Power PC as a daily driver?

[VirtuallyInsane]

Does anyone here still use ONLY PowerPC products as their main daily drivers, in 2023? (No Intel, or Mx products at all in regards to computing).

If so, how do you do everything? I am very curious to know.

I use PowerPC products to run old apps, mainly but they are not my main "daily drivers". If I want to use an old version of a DAW for music, Final Cut Pro, use an old version of Word for distraction-free writing, use a browser for website compatibility testing (like TFF, Interwebs, or WebKit), or just sync my iPod/use iTunes then I will use one of my machines. They have specific purposes.

Yes, I know there was a thread like five years ago with a similar question but I want to know, currently if people still use them now, in 2023, without fail. I know people have probably changed and upgraded since then and moved on.

 

[TheShortTimer]

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/do-any-of-you-daily-drive-a-ppc-mac.2188717/
Do any of you daily drive a PPC Mac? | MacRumors Forums

Please, consider using the search facility to check if these threads already exist.

Not being a d**k, just trying to help you.

 

[VirtuallyInsane]

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/do-any-of-you-daily-drive-a-ppc-mac.2188717/
Do any of you daily drive a PPC Mac? | MacRumors Forums

Please, consider using the search facility to check if these threads already exist.

Not being a d**k, just trying to help you.

Fair enough. It's just, I kinda am not used to necro-ing threads, and I was told on other forums throughout the years not to do it, but I guess MR doesn't mind it. I know you're not trying to be a d**k, and I appreciate you sending me the link, but I am still trying to understand this forum and how it works after four/five years.

I'll try not to make duplicates and I will use the search function more if this is what the forums prefer. I'm not making the threads to be annoying or to rile people up. It's just things are different here, and I will have to try and remember that and get used to it.

 

[TheShortTimer]

I'm not making the threads to be annoying or to rile people up.

We all know that.

Text can easily be misconstrued online and lead to misunderstandings, which is why I emphasised that there was no intention to belittle you.

It's just things are different here, and I will have to try and remember that and get used to it.

No worries.

 

[Amethyst1]

Fair enough. It's just, I kinda am not used to necro-ing threads, and I was told on other forums throughout the years not to do it, but I guess MR doesn't mind it.

The rules say nothing with regards to how old a thread may be necro-ed, so, personally, I interpret this as it being fine as long as the new post is... relevant in some way or another. Necro-ing a 15-year-old thread just to say "Cool" is probably a different matter.

 

[eyoungren]

Fair enough. It's just, I kinda am not used to necro-ing threads, and I was told on other forums throughout the years not to do it, but I guess MR doesn't mind it.

We don't and we do - it's all context.

Chances are that if you run into a thread that has at least 2-3 pages of comments you are not going to get your head handed to you because you necroed the thread.

It's kind of stacked against you though since you are relatively new to the forums. Most of us here 'know' which threads are 'active' and which aren't. It's the ones that aren't (which, we only know about) and that have posts that are off-topic to the original subject that we mainly object to being necroed. Which is why I say it's stacked against you.

So, it's just time. Being around here long enough to see which threads fade in and out.

 

[eyoungren]

Does anyone here still use ONLY PowerPC products as their main daily drivers, in 2023? (No Intel, or Mx products at all in regards to computing).

If so, how do you do everything? I am very curious to know.

I use PowerPC products to run old apps, mainly but they are not my main "daily drivers". If I want to use an old version of a DAW for music, Final Cut Pro, use an old version of Word for distraction-free writing, use a browser for website compatibility testing (like TFF, Interwebs, or WebKit), or just sync my iPod/use iTunes then I will use one of my machines. They have specific purposes.

Yes, I know there was a thread like five years ago with a similar question but I want to know, currently if people still use them now, in 2023, without fail. I know people have probably changed and upgraded since then and moved on.

To properly reply to this…

No. I've been out since 2020 when I finally got a Mac Pro as a daily driver. Prior to that though I was using a Quad G5 with 16GB ram and two large hard drives. It was getting harder and harder to do things.

Being fully on the Intel side of it now, I wouldn't go back. I stick around this particular subforum because I have friends here and I still like messing around with PowerPC from time to time. Just not as a daily driver.

