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I bought a Mac

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237 points todsacerdoti | 3 comments | 14 Apr 25 01:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.422s | source
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SpecialistK ◴[14 Apr 25 02:04 UTC] No.43677433[source]▶
The late PowerPC-era Macs are really fun to play with, because they're an interesting blend of modern niceties like USB and Ethernet but are limited with how old most software is. There's still a scene of people working on bringing newer versions of GCC and other *nix utilities to Tiger or Leopard, working with the pre-release PPC betas of Snow Leopard, and trying to keep online services working despite aging TLS versions and retired APIs. Compiling takes forever until it fails with an obscure C11 error or missing C library features. And that makes for a fun, if often frustrating, challenge.

But PPC32 Linux support is quickly falling off. Gentoo isn't just used because it's fun to leave your lampshade iMac G4 compiling a kernel for days, but because it's one of the few distros still supporting the platform. There's unsupported testing repos for Debian (and maybe Ubuntu?) plus the up-and-coming Adelie. Otherwise your best bet is OpenBSD - FreeBSD and NetBSD usually lack precompiled ports, and FreeBSD has announced the next major release will almost definitely drop 32 bit PPC.

The 64 bit G5 systems are much better supporte. I'm pretty sure they can boot ppc64le that many distros target. They're also even more modern - the final models had PCIe, SATA, and up to 16GB of DDR2 RAM. Sadly there's nothing modern about the power efficiency, nor the self-destructing water cooling system.

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1. ryandrake ◴[14 Apr 25 03:00 UTC] No.43677681[source]▶
It's sad that support for these things always seems to just disappear. All software maintainers have to do is not touch it and not break it, and it would work forever, but no, they can't help themselves. Out of boredom of old things, they drop this... out of convenience, they deprecate that... and out of a refactor, they forget to keep thus... and suddenly, software that once worked fine is now gone. It's up to archivists and tinkerers to constantly fix these mistakes and restore these old platforms.
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2. jogu ◴[14 Apr 25 03:11 UTC] No.43677735[source]▶
Unfortunately, I don't think supporting a platform by providing prebuilt binaries is as simple as "just don't touch it". There's no guarantee things will continue to build for the platform, nor that upstream projects won't remove explicit support from their code bases if the effort to maintain it exists.
3. degamad ◴[14 Apr 25 03:24 UTC] No.43677789[source]▶
> All software maintainers have to do is not touch it

That seems okay...

> and not break it

Ah, there's the rub - when you're not actively testing on the platform, because no-one on your team has the relevant pieces around any more, then you don't know whether you've broken it.

And even if you do have the relevant pieces, there's a non-zero cost involved in testing every subsequent release on that environment, and implementing workarounds for every subsequent change or new feature in the future which fails to work on the old hardware, used by ~0.0% of your user base.

It's not just boredom that causes stuff to be dropped, it's when the cost of maintaining compatibility with the old hardware exceeds the benefit of retaining the compatibility.