I remember discussing with an IBM representative at one of the last CeBIT shows (was it 2016?) that the community who did open source development on non-x86 were gravitating away from POWER/PowerPC towards ARM. The affordable hardware was a major selling point.
His offered "solution" was that IBM granted free access to its POWER cloud. But that is of course not interesting for someone who runs a home lab and works on Linux distros.
And even so, the blog post still does not aim to where they need to aim. Raptor systems are far from "affordable" for your average CS undergraduate or hobbyist. Power Pi's $250 target price is still off by almost an order of magnitude. The $250+ market is served by second-hand POWER servers, which are ok for home labs. Unfortunately, Ubuntu and IBM in their infinite wisdom decided to drop POWER8 support from upcoming releases, which will drive away home labs and the open source community further from Power.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-2...