Additionally, I have older SL systems that use the same apps I was using on the Quad G5. Most of those are either accessible to me via VNC, or I just pull them out. I don't need to scrounge an HD for my Quad, install an OS and Adobe CS4 to use CS4. It's running on one of my SL Mac Minis.

 

[ocmac]

Ahh.....progress. I haven't used a PPC as a daily driver since about 2016. Just impossible. I keep a couple around because I like to tinker and people like eyougren, Dronecatcher and Wicknix inspire me. But as an aside, and to vent.... I have a dual core Dell Chromebook, 4 GB RAM from 2018 which it is now impossible to use as a daily anything. ChromeOS worked fine but stopped support in April. ChromeFlex doesn't work at all. GalliumOS worked well, but has ceased development. Put Coreboot on it, have gone through about 12 Linux distros and nothing works completely. Sound cuts out in Linux Mint. Ubuntu mainstream is unusable. MATE is decent, but produces graphic glitches periodically. Puppy Linux works, but is weird and with EasyOS, Puppy is a dying distro and it shows. Trisquel Linux works best, but has gnarly screen tearing which I am normally able to fix with some config file editing, but apparently not on a FOSS distro....

My daily driver is a 50 dollar 2008 unibody Macbook with High Sierra, Dosdude1 patcher on it. Brave Browser works a treat. Librewolf also works well. Firefox ESR works decently. Everything just works if I avoid the native Apple apps. Progress.

 

[eyoungren]

Ahh.....progress. I haven't used a PPC as a daily driver since about 2016. Just impossible. I keep a couple around because I like to tinker and people like eyougren, Dronecatcher and Wicknix inspire me. But as an aside, and to vent.... I have a dual core Dell Chromebook, 4 GB RAM from 2018 which it is now impossible to use as a daily anything. ChromeOS worked fine but stopped support in April. ChromeFlex doesn't work at all. GalliumOS worked well, but has ceased development. Put Coreboot on it, have gone through about 12 Linux distros and nothing works completely. Sound cuts out in Linux Mint. Ubuntu mainstream is unusable. MATE is decent, but produces graphic glitches periodically. Puppy Linux works, but is weird and with EasyOS, Puppy is a dying distro and it shows. Trisquel Linux works best, but has gnarly screen tearing which I am normally able to fix with some config file editing, but apparently not on a FOSS distro....

My daily driver is a 50 dollar 2008 unibody Macbook with High Sierra, Dosdude1 patcher on it. Brave Browser works a treat. Librewolf also works well. Firefox ESR works decently. Everything just works if I avoid the native Apple apps. Progress.

I'd argue that PowerPC is still usable, not impossible. Just difficult and getting more so.

The key here is standards. PowerPC is still possible (but difficult) because certain file standards are still relevant. .docx, .idml, .psd, .ai, and so on and so on. If you get a file in that format on PowerPC you can still open it because there are still apps on PowerPC that open those formats. And PowerPC can still serve as a bridge for even older systems.

But, once the standards move - that's it. That's when early Intel systems become the 'bridge'. At some point Microsoft will come up with a new Word format, Adobe with a new IDML format and so on. That's when this becomes impossible and when PowerPC ultimately becomes an island to itself. It hasn't happened yet, but just like .docx replacing .doc, it will.

That's my opinion on the matter.

 

[mmphosis]

I'd argue that there is no "daily driver" because things we do are fragmented. Ideally, I disconnect for the day.

Phones

If I am making a short or long trip, I tend to bring a cell phone. Android has surpassed Windows in market share. I prefer the iPhone but if the battery goes dead I swap the sim card into the Android phone with the good battery but Android is terrible in my opinion.

Wintel

So yes, I've been using Intel with much disdain. I don't like Intel, but I have a lot of hand-me-down Wintel laptops. Yesterday, amongst the hundreds of processes and threads, I saw fwupdate downloading and running some unknown update. An undocumented modified version of Minix is running regardless of what os you might want to run. I've managed to avoid Windows and run Linux exclusively on all the various Intel laptops.

Servers

To save power, my "daily" web servers and NFS file servers run on Raspberry pis but I do like (and miss) being able to click a checkbox to bring up or down various servers on the PowerPC Mac.

I used my PowerPC Mac all day yesterday. I simply prefer to use my older PowerPC Macs when I can. Those are my opinions on the matter.

