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Comment by justincormack | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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).

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.

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