Mac replacement.
I expect that from my past postings many of you will be well aware of my limitations with PCs and Windows by now but I'm faced with a problem which has to do with neither. My daughter is a nearly finished Vet. student who was given a Mac Powerbook G4 five or six years ago in another life when she was doing a doctorate in things to do with DNA mutations and cancer. She loves it, without understanding it, and hates Windows - probably also without understanding why. She wants a new Mac but cannot afford one. In my continuing state of, mmmm, let's call it innocence I wondered "OSX > Unix < Linux, is there something to look into here?"
Conscious that she could get a pretty fancy PC laptop for much much less than a Mac, especially if she bought it without paying for a Windows licence, would the Linux experience and the open source equivalent software to what she has been using on the Mac suit her? She does a lot of word-processing, quite a lot of spreadsheeting, not so much databasing but quite a lot of the usual social networking.
I was going to put this on Mac corner, but then I thought about it first!
Thank you in advance for your help.