 

[VirtuallyInsane]

The rules say nothing with regards to how old a thread may be necro-ed, so, personally, I interpret this as it being fine as long as the new post is... relevant in some way or another. Necro-ing a 15-year-old thread just to say "Cool" is probably a different matter.

Fair enough. Yeah, I think that necro-ing a thread to say cool is dumb, lol. I guess that could be counted as "spam" and against the rules because of the lack of context behind the post, and the posting to the thread.

We don't and we do - it's all context.

Chances are that if you run into a thread that has at least 2-3 pages of comments you are not going to get your head handed to you because you necroed the thread.

It's kind of stacked against you though since you are relatively new to the forums. Most of us here 'know' which threads are 'active' and which aren't. It's the ones that aren't (which, we only know about) and that have posts that are off-topic to the original subject that we mainly object to being necroed. Which is why I say it's stacked against you.

So, it's just time. Being around here long enough to see which threads fade in and out.

Ah, yeah that makes sense too.

Yeah, I am relatively 'new' to the forums. I have only started really posting regularly over the past six months or so. I took a long break (two years, to be precise) from the forums before I got myself an iBook G4 to play around on.

I haven't got a good gauge of what isn't an active thread and what isn't yet. I will get it soon enough, I hope, in time.

To properly reply to this…

No. I've been out since 2020 when I finally got a Mac Pro as a daily driver. Prior to that though I was using a Quad G5 with 16GB ram and two large hard drives. It was getting harder and harder to do things.

Being fully on the Intel side of it now, I wouldn't go back. I stick around this particular subforum because I have friends here and I still like messing around with PowerPC from time to time. Just not as a daily driver.

Additionally, I have older SL systems that use the same apps I was using on the Quad G5. Most of those are either accessible to me via VNC, or I just pull them out. I don't need to scrounge an HD for my Quad, install an OS and Adobe CS4 to use CS4. It's running on one of my SL Mac Minis.

It's impressive that you managed to daily drive PPC for so long. It's annoying when things go obsolete, though and things get harder to do on old machines.

And friends are a good enough reason to stay here. From what I have experienced, everyone in the PPC subforum has been pleasant, helpful and friendly. It's a very nice place to be and everyone is more than happy to share their experiences.

And yeah, messing around on PPC is fun. I like to run Tiger/Leopard when I can and try out all the new programs that have been developed and test them out. It amazes me that people still program and keep PPC running for as long as they can, in a good way.

Yeah, as for Early Intel stuff, I am quite impressed at how well my 'new' MBP 2007, Macbook 2008, and MBP 2009 all still run today. All of them have a copy of SL on it, and the 2009 is Dual Booted with Yosemite. Thinking of dual booting the Macbook with Lion just so I can use Chromium Legacy for specific websites.

I'm using my SL MBP 07 right now, and it has the basic apps I need to use it still covered. I like the bigger screen, as with my 17 inch MBP 09, which is great for watching videos/movies on, and for using on my ACD. SL is still surprisingly useful today, which is nice.

Ahh.....progress. I haven't used a PPC as a daily driver since about 2016. Just impossible. I keep a couple around because I like to tinker and people like eyougren, Dronecatcher and Wicknix inspire me. But as an aside, and to vent.... I have a dual core Dell Chromebook, 4 GB RAM from 2018 which it is now impossible to use as a daily anything. ChromeOS worked fine but stopped support in April. ChromeFlex doesn't work at all. GalliumOS worked well, but has ceased development. Put Coreboot on it, have gone through about 12 Linux distros and nothing works completely. Sound cuts out in Linux Mint. Ubuntu mainstream is unusable. MATE is decent, but produces graphic glitches periodically. Puppy Linux works, but is weird and with EasyOS, Puppy is a dying distro and it shows. Trisquel Linux works best, but has gnarly screen tearing which I am normally able to fix with some config file editing, but apparently not on a FOSS distro....

My daily driver is a 50 dollar 2008 unibody Macbook with High Sierra, Dosdude1 patcher on it. Brave Browser works a treat. Librewolf also works well. Firefox ESR works decently. Everything just works if I avoid the native Apple apps. Progress.

Yeah, tinkering is great definitely. Yeah, they inspire me as well. It's great what they do/have done for the PPC community, along with various others. And a Chromebook, yeah. That's annoying that you don't get support anymore on that, and that various others don't work anymore. Especially since it's barely 4-5 years old.

