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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

POWER/PowerPC is the same architecture that Apple once used in the Macintosh, so if you want to play with Linux on a PowerPC machine they can be had for almost nothing on the used market.

There are really only two models worth having, at opposite ends of the spectrum: The PowerMac G5 (64-bit, based on POWER4) was the fastest available but they're enormous and power hungry. At the other end, the G4 mini is much smaller and more efficient but 32-bit and not as fast.

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32 bit is not worth having, nothing modern supports it.

The G5 was supported with Fedora until recently but alas support was dropped. Also the newer Power distros are the new ppc64le flavour, which is a slightly different ABI and little endian but the G5 is not alas dual endian so does not support it. But they are cheap and quiet and mine has been running reliably, although I might install FreeBSD on it next as that has ongoing support.

Ubuntu Mate has a PPC version which seems to be pretty popular. Unfortunately the G5 power consumption and fan noise (unless you have the liquid-cooled version, maybe) are high, so trying to reanimate a G5 is not really a compelling proposition for me (besides the fact that I ended up stuck somewhere in openfirmware-land last time I tried).

I have a 2.3GHz dual core PowerMac11,2 running FreeBSD 10.2 PPC64 on a ZFS root. My machine has 8GB of RAM and works brilliantly.

I tried all flavours of PPC linux and none of them worked particularly well. FreeBSD 10.x had the advantage of 64 bit support and the nvidia 6600LE works acceptably with the open source drivers.

I highly recommend FreeBSD 10.x PPC64 to anyone with a G5 PowerMac who wants to run a modern OS.

Debian still supports big endian PowerPC (including 32-bit). You can successfully install jessie on a PowerPC Mac mini.

I still use one to test software because testing on "weird" hardware reveals more bugs.

But obviously not everyone does that, so some of the software in the package manager still has aforementioned bugs.

This is true, but honestly no one is really interested in playing with the POWER ISA, which for most purposes is Just Another 90's RISC Box. The thing drawing clicks here is the question of whether or not the specific POWER8 architecture can beat contemporary Intel (which means Haswell right now, as Broadwell doesn't have a high performance Xeon variant) architecture in some regimes. And... it kinda doesn't.

I think that apple figured out a long time ago that the price performance would never be as good, and that pure performance would be on par - at best.

Since then it has all been about making it look good for enterprise goons. Consolidating and vertical scaling and all that.

And poor buggers that end up with high cpu steal and poor performance because a new box is just unimaginably expensive when you have filled the existing system.

Long ago I bought a first generation (G3) iMac and ran Yellow Dog Linux for this very reason. It worked fine: $200 for a PowerPC target system.

I got a PowerMac G5 recently from a friend who no longer needed it, because I always loved those big beasts and have fond memories of the time I got a prerelease model so I could port a codegenerator backend to it. Alas, I haven't found any practical application for the machine this time around, but I'm reluctant to pass it along as I'm afraid it'll just be scrapped.

Put FreeBSD 10.x on it if you want a modern OS with great G5 support.

Good to know!

I believe that the assertion in your first sentence is false, partly from memory, as a compiler person, but then I looked it up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_POWER_microprocessors

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