Using a 14-year-old Mac mini as your daily driver. Can it really be done?

“Last week, I sent a piece extolling the joys of the Hackintosh, a concept that is very much a response to the demise of ‘the good old days’ of Apple,” Ernie Smith writes for Tedium. “But as I was working out the details on that piece, I had a not-so-secret hobby that was taking up quite a bit of my time.”
“I was trying to figure out if I could revive a Genuine Apple Product that had seen better days. My acquisition of this product was a total impulse buy: After reading up on the Mac Mini G4 and remembering that it was the first computer I ever owned that I had not purchased refurbished or used (though not my first Mac), I decided to relive those days by buying a new one,” Smith writes. “I gave myself some parameters, however: It had to be as cheap as possible, and if it was broken, I had to fix it. After some research and some careful bidding on eBay, I bought a damaged one — for $10, plus shipping. And I got it to work.”
 
“Linux is an option, of course—a number of the open source operating system’s flavors, most notably Ubuntu, support the PowerPC platform, which has seen wide use in a number of other places, most famously the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii. Maybe I’ll do that at some point. But honestly, I was just hoping to relive my own past a little bit — in the form of a computer that was once the machine I found necessary to get through my day. But thanks to the internet’s drumbeat, I can’t do that,” Smith writes. “The Mac Mini G4 is not a sign of our past. It is a sign of our future — a future that will not allow the past to survive on its own terms.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Now, if that Mac mini were an Intel-based Mac mini, instead of the 1st gen. Power PC model from 2005, Smith would have had a lot better luck. He’d be able to run a more modern OS. It’s the divide between PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs that’s a leap too far.
[UPDATE: 6:49pm ET: Corrected take as per “JC” below. Mac mini (Early 2009, Macmini3,1) can run OS X El Capitan 10.11.6 and macOS Mojave via Mojave Patcher.]