That's sweet that you can get Sierra on that through a patcher. Does it overheat much or is it upgraded? My MBP 09 is dualbooted with SL and Yosemite, and it works fine for the most part but Yosemite lags a bit. And yes, Native Apple Apps are a pain, they always want you to be on the "latest version" of everything to use it fully. No thanks.

I'd argue that there is no "daily driver" because things we do are fragmented. Ideally, I disconnect for the day.

Phones

If I am making a short or long trip, I tend to bring a cell phone. Android has surpassed Windows in market share. I prefer the iPhone but if the battery goes dead I swap the sim card into the Android phone with the good battery but Android is terrible in my opinion.

Wintel

So yes, I've been using Intel with much disdain. I don't like Intel, but I have a lot of hand-me-down Wintel laptops. Yesterday, amongst the hundreds of processes and threads, I saw fwupdate downloading and running some unknown update. An undocumented modified version of Minix is running regardless of what os you might want to run. I've managed to avoid Windows and run Linux exclusively on all the various Intel laptops.

Servers

To save power, my "daily" web servers and NFS file servers run on Raspberry pis but I do like (and miss) being able to click a checkbox to bring up or down various servers on the PowerPC Mac.

I used my PowerPC Mac all day yesterday. I simply prefer to use my older PowerPC Macs when I can. Those are my opinions on the matter.

That's a good point, actually. I use my iPhone when I go out mostly and am not at home because it's easy. I have a Win 11 gaming laptop, pretty much for that sole purpose. I use Mac for everything else. Yeah, nothing wrong with having a preference for PowerPC/Early Intel. Those machines still work well and get the job done.

 

[eyoungren]

Ideally, I disconnect for the day.

Anathema to me.

I connected for the first time in 1985 to a BBS and was able to communicate with people outside my home, outside my rural community and sometimes outside my own state. I have never disconnected. I simply ignore what I do not wish to respond to.

But, I think that is a generational thing. I'm Gen-X, part of the latchkey generation, where being home meant being alone - and disconnected. So, connecting was a lifeline for me.

This current generation has always had always on internet and connected devices. Even my son, born in 2003, has never known dialup.

 

[eyoungren]

I haven't got a good gauge of what isn't an active thread and what isn't yet. I will get it soon enough, I hope, in time.

Stick around, you'll know soon enough.

It's impressive that you managed to daily drive PPC for so long. It's annoying when things go obsolete, though and things get harder to do on old machines.

Not so much if you consider that any obsolescence I experienced was primarily internet related. I was relying more and more on my Intel systems (that I had then) to use the internet and by 2020 I had a job that was using later versions of specific apps. While I could work around that with my G5 it wasn't a process I was particularly happy with. But all my regular apps functioned exactly the same and I got stuff done.

So moving away from PowerPC wasn't so much necessity as it was preference. I enjoy the challenge of making things work, particularly when somebody else says "You can't". But holding up the middle finger was starting to get tiring and I just wanted to not have to fight anymore.

By the end of March, my job will be issuing new laptops which means new versions of MacOS and new versions of apps. So, I'm headed towards growth again as my objective with my home systems has always been to be at or near the same level as the systems I use for work.

Consequently, the Mac Pro and my Minis will be upgraded via OCLP at some point. Not looking forward to that process for two reasons. One, the process itself. It's easier now (I hear) but I still have to go through it. And two, once I make that jump I know it will be the final one for the systems I have. That's going to be as far as I can push them. That'll hold for the next few years, but as with PowerPC to Intel, there is a hardware upgrade in my future within the next 10 years I expect.

 

[lepidotós]

Simultaneously no longer and not yet.

What I mean by that is between July 2021 and August 2022, my main machines were all PowerPC Macs, having become functionally computerless at the time after my Dell Inspiron 2200's power connectore wore off the PCB, and taking the plunge on an iBook G3 for Mac OS X Jaguar/OS 9 use.
Eventually that ballooned up into a small collection and hobby, but that came to a close when a relative gave me a 6600K tower. Then, in November, I found an old Bay Trail laptop I've had since 2014 that I put Mageia on. So my time DDing PowerPC Macs exclusively is over.

