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Operating Systems for PowerPC Macs
- Thread starter AmazingHenry
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10 Best PowerPC Linux Distros for 2024 with Installation Links!
We go through the best PowerPC Linux Distributions, their latest working versions, and where to find them.
10 Best PowerPC Linux Distros for 2024 with Installation Links!
The site above is more complete (with links), but heres whats on their list:Here is our list of the Top PowerPC Linux Distros:
- Debian 6.0 and 7 – EDITOR'S CHOICE PowerPC support is not included in the current version of Debian but look for versions 6 or 7 instead.
- Debian sid This operating system is available for some editions of PowerPC.
- Ubuntu 12.04, 14.04, and 16 Go back to these earlier versions of Debian to get a PowerPC-compatible version.
- Lubuntu This lightweight version of Ubuntu is an option if you have PowerPC versions for Apple G3, G4, and G5.
- MintPPC This distro is a blend of Linux Mint and Debian sid – it was specifically designed for PowerPC.
- Void Linux ppc This operating system for PowerPC will work on POWER8 or later.
- Gentoo Linux A great choice for a PowerPC operating system because it is suitable for a wide range of PowerPC versions.
- Adélie Linux This operating system is suitable for G3, G4, and G5 versions of PowerPC.
- Fedora This widely-used distro of Linux for G3 and G4 up to release 17 and for G5 thereafter.
- Fienix The derivative of Debian was specifically written for PowerPC.
Half of this list containing obsolete releases truly shows the state of the remains of the Linux landscape on PowerPC.
The only real options here are Adélie, Debian sid (or stable with snapshot, but they don't mention that), and Gentoo. Maybe Fienix. Maybe Lubuntu if you want to use the wicknix repack.
The only real options here are Adélie, Debian sid (or stable with snapshot, but they don't mention that), and Gentoo. Maybe Fienix. Maybe Lubuntu if you want to use the wicknix repack.
Where as, it seems like MorphOS is doing better than ever. Considering how much some people have been willing to spend on a "new" PPC Amiga, I'm not shocked.
IBM Power8/9/10 hardware is as prohibitively expensive as Apple’s offerings on equivalently specced Macs.
Think we can add Windows to this list now
That’s only for systems based around Gossamer… nothing newer than that right now.
I'm aware. Leopard is only for G4s and up, but still makes the list.
I was mostly joking though
There’s also SLPPC in which it’s discovered that if enough components are swapped out from 10.5.8 graphics acceleration is doable now.
I've been out of the game for awhile. Is this including AGP Macs? I knew it was doable with PCIe based ones. The only PCIe based PPC I have is my iMac G5 which I was running SLPPC on for awhile.
I suppose I could just go over to that thread lol
Indeed. Although I continue to fail to get an idea on how big (or small) the actual user base is.
Yeah, sure feels like it 😬. Yet there still seems to exist some movement on the development front. Plus off an on I read that the Amiga community is alive and there are even devs creating C64 and/or Amiga games.
I just know what is the situation with development on Darwin, given that PowerPC Apple is far more common than Amiga. We have 1 developer in GCC upstream (who Quad recently broken, so at the moment 0, until he gets some replacement in UK), perhaps 4 people working on browsers and myself for everything else LOL
Unless something is going on privately, that’s more or less it. (Admittedly, some occasional contributions still happen, but that’s like 3–4 people more.)
P. S. One thing that essentially killed macOS was this attitude which you frequently see here: “that’s some third party software, we do not care”. Well, in result the support for macOS ppc was dumped from everywhere, aside from GCC (thanks to enormous efforts of a single developer), since the impression outside was that no one uses it. Now it is too late. If Apple users were frequenting GitHub earlier, we would have had a functional platform. Now it takes non-trivial efforts not only to unbreak something but often to simply convince upstreams it is relevant. Which often fails.
Today both are irrelevant and if we look at historic data I wouldn't be so sure about any such statement.
But again does not matter, what matters is who is pushing what forward.
PPC-OSX has the advantage of being able to use the full extent of the HW while anything Amiga/MorphOS is still limited to 1 CPU and a 31bit address space.
At least for MorphOS developers have full control about the OS, while OSX developers can only hack around a 20 year old closed IP.
"Users" is a question of definition for both as the number of people who use it as their main OS is most likely dwarfed by the number of people using it as a secondary hobby system.
True. Yet Amiga and OS X are different: Amiga is mostly a gaming platform; whereas OS X is anything but.
There are forums like amigaworld.net or subreddits which seem to be active. And there are people out there creating youtubes about Amiga game development or Amiga assembly programming.
From that I'd deduce the Amiga community is both larger and more active compared to PPC Macs
Well this started with the size of the MorphOS user base which is kinda part of the Amiga user base.
Not really gaming centric (and even for the overall Amiga user base that is a common misconception).
More specific it was about current OS centric development between MorphOS and OSX-PPC.
Everything that is not for a current mainstream OS/platform is time wasted.
Everything that can't be monetized is time wasted (not just SW development).
"Wasting time" is also the truest definition of "hobby"
I wonder how many people would buy a 2000+ Euro workstation to run Amiga. And AFAIK, no laptops exist. Which is a severe limiting factor for adoption of any HW platform.
Re activity: well, may be or may be not, but it has little to do with prevalence. SGI community is pretty active, from forums, but how many people out there with working SGI hardware?
P. S. As a proxy, try compare how many deals are there for ppc Macs vs Amigas. One could say that ppl selling ppc Macs are not their users (which is partly true, though not necessarily always), but on the other hand most of those Macs are also bought by someone. I think I have seen Amiga once or twice on eBay.
That is a very subsection of Amiga (read OS4) quite opposite to that other subsection of Amiga that is the topic here (MorphOS) who for the most part use PPC Mac followed by <500€ special build mATX boards from the early 2000s. Plus a handful o those 2000€ "workstations".
And then there is the 68k community and the fake-68k one.....
MorphOS runs well on Powerbooks. Not sure sure how compatible the various flavours of Amiga-like OSes are, though