[lubuntu-devel] State of PPC

Sat Jul 23 18:22:20 UTC 2016

@wxl

It would be sad but I understand if Lubuntu drops PPC. I believe 16.04 is a solid release for PPC. 

However I do believe that PPC will not completely die away. Like Fritz said Amiga is producing PPC hardware. Talos is considering producing a modern PPC system. I know these projects are small but they are out there. 

I one issue that those of us who have Apple PPC machines need to have is managed expectations. We are using old machines.  Most devs are working on AMD64 or ARM. This is not to say there all is lost. I know that the latest version of mesa 12.0 will have improvements of Radeon cards on PPC. I am running Gentoo on my PowerBook G4 and am tracking the mesa dev branch and can verify that I have working 3D acceleration. It is no means perfect but an improvement to what I had before. We need to be patient and be willing to do some work (i.e. Bug reporting and possible debugging ourselves to help upstream). Most do not have the hardware we have anymore. 

Also if Lu and Ubuntu-Mate decide to drop PPC this is not the end of the world. Debian and Gentoo still support PPC. They do not provide the same out of the box experience that Lu does and require work (esp Gentoo ) but they are out there. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jul 22, 2016, at 1:59 PM, Walter Lapchynski <wxl at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> 
> As you can see from the page on [PPC][1], the architecture has only community support from Ubuntu. Lubuntu has been trying as much as we can to support this, but the fact of the matter is that we have no developers on our team that can actually help with PPC bugs. 
> 
> The best you can hope for is that kernel developers (mostly, the issue is with drivers) might have some interest in fixing bugs. However, with only community support, that's unlikely. Most of the focus on PPC has been on the server side of things, where graphics just don't come into play.
> 
> My estimation of things is that Lubuntu on PPC mostly works, given a few caveats. All we need to do to release PPC is for all of the test cases to be completed successfully (regardless of whether or not there are bugs) and that marked on the QA tracker for the final testing of each milestone. If we don't have that done, Canonical will not let us release it.
> 
> PPC was what brought me originally to Lubuntu, so there's a special place for it in my heart. Having an OS make that old hardware work was very refreshing and introduced me to the real power and mission of Lubuntu.
> 
> However, I haven't ran PPC in a long, long time. That being said, I'm not of much help. We rely on the community of users to help out. When I don't see testing happening in the community, it makes me think that I'm not the only one that's neglected their PPC machines.
> 
> The reality of the situation is that there has been much talk throughout the Ubuntu community over the past few years about getting rid of i386. If that happens, I can't imagine that Canonical keeping PPC. With that in mind, I think the end of PPC Lubuntu is coming regardless of what our feelings are.
> 
> Furthermore, the Lubuntu Team is a small one and we often lack the capacity to do the things that we need to do. PPC is just stretching us even thinner, and into an area few of us really have the experience, knowledge, resources, or time to deal with.
> 
> That said, I'm inclined to suggest we start the process of removing PPC. We managed to release an LTS, which is the only version we even bother with PPC on. All we would need to do is ensure that all the point releases for Trusty and Xenial get published. That would put us out until about August 2018.
> 
> I think ultimately this will be better for the team. Most importantly, though, I think it will be better for the PPC users that I fear we can't really support and who we often leave with a frustrated experience.
> 
> What do you think?
> 
> [1]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPC 
> -- 
> @wxl | http://polka.bike
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