But, that's just one vendor. I've been wanting a Raptor Blackbird system for a few years now as a daily driver desktop PC, in spite of the price hikes making a board that was once sold for $999 more than double in price, because I think they deserve it.
In the laptop space, Acube and Power Progress Community are working on Powerboard Tyche still, and RED Semiconductor is doing Vantage, which seems awesome and is coming to SBCs and hopefully a Framework mainboard. But both are still quite far from now, so I went with a Surface Laptop 3 15" in the meantime and... regret that choice to be honest. It's hot and the battery life is on par with my PowerBook G4.​

 

[VirtuallyInsane]

Stick around, you'll know soon enough.

Oh yes, I plan to stick around.

I don't think I will be buying anything brand new from Apple for a while, and I won't be upgrading to Ventura. Or buying Yubikeys. Big Sur is iOS looking enough for me to handle. If I want iOS, I'll go to my iPad or my iPhone, tyvm.

The more "advanced" MacOS has become, the more complex and backwards it seems to end up (to me anyway). I like the simplicity of the PPC/Early Intel software. (Anything pre-10.7). Yeah, I use modern MacOS for compatibility reasons, which is fine but they will never beat the early days of OS X.

Not so much if you consider that any obsolescence I experienced was primarily internet related. I was relying more and more on my Intel systems (that I had then) to use the internet and by 2020 I had a job that was using later versions of specific apps. While I could work around that with my G5 it wasn't a process I was particularly happy with. But all my regular apps functioned exactly the same and I got stuff done.

So moving away from PowerPC wasn't so much necessity as it was preference. I enjoy the challenge of making things work, particularly when somebody else says "You can't". But holding up the middle finger was starting to get tiring and I just wanted to not have to fight anymore.

Yeah, that's understandable. Stuff like CC needs like El Capitan, or something doesn't it? I can't remember. I've always had CC on Sierra + since 2018-9 when I got my Air. Yeah, I get it being tiring. At some point, you have to get with the times and not fight things, especially when it comes to your job.

By the end of March, my job will be issuing new laptops which means new versions of MacOS and new versions of apps. So, I'm headed towards growth again as my objective with my home systems has always been to be at or near the same level as the systems I use for work.

Consequently, the Mac Pro and my Minis will be upgraded via OCLP at some point. Not looking forward to that process for two reasons. One, the process itself. It's easier now (I hear) but I still have to go through it. And two, once I make that jump I know it will be the final one for the systems I have. That's going to be as far as I can push them. That'll hold for the next few years, but as with PowerPC to Intel, there is a hardware upgrade in my future within the next 10 years I expect.

It's sad in a way when you have to upgrade, but you have to sync everything, and make sure it works smoothly with your work and home life. Whatever works, works. But yeah, I hear OCLP is good, seen and heard good reports about that program. And yeah, it probably will be as far as you can push them. Ventura, or Monterrey.

Late Intel hardware, from my own experience and M1 too itself has been great. Mojave flies on my iMac, and Big Sur is great for the MBP M1 and I, myself am trying to hold onto those versions for as long as I can without upgrading. Mojave is starting to lose support in the app store and it will probably lose support soon in other places, which isn't good if I still want to run 32 Bit Apps.

I don't like forced upgrades but I will do it if I must. Hopefully not for a while, though.

EDIT : Don't know what happened there so sorry for the empty quotes, @lepidotós I replied below.

 

[VirtuallyInsane]

Simultaneously no longer and not yet.

What I mean by that is between July 2021 and August 2022, my main machines were all PowerPC Macs, having become functionally computerless at the time after my Dell Inspiron 2200's power connectore wore off the PCB, and taking the plunge on an iBook G3 for Mac OS X Jaguar/OS 9 use.​

Sucks that your Dell power connector broke. That sounds annoying.

OS9 is interesting. I have a Tiger iBook (12 inch) that runs classic mode and some of the apps on it are very interesting, to say the least. The notepad one with TTS is cool. It sings your words.

Eventually that ballooned up into a small collection and hobby, but that came to a close when a relative gave me a 6600K tower. Then, in November, I found an old Bay Trail laptop I've had since 2014 that I put Mageia on. So my time DDing PowerPC Macs exclusively is over.​

Yeah, it's too easy to collect PPC laptops. And it's cool you got a tower from a relative, and Mageia on a laptop. Never heard of it but it looks interesting from what I looked into of it.

