NEITHER!
Get a regular PC Laptop for him, and throw Linux on it. It'll be beast, plain and simple. Convince him to join us, convince him to join the dark side of the OS world. We have cookies, lot's and lots of cookies.
Hardware wise....
Screen Size: Up to you,
Ram: 4GB of Ram if you can, no less than 3 though. Less need to upgrade it later
Processor: Dual, Tripple, or if he wants something that'll tear stuff to shreds, a Quad Core. Make sure it's 64-Bit, not that you'll find much else other than 64-bit. Brandwise, AMD or Intel is fine. (Trust me, nothing sucks more than having 4GB of ram and only being able to use 2.9GB due to 32-Bit processings shortcomings). Distros often use either (AMD64 or x86_64) to mark the releases for 64-bit architectures.
Hard Drive: 320GB Minimum, anything less isn't worth it IMHO.
Optional components may include: Extended life battery, 10-key numeric keypad, etc.
Do not get a Netbook, they are weak, Atom Processors won't even come close to those of a full-fledged laptops, even if they are dual-core Atoms. That and the screen size, so puny...10.1 is not cool
Download a Linux Distro of whatever flavor
-Ubuntu (Coffee) - Suggest this one for newcomers.
-Mint (Greeeeeeeeen!)
-Debian (Swirly)
-Debian Mint (Greeeeeeen Swirl!
-Fedora (Not as in the hat. It's not as user friendly, but still usable. Not as many packages either.)
-Arch (Only if you're willing to use a TTY (text console) initially to install Xorg, desktop environment, and configure them to load through nano or vim, once you get past that you have quite a beastly distro on your hands. Not for the light of heart. I use this one by the way)
-Gentoo (Beastly in every sense of the matter, but is probably the least user friendly to get up and going. Still it's potency is somewhat unmatched when it is going. Wouldn't recommend it to a new user though.)
Burn it to a disk using Nero, Infranrecorder, or whatever tool you use.
-Plug yourself into an ethernet connection on a Router, if for some reason your computer says at some point after booting a LIVE/Install CD, that it detects networks, congrats your wireless card is natively supported and you can skip the step involving it.
-Partition your disks using Gparted, or the installer for the distro. Read the section towards the bottom of my post for a good outline of how you should go about this.
-Install said distro,
-Enable restricted/Non-free repos
-Add some third-party Repos (Equinox PPA if you're using ubuntu for some nice themes and a really nice icon theme)
-Install wireless drivers (You may not even need to do this if your card is natively supported)
-Install Flash
-Install non-free (No not in the sense that they cost money) codecs and utilties
-Install another desktop environment (If you'd like KDE or XFCE, LXDE, or whatever). Again, this is optional
-Install some GTK Themes (Mac one's exist btw, I don't like em but it's up to you)
-Install some Icon Themes (Faenza is awesome btw)
-Install some extra programs from the repositories (Yeah, that easy, you can just go to your repository or package manager and have it do all the work),
-Install compiz if it hasn't already been installed (Instant eye candy, which IMO as a minimalist, pales in comparison to what you can do with Openbox in Linux. Still cool),
-Install the latest Kernel (200 Line kernel patch is the **** man). You probably want to do this anyway since it gives you two kernels, one to fall back on.
-Install Ubuntu Tweak (If you chose Ubuntu)
-Install ClamAV and ClamTK
-Install Wine (Can run some, but not all Windows Programs as if they were native)
-Install Support for iPods in media players for Linux. Most regular MP3 players work out of the Box in my experiences.
Note: In some distros, particularly Debian, Mint, Debian-Mint and Ubuntu you'll have to upgrade the kernel anyway to get the wireless drivers to work. They'll still install most of the time on the kernel shipped with the ISO, but will not function untill you have a higher kernel
-Join and be proud to be one of the 1% out there in the world that dare use something different.
Poof, instant magnificent Laptop, and here's what you can possibly get with using Linux.
-Bullcrap easy way to install programs (Synaptic (Any debian/ubuntu based distro) or Ubuntu Software Center), or if you use the terminal (sudo apt-get install insertprogramspackagenamehere. In Arch we use yaourt or pacman from the command line.
