source. The source code is freely available and easily modified. When people aren’t satisfied with something, they simply change it (and put their change up on the internet) or start a whole other new project. Also, many open source programs have many more customizability options than closed source programs.

2) The freedom to choose: For any given piece of software on Linux, there is always at least one alternative. For example, Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution, uses a desktop environment (don’t worry if you don’t know what that means) called Gnome. The default Gnome desktop looks like this:

Notice the menu bar at the top of the screen and the bar with minimized windows at the bottom of the screen.

For users that are unhappy with Gnome’s look and feel, there is another desktop environment called KDE. Kubuntu, an operating based on Ubuntu, uses KDE instead of Gnome. Here’s a screenshot of the default Kubuntu desktop:

There are many other desktop environments, and there are other versions of Ubuntu that use them. For example, there is another desktop environment called Xfce. Xfce is a bit more lightweight but is much faster. In Xubuntu, Xfce is the default desktop environment. (See screenshot of Xubuntu below.)

Theoretically, you could customize Gnome to look more like KDE, and you could customize KDE to look more like Gnome, and so on and so forth. You can also install KDE, Xfce, and E17 (yet another desktop environment) in Ubuntu and vice versa. However, the fact that you have so many options is amazing.

On Windows and Mac OS X, you’re stuck with the default look and thats that. You can- maybe- customize the theme, but thats it. Your options end right there. On the other hand, you can make Linux look like anything you want- OS X, Windows, a combination, or something entirely different.

If you don’t like Ubuntu, then there are also other “distributions” (i.e. Fedora, Dream Linux, Gentoo, Debian, etc). The other distributions have the same Linux core, but they include different programs and come with different default options. Theoretically, you could just take one distribution and change all the software and options around, but its much simpler just to find a distribution that you like. Linux is the ultimate operating system in terms of customizability.

3)Compiz Fusion: Although Compiz Fusion (formerly Beryl) is really just one example of the customizability that I mentioned earlier, I feel that its important enough to mention here on its own. Instead of explaining what it is, I think a video of it should explain it pretty well. This video is a few days old, but it still shows many of the new features of Compiz Fusion running on Ubuntu.

Coming up soon will be instructions on how to install Ubuntu (with Compiz Fusion) on your Mac (or your pc for that matter).

In the meantime, you may be interested in this quick video of the Compiz Fusion screensaver (an add on for Compiz Fusion):