But, that's just one vendor. I've been wanting a Raptor Blackbird system for a few years now as a daily driver desktop PC, in spite of the price hikes making a board that was once sold for $999 more than double in price, because I think they deserve it.​

Sweet. Looks like a cool board. Must be worth it if it's worth double the price now.

In the laptop space, Acube and Power Progress Community are working on Powerboard Tyche still, and RED Semiconductor is doing Vantage, which seems awesome and is coming to SBCs and hopefully a Framework mainboard. But both are still quite far from now, so I went with a Surface Laptop 3 15" in the meantime and... regret that choice to be honest. It's hot and the battery life is on par with my PowerBook G4.​

The PowerPC notebook seems cool, to be honest. I am interested in that project as a whole in the future. I like the concept of it thus far and they seem to have a good amount of funding. Wow, does it even get 3-4 hours? How is the battery so bad? Can you change settings?

 

[lepidotós]

Sucks that your Dell power connector broke. That sounds annoying.

By itself, it wouldn't be that bad, but it stays working just long enough to be significantly inconvenient when it does shut off.
​

Yeah, it's too easy to collect PPC laptops. And it's cool you got a tower from a relative, and Mageia on a laptop. Never heard of it but it looks interesting from what I looked into of it.

They're small and handy (and thus easy to hide), and don't need more monitors.
It's an updated version of my old childhood distro, I still like it even if I don't like systemd which it comes with. I'd rather use it than Fedora, which I'm mainly just using because it didn't have an up to date kernel on the netinstall image meaning I didn't have keyboard or trackpad support out of the box on my SL3. I've been really itching to replace it now that I've bitten the bullet and just invested the time and space into painfully downloading a full 4GB live installer.
​

Sweet. Looks like a cool board. Must be worth it if it's worth double the price now.

Made to order in I believe either Illinois or Kentucky? I know Raptor themselves are in Illinois. They (well, technically not Raptor Computing Systems but Raptor Engineering, which from what I understand has a sort of Fedora-Red Hat or Mozilla-Netscape kind of relationship) reverse-engineered every piece of firmware on the board that wasn't already open and made sure they were reflashable, and POWER9 is stout enough (~i7-8700K if it had 10MB L3/core and twice the threads) I think I can still get another 15 or 20 years out of it as a daily driver, until gallium transistors come along at least. Even just based on how old my Power Macs that I can still use now are, and the rise of smartphones about as powerful as they are as a significant force website designers have to consider.
​

Wow, does it even get 3-4 hours? How is the battery so bad? Can you change settings?

No, my G4's battery is just really good and gets ~5.5 hours. The answer is some combination of Intel, Ice Lake just kinda... sucks (shocker I'd say that), a battery that only keeps ~85% of its charge, and systemd bugs that make it impossible to mask services like bluetooth that I never use that just eat up battery life. Ice Lake is hot and not even all that great of a performer, with the fans kicking on with just an Xfce desktop and a Firefox window with six tabs open. And that's with various power saving measures like tlp already installed and running.​

 

[mectojic]

Yeah, I use modern MacOS for compatibility reasons, which is fine but they will never beat the early days of OS X.

Me too. I find that if I can do a task on PPC/early Intel, I do, since it's more fun, focused and rewarding.
Emails, writing documents, reading PDFs, some light web browsing, this can be done on older Macs. But when I need to do video editing or web apps, obviously a newer Mac/iPad is required. However I haven't gone beyond High Sierra yet, for any need.

I don't use PPC for the architecture, but certainly for the early UI and simplicity.
Some may think the Aqua UI was getting stale by 2013, but I think it was such a futuristic and refined design language that it didn't need to dramatically change. I didn't mind the direction it went with in Lion/ML on the whole, though. I just didn't use them because I lost Rosetta. From then on, I became sceptical of change, rather than receptive. I think the only modern feature I regularly utilise is Airdrop.

 

[VirtuallyInsane]

By itself, it wouldn't be that bad, but it stays working just long enough to be significantly inconvenient when it does shut off.​

That still sucks. It's annoying when things don't work the way they are intended to.

They're small and handy (and thus easy to hide), and don't need more monitors.
It's an updated version of my old childhood distro, I still like it even if I don't like systemd which it comes with. I'd rather use it than Fedora, which I'm mainly just using because it didn't have an up to date kernel on the netinstall image meaning I didn't have keyboard or trackpad support out of the box on my SL3. I've been really itching to replace it now that I've bitten the bullet and just invested the time and space into painfully downloading a full 4GB live installer.​

Yeah, definitely. I think that the 12-inch iBook/Powerbooks are great to use. I love the keyboards on the older models.