-Full fledged office suite, Libreoffice. The rebirth of the now dead and sold-off-to-apache-by-oracle OpenOffice suite. More improvements have come to this in it's year-long existance now than Oracle has probably made in twice that time. It's completely free, and it can do tax stuff. Heck most distros have stuff similar to Quicken too.
-Gimp, an image editor. Must be installed from software center, no longer packages with it.
-Banshee Media Player - Excelent media player, can play all sorts of stuff. I prefer Rhythmbox myself (Mono is evil, Banshee uses Mono).
-A nice interface, and the choice to install and use others. Guess what...it's fully customizable, I mean fully.
-Immunity to effects of Windows Viruses, yep. They can still infect you sometimes, but they cant do much of anything at all, if anything. However, that doesn't mean that you cant brutally slay them. ClamTK is actually incredibly well updated, and sort of ruthless when it comes down to detecting stuff. I've tested it using signatures in a VM, takes it less than about 10 seconds. ClamAV also doesn't take kindly towards the few Mac or Linux viruses that exist, it'll kill and quarantine them too. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/evil.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="
" border="0" alt="evil.gif" />
-A well updated system (Seriously, Windows Updates...they seem so few and far between, expecially the Service Packs. This doesn't happen with Linux for the most part. We get updates, alot, it's good thing.
-A faster system. Linux tend's to not bog down systems like Windows.
-Applications for every purpose you could think of from the software center (DVD Ripping, Office Suites, Desktop Environments, Media Players, Games, Virtualization, Graphics Editing, Email, Web Browsers, every thing you could think of. )
-You'll still be able to watch stuff on the internet, so long as you install the codecs (I believe Mint does this for you by the way, but not Ubuntu or most other distros)
-Oh, did I mention it was free as in costing nothing to download and install. No license keys or any of that crap either. No paying to update/upgrade to a new release either. Yeah...that awesome.
Partitioning wise, I always recommend not having everything just one one partition, it causes headaches later. If one does not plan on ever using Windows again, here's what you should go about doing. For example, if you get a laptop with say 4GB of Ram, Dual Core (Irrelavant, but thought I'd suggest it), and a 320GB Hard drive (You could probably go with a 500GB one, either way expect to be able to use a bit less due to the discrepancy between manufacturers listing the capacity in decimal and computers doing it in binary).
I highly recommend you do something like this, and you might want to use the partitioner from the live CD before you actually install it. I'll explain why as we go along
<u><b>/home (Home) (HDD=320GB then /home should be about 200GB in size. No this isn't a typo, I really suggest 200GB. Your /home should always take up the majority of the HDD capacity with Linux)</b></u>
This is where all of your users home directories go. Normally they exist inside of / but if you have to reinstall for some reason and they are located under / , it does present the problem that they might get wiped in the process.
If you instead make /home located on a seperate partition, you'll be able to reinstall your distro, or any other distro without losing anything in it, you'll keep your documents, personal settings, desktop settings and layout and everything, music, pictures, etc, all of that. You'll just need to give it the same exact details you specified when you originally set up your user account on your first distro (This means username, full name, exact same password, and perhaps even the hostname/computername). If you fail to do that you'll most likely encounter permissions issues on you home directory, and thats never fun. The only thing you'll need to reinstall are your applications, codecs, etc which are located on various directories under / (root)
Also if you inspect the root partition /, you may see /home listed under there. Do not worry, if /home is on a different partition this functions as a symlink (In other words a shortcut of sorts which loads the root or base level of the /home partition.)
<u><b>/ (Root) (40GB - Yes I know this seems a bit much, but you'll thank me if you have to do alot of stuff that involves using space in /tmp and /var)</b></u>
This contains many directories including /etc /var /tmp /usr and many others, all of which contain many other folders and files. Only the root user (Aka superuser), or someone who has been given temporary root-level permissions (Also known as a sudoer), can alter, move, create, and/or delete files and folders in root. It's advised you don't mess with this unless you know what you're doing.
<u><b>/swap (8GB - This should always be 2x your ram at minimum if you can.) </b></u>
It functions alot like Swap does in Linux, only more controllable and more efficient. The reason why swap = 2x physical ram is that it allows you to use hibernate alot more effectively, as for example say you're using 2gb of RAM and you go to hibernate. You still have to store whats in ram, as well as whatever is currently open and what not. Having too low of Swap prevents Linux from even offering you the option to do that, yeah it's smart like that. Having 2x your ram for swap gives it ample room to store for Hibernation, and still leaves a bit extra.
