[squarefoot]

Not the OP, anyway I used Debian on my old Mac Mini (first model, PPC CPU) about 2007 or so as media player connected to a projector, all mounted on a wooden shelf over a door; very compact and fit nicely in the living room. I used a media player roughly similar to Kodi (can't remember the name atm) that loaded just after boot without requiring login, set up to connect automatically to my NFS NAS and present all media as browseable directories; I later also added a USB TV dongle for DVB-T TV, so it was practical enough to be used by the girlfriend who isn't much into computers. A wireless IR keyboard with sort of a trackball (actually a giant equivalent of the Thinkpad red mouse "thing") completed it. It lasted a few years though, as pretty soon I discovered that a Raspberry PI that cost about 1/25 could do almost the same things, so I gave the Mini to a relative of mine who is an architect, and never heard that awful loud "boonnnnng" sound again. I had to fiddle a bit with startup scripts, kernel recompiles etc. to bring it to useable level, today it would be probably a plain install, but was helpful and taught me a couple things. As for MacOS, I tried it, it was like a large polished, beautiful, golden cage. It has every possible comfort, but it was still a cage, and it lasted a few hours before I installed Debian over it.