[lubuntu-users] dropping i386/PPC (was: Re: [lubuntu-devel] State of PPC)

[Fritz Hudnut]

On Wed, Nov 16, 2016 at 2:58 PM, Walter Lapchynski <wxl at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> As far as my perspective is concerned, I'm perfectly happy with dropping
> PPC. It makes me sad. PPC brought me to the Lubuntu community. However, it
> becomes increasingly harder to make PPC users happy. The successes that we
> have had in recent times are largely by accident. Neither Lubuntu nor
> Ubuntu MATE have the resources to support PPC. It does sound like Ubuntu
> Server will be dropping PPC. I think it only makes sense for us to follow
> suit.
>
> Apparently, there are plans in place to evaluate the health of the PPC
> port during the Z cycle and so a decision on removing PPC from the archives
> will likely come in 6 months time. Even then, it sounds like that's going
> to be a temporary delay to PPC's inevitable removal.
>

@et al:

I also am sad about the "demise" or withering of the PPC port, both from
Debian and Lubuntu . . . and from the slated decision by Firefox to drop
support for PPC . . . .  As I've posted before, there seemed to be a vortex
of neglect that precipitated this "event" . . . the devs seem to be looking
only at one "screen" (so to speak) and end users such as myself try to wade
through trying to figure out if problems are the inevitable "pilot error"
or . . . e.g., due to "big endian" issues that nobody is bothering to fix .
. . .  I find it also a problem that the notice for the video conference
went out to Lu users list only a couple days ahead, and that no one had
posted anything about it on the Apple User sub-forum, etc.

As an example of the difficulties experienced by users of the PPC systems,
I recently went through a bug report cycle on LP on an issue with U-MATE
possibly 14.04 on my Powermac relating to failure of the optical drive to
mount disks . . . it took many months to get passed the "Are you sure this
problem is happening, to you?"  line taken by the devs . . . even after the
multiple times I posted the data that when I simply logged out of MATE
session and into an XFCE session the problem went away . . . months went by
with no response or effort . . . finally I believe we had "exceeded the
time limits" on the bug report . . . and there were some further posts on
whether the problem was "real" . . . .  And, then suddenly, as the bug was
being closed, a minor miracle after running an update/upgrade . . . the
problem had been silently "solved" . . . & MATE was able to mount DVDs in
my Powermac.  Nobody ever posted to the bug saying, "hey we found the
problem . . . this is what we did" . . . the problem persisted as
"unresolved" and marked as "not verifiable"--then gone, but months later.

Possibly those newer to the PPC experience would have long ago moved on to
something else . . . thus supporting Martin's report of "less than .01
percent of downloads are of PPC systems."  The point is that historically
there has been finger pointing from devs that "the responsibility is with
PPC users" . . . and PPC users (I'm gathering evidence from the Ubuntu
apple sub-forum) find that "nobody is listening" . . . and in that sense,
both are right . . . .

But, still, as was mentioned by "slangasek" . . . in the video conference,
and myself in the past, here and on the sub-forum, "the AmigaOne guys are
breathing new life into PPC" . . . possibly they could run 64 bit, I don't
know on that . . . point being that they will, if not now, be looking for a
system to run on their computers . . . and it could be Ubuntu-based . . .
if it is there.  Otherwise, people just shop on to what works . . . .

Seems like the death knell would be the dropping of PPC by FF, there are
other choices, on my PPC units Qupzilla and those other browsers mentioned
don't run too well, also they are not as full featured as FF . . . my
personal PPC units are falling behind the technological curve for basic
stuff like flipping around the web, but otherwise for simple word
processing they are still running . . . Xenial . . . which for them might
be enough; but at a certain point if FF stops providing upgrades . . . will
mean the potential usefulness is diminished, even if the kernels would be
maintained--but the machines are in fact still running quite fine . . . .

So, even though it seems like there might be other OSs to choose from for
PPC, someone mentioned Arch, which seems to be a new learning curve for
those of us who started with Debian/Ubuntu/mintPPC options, and someone
mentioned "Puppy" for low spec machines . . . for someone who found their
way to linux as a way to keep what were perfectly good machines that Apple
had "unsupported" . . . it is indeed "sad" to see the benign neglect given
to PPC ports and OS's in the last few years . . . .

Sayonara, linux on PPC . . .

F
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/lubuntu-users/attachments/20161118/364c75e5/attachment-0001.html>