/tmp (Give this as much as you think you'd need for doing the most resource intensive tasks, I personally use 18-20GB myself as I rip my movies so I can watch them on the go alot, but it's up to you)
When your computer is doing something such as ripping a DVD, or burning one or any task that requires it to store stuff temporarily on the HDD, it normally under Linux puts it under /tmp. /tmp is normally under root, but if a program goes rouge (In other words it experiences a severe memory leak or stops responding but keeps eating temp space), it can quickly fill up root. If /tmp is on a seperate partition, then it cant do this, and will just crash or force quit when it fills up completely, or it will inform you that "Hey, I cant do this, no room on /tmp" in whatever way it can. Highly recommend doing this.
If you have any left, you can always use it for a misc partition or something, or allot it to another OS, or give it to your /home partition. You might want to create root ( / ) and swap partitions first if you do give it to /home
So, in short, here's a good partitioning layout for a pure Linux, no Windows or any other OS install, with Filesystem Types, sizes, and all. Remember, adjust the sizes of each partition based on your HDD capacity.
Filesystems
ext4 = Journaled, extremely good fault tolerance, recommended for most users
ext3 = Ancestor of ext4, has journaling as well, but it isn't as foolproof or as fault tolerant
ext2 = Great ansestor of ext3 and 4, no Journal, very little fault tolerance, but lacks the 4gb maximum limit for a single file that fat32 has.
fat32 = No journaling, no fault tolerance, no permissions support. Not something you'd want as a filesystem for anything outside of cameras, sd cards and whatnot
/ (Root)
Filesystem Type: EXT4
Size: 45GB
Notes: You should always use journaled filesystems on root, always, evenmoreso on /home. Make sure this is in one of the first four partitions, as GRUB2 will need to install into the MBR in order for Linux to be able to boot, and multiboot with other OS's if any exist.
/tmp
Filesystem Type: EXT4/EXT3/EXT2
Size: 20-25GB
Note: You can use journaling on a temporary partition, but it doesn't serve much purpose. /tmp is cleared on reboot anyway, so journaling serves little purpose, and ext2 would probably be fine.)
/swap
Filesystem Type: Linux-Swap (It auto defaults when you set something to /swap when you partition it)
Size: 2x your physical ram. If in doubt, 8GB is a good start, even if you only have 2gb of ram
/home
Filesystem Type: Ext4
Size: 200GB or whatever remains.
Note: Do not use anything that does not have journaling on a /home directory. If there is no journal to recover stuff from, it often results in the filesystem being too damaged to be used, and it would mean that you would lose everything on it most likely. Heck I myself won't even recommend ext3 anymore for /home either, as it suffers from the unix time/millenium bug. ext4 puts that off for another 245 some odd years.
You really should just get a PC and install Linux on it, Viruses for Linux are usually very few and far between, literally in the 30's or less in quantity, maybe even considerably less than that. Not just that but they aren't out there in the wild much, haven't run into one in the 3-4 year's I've been using Linux. It's also what I would consider the most powerful and versatile OS in existence. I mean yes one would need to be able to learn to use it well enough for everyday use, but that often happens quite fast. I hate it when people say it's the poor-mans OSX, OSX doesn't even come close to what Linux or normal BSD can do, as it's a propriatarily-encumbered, watered down, dumbed down to 2 year old level, butchered version of BSD, it has hardly half of what Linux can do.
Oh and by the way, you can try it out from a Live CD/DVD first most of the time, running the entire OS from the CD/DVD without installing it. If you like it and want to install it, then you can. Heck if you choose Ubuntu you can actually install the Restricted Extras from their repos, and add the repos as well so long as you have an internet connection, taking one of the post-install steps out of the equation.
I'm not gonna force you to use it, just putting the idea out there if you do wan't to go about it. I personally don't like Ubuntu myself anymore, as their whole way of going about with Unity steers me off just as much as Gnome3 did (I had do use downgrade and the A.R.M. in Arch to completely downgrade G3 to G2, and I'm loving G2). Needless to say some people might find Unity to be nice, I just wasn't one of them.