Ah, I see. I know about Fedora, vaguely. I have never tried Linux, but I'd like to at some point. On a slightly older system, well about ten years. It's annoying about your Surface. You'd expect it to be a better product than what it is.

Made to order in I believe either Illinois or Kentucky? I know Raptor themselves are in Illinois. They (well, technically not Raptor Computing Systems but Raptor Engineering, which from what I understand has a sort of Fedora-Red Hat or Mozilla-Netscape kind of relationship) reverse-engineered every piece of firmware on the board that wasn't already open and made sure they were reflashable, and POWER9 is stout enough (~i7-8700K if it had 10MB L3/core and twice the threads) I think I can still get another 15 or 20 years out of it as a daily driver, until gallium transistors come along at least. Even just based on how old my Power Macs that I can still use now are, and the rise of smartphones about as powerful as they are as a significant force website designers have to consider.​

15-20 years is a long time. I usually get about 5-10 years out of my stuff, if I keep it good and the operating systems are still on the go and I haven't filled the SSD/Harddrive with crap. It's good also that the boards have the power to last longer, too. The one downside about it all is web pages, especially on PPC. Some of them take a long time to load, even on good browsers and content blockers. What will the internet be like in another 15-20 years from now?

Will we still be using laptops and notebooks in the same way then?

No, my G4's battery is just really good and gets ~5.5 hours. The answer is some combination of Intel, Ice Lake just kinda... sucks (shocker I'd say that), a battery that only keeps ~85% of its charge, and systemd bugs that make it impossible to mask services like bluetooth that I never use that just eat up battery life. Ice Lake is hot and not even all that great of a performer, with the fans kicking on with just an Xfce desktop and a Firefox window with six tabs open. And that's with various power saving measures like tlp already installed and running.​

Ah, lucky you. My iBook G4 (the one still working, lol) gets about 2-3 hours of use on a full charge.

I have an AMD Ryzen Lenovo gaming laptop, and even at its hottest, it doesn't get that hot even when I'm playing big games. The fact that you can't turn things off that are hidden is annoying and wow 6 tabs and the fans kick in? No way. That would drive me mad. My Macbook Pro from 2007 doesn't even do that.

Me too. I find that if I can do a task on PPC/early Intel, I do, since it's more fun, focused and rewarding.
Emails, writing documents, reading PDFs, some light web browsing, this can be done on older Macs. But when I need to do video editing or web apps, obviously a newer Mac/iPad is required. However I haven't gone beyond High Sierra yet, for any need.

Yes, I agree. I notice when I write on an older machine, I am a lot more focused. Especially on PPC devices/early Intel MBP. Yeah, same here. Music Production is all on my iMac running Mojave, and so is my video editing. It handles things very well with 36GB RAM and a TB drive. If I need more space, I can store the files on iCloud/Localhost server.

I don't use PPC for the architecture, but certainly for the early UI and simplicity.
Some may think the Aqua UI was getting stale by 2013, but I think it was such a futuristic and refined design language that it didn't need to dramatically change. I didn't mind the direction it went with in Lion/ML on the whole, though. I just didn't use them because I lost Rosetta. From then on, I became sceptical of change, rather than receptive. I think the only modern feature I regularly utilise is Airdrop.

Yes, I like the simplicity myself and it not annoying me every five seconds about logging into iCloud or 2FA. I have Lion/SL dual booted on my 2008 Macbook and it runs well. I have SL/Yosemite dual booted on my 09 MBP and I prefer using SL to Yosemite on that, but I need Yosemite for Netflix, Discord etc. If I want to do actual tasks without distractions, I boot SL instead on it though.

But yeah, I find that the newer versions of MacOS have too many useless features that I barely use from about Cataline onwards. I found my old laptop (MBP 2016) and it was running Catalina, so I deleted the drive (backed it up of course) and then ran Mojave on it. I think it runs better on Mojave than Catalina. I wanted to put Sierra on it, but the Sierra USB didn't work, so Mojave it was. It's just sitting there as a backup.

