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I bought a Mac

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237 points todsacerdoti | 5 comments | 14 Apr 25 01:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.632s | 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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genevra ◴[14 Apr 25 02:19 UTC] No.43677500[source]▶
It's always bothered me that Apple has so little backwards compatibility. I suppose that's why Windows is used by most of the corporate world for "reliability" (more reliable than Apple), and "ease of use" (people don't want to learn command line for Linux). It's just the mid option
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1. poulsbohemian ◴[14 Apr 25 20:45 UTC] No.43686116[source]▶
I'm writing this on a ten year old Mac with specs in line with what I see on dell.com as still available in new systems, with Apple still delivering some software updates yearly. All the apps I use have been available in both Intel and Apple Silicon flavors. I'm not sure how much more I can expect from Apple / the Apple ecosphere.
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2. 71bw ◴[15 Apr 25 12:58 UTC] No.43692026[source]▶
...what Mac are you using then, again? Because I have a 2017(!!!!) MacBook Pro that's completely unusable due to its terrible performance and fans going at 100% all the time.
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3. Eugen_RS ◴[15 Apr 25 18:49 UTC] No.43696924[source]▶
Open it and clean the fan. After it, it will work like a new one.
4. SpecialistK ◴[17 Apr 25 09:12 UTC] No.43714527[source]▶
You say:

> specs in line with what I see on dell.com as still available in new systems

But I'm not sure if you mean the relative performance of an entry-level chip like the N100 or the raw numbers like "6-8 core, 3.8GHz" - the performance may be fine for your use-cases but doesn't actually compare to decade-newer chips like M2 when pushed.

> Apple still delivering some software updates yearly

They deserve a lot more credit for this transition than the PPC-Intel one, that's for sure...

5. poulsbohemian ◴[23 Apr 25 17:10 UTC] No.43774291[source]▶
iMac - i7 processor, 32gb of ram. Still a very serviceable machine by the specs.