I'm willing to live with an obsolescent computer for a few years, although security would probably be a problem (in that case, I'd probably adapt to using some form of Linux). Unfortunately, I have to admit that the 2008 Mac Pro is already bordering on obsolescent (it is the minimum requirement for 10.8, for example; I cannot rely on Apple to support it in the next release or two of OS X, although that is probably likely, at least for 10.9), so its days as a modern computer are probably numbered.

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Even a 2006 Mac Pro is still a reasonably competent Linux computer, and will be for a while. The annoying 32 bit EFI limitation matters not under Linux, as long as you don't have some philosophical problem with using the BIOS emulation stub to boot x86-64 instead of EFI, and I find that personally at least four 2.0 ghz Core Duo 2-equivalent cores is still a couple notches above the "fast enough" cutoff for a daily driver. On the flip side, of course, I haven't been using mine much after being shocked and amazed that according to the Kill-A-Watt the system draws about 200 watts while completely idle. (This is with the monitor in power save mode, system load average flat barely above zero.) That's... a lot. It certainly was enough to talk me out of having the system double as the home server, anyway.

I have on hand the RAM chips needed to max the thing out at 32GB, so I've been thinking of keeping the thing around for use as a bare-metal VMware box, but I have as of yet failed to actually come up with a good reason for *having* a giant VMware box at home.