Quick couple questions before I dive into this.

I've been becoming a bit frustrated with Windows 7 lately, and Linux I'm just plain unsure about (thanks, low battery life)... so I've been considering either moving back to XP or (leaning toward this, honestly, seeing as I recently picked up a cheap ($150ish) Power Mac G4 and quite like the thing... I might even consider it my main machine.) installing OS X (10.5) on it.

I know there are hardware hurdles and such, though, and I'm willing to find drivers and such. However, a few nagging questions:

How is battery life on OS X? If it's around my Linux time (2h at most), I may want to pass it up unless there is a way to squeeze a bit more life.

Secondly, I read something about Atheros drivers actually existing, can't remember where. My questions here are: Is it true? And would they be stable enough, if so? I wouldn't need legendary, always-completely-up stability, as long as it wasn't completely unusable. (Lasting a few hours at a time would be fine - I could always dualboot into XP until if I needed to use the machine longer.)

I'd replace the wireless card, but I completely lack faith in my ability to do such, as... if I wrecked the machine, somehow, I'd be screwed (couldn't get another, no money). :/

My apologies if I've missed anything fairly obvious.

 

Can't really respond to the battery life question, in the space of a year I've gone through so many OSs and dual/tripple boot setups that it's hard to notice.

As far as atheros drivers, there's a reason everyone with OS X on their machine swaps the card out. You might be scared about replacing but honestly it's so easy. The card is located just under the main bezel around the keyboard. All you need to do is undo some screws on the bottom, pop out the keyboard with a credit card and use the card to unclip the snaps holding the bezel in place, then you can reach the card. It's a ten minute job and literally impossible to screw up. I too was worried about swapping the card out and I was in the same position (15yo, spent all my money on the machine) but it really wasn't a big deal.