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I bought a Mac

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237 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 14 Apr 25 01:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.288s | 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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leoh ◴[14 Apr 25 08:59 UTC] No.43679399[source]▶
> 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.

Seems to me the trick to enhancing build times would be emulation using modern hardware, no? qemu, etc.

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1. SpecialistK ◴[17 Apr 25 09:20 UTC] No.43714562[source]▶
QEMU support exists, but needs TLC. The best it can do is "mac99" which emulates a 1st generation PowerMac G4 - it can run 9.2 - 10.5. But in my experience via UTM on a modern MacBook, it gains some Geekbench points like memory speed but loses a lot in others like integer performance.

I'm very glad that it exists but is not at a point where a powerful Ryzen or Apple Mx can compile (much) faster than real hardware.