 

[barracuda156]

Once Apple returns to POWER and makes a MacBook Pro with Power9+ running in Big-endian mode, I will.

 

[r34per]

I have a raptor blackbird board with the 4core in my daily pc dual booting void linux and fedora. While it's miles ahead of any ppc mac in terms of daily use, it's not quite there yet that I would recommend it to someone who isn't modestly comfortable in the linux CLI or compiling source code. Wine won't work on it, and you're basically stuck with AMD gpu's if you need hardware acceleration. I still keep my old wintel pc around for games and certain software that only runs on windows.

Firefox jit doesn't work on the latest version, so js-heavy webpages can really bog the cpu down. In fact the only reason I even use my void linux partition is because it has a build of firefox with jit while fedora doesn't. Beyond that though, performance is fine for day to day things. I have very rarely not found a piece of software I needed in the repos, and those that weren't usually compile fine.

RCS is in a weird spot though. They have no plans of making a power10 based board(with good reasons to be fair, and I don't blame them), and power11 is probably still a few years away. Power9 came out in 2017, and is already 5 years old. As it stands right now there isn't a very clear upgrade path, and while POWER9 still has lots of life left in it, that can make people hesitant to buy into the ecosystem.

 

[barracuda156]

I have a raptor blackbird board with the 4core in my daily pc dual booting void linux and fedora. While it's miles ahead of any ppc mac in terms of daily use, it's not quite there yet that I would recommend it to someone who isn't modestly comfortable in the linux CLI or compiling source code. Wine won't work on it, and you're basically stuck with AMD gpu's if you need hardware acceleration. I still keep my old wintel pc around for games and certain software that only runs on windows.

Firefox jit doesn't work on the latest version, so js-heavy webpages can really bog the cpu down. In fact the only reason I even use my void linux partition is because it has a build of firefox with jit while fedora doesn't. Beyond that though, performance is fine for day to day things. I have very rarely not found a piece of software I needed in the repos, and those that weren't usually compile fine.

RCS is in a weird spot though. They have no plans of making a power10 based board(with good reasons to be fair, and I don't blame them), and power11 is probably still a few years away. Power9 came out in 2017, and is already 5 years old. As it stands right now there isn't a very clear upgrade path, and while POWER9 still has lots of life left in it, that can make people hesitant to buy into the ecosystem.

Have you tried FreeBSD on it?

 

[lepidotós]

As it stands right now there isn't a very clear upgrade path, and while POWER9 still has lots of life left in it, that can make people hesitant to buy into the ecosystem.

That's true, but the target audience is probably still gonna be happy with an upgrade path from the eleven year old Opteron 6100 KCMAs and ThinkPads. And hey, there's people on Ryzen 3000 and older, or Skylake and older. My newest desktop PC uses an i5-6600K, so that's still a nice bump up and plenty of speed for all but the most demanding tasks. I feel like Raptor should look into undervolts/overclocking to see how far they can push the 4 and 8 cores, as since they have bigger cache per core, I feel like they're the ideal CPUs for desktop and many workstation users.​

 

[barracuda156]

That's true, but the target audience is probably still gonna be happy with an upgrade path from the eleven year old Opteron 6100 KCMAs and ThinkPads. And hey, there's people on Ryzen 3000 and older, or Skylake and older. My newest desktop PC uses an i5-6600K, so that's still a nice bump up and plenty of speed for all but the most demanding tasks. I feel like Raptor should look into undervolts/overclocking to see how far they can push the 4 and 8 cores, as since they have bigger cache per core, I feel like they're the ideal CPUs for desktop and many workstation users.​

What really prevents Power CPUs from taking on is a lack of laptops. (Perhaps also a part of the reason for other RISC CPUs failures.)

 

[ervus]

Does anyone here still use ONLY PowerPC products as their main daily drivers, in 2023?

I do. My main computer is an upgraded 12" PowerBook. I like to own my tools (not the other way around).

At work I'm required to use a computer straight out of 1976. It has an intel CPU, winDOS software from microsoft, and I constantly have to do the vulcan ctrl-alt-del finger contortion. But that's not my problem to solve. When it doesn't facilitate my work I pull the plug (the off switch is only a vote now, but I can still control the plug), call "IT" and get some coffee.

But I'm weird. I don't do my personal computing with my thumbs, and I don't do business computing in the fog.