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Description
7.04 dropped PowerPC as a supported architecture after a decision by the technical board. It is now only a community supported port. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCReview for more info.
There are still lots of PowerPC users and there is an active section on the forums. However the going is a bit tough. Gutsy required quite a few work arounds to boot the install CD, and there are plenty of long standing PowerPC specific bugs.
It would be great for powerpc to be supported again. Perhaps canonical could hire a PowerPC dev, or a ports dev.
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stream303 wrote on the 12 Mar 08 at 01:26
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The wording on the main Ubuntu download page makes it appear that Ubuntu is actively discouraging PPC use, if you read between the lines.
Yes, there is a note at the very bottom of the page, which many newcomers miss, and give the impression that dapper is the only version that has support.
If we want to get into semantics, the word "official" should be included so as not to imply that 6.06x is the only version worthy of using. The truth is that as of now, ALL versions of Ubuntu PPC are supported, just not officially.
It might be helpful to mention the use of the PPC-forums in that note at the very bottom of the page, because it is likely that newcomers will have to turn to it for help and find the secret to being able to download dapper+ versions that work well on their machine.
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Auzy wrote on the 13 Mar 08 at 07:47
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The majority of your PPC crowd is probably your OSX users. As Apple no longer uses PPC, theres not much of a crowd anymore probably who would use it.
so +0. I'd personally prefer to see the resources poured into Intel at the moment. If PPC demand grows again, the PPC port can always get officially supported again.
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stream303 wrote on the 13 Mar 08 at 10:32
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My comment is not about restoring official support - it is about the total lack of mentioning community-support on the download page for those who need dapper+ versions to work properly on their hardware. Ubuntu has passed the torch to us, but fails to notify users on the download page that community support exists.
Case in point - I just tried the "officially supported" 6.06.1 release on my G5 iMac. There is no thermal support, fans scream, and the keyboard and mouse aren't detected. If I were a new user, I may have been tempted to just stop right there and not even peruse the community-supported forum to find out that later versions work just fine. I'm familiar with these problems in Dapper on my box, but wanted to emulate what a new user would go through if they followed "official" directions. What I have just done is waste my time, and waste valuable bandwidth from a mirror.
As to your suggestion that "there's not much of a crowd anymore probably who would use it", linux as a whole is what percentage of users compared to windows? Single digits? Then what's the point of using Linux, no less Ubuntu? We are on a slippery slope if the *only* thing we look at are statistics.
There is nothing wrong with the "majority of your crowd is probably your OSX users." In the spirit of Ubuntu, I welcome them with open-arms rather than with indignation. Many of them are desperately searching for a way to bring their machines up to date, or to use non-proprietary OS.
Sure, we could all jump-ship and use another distro - and that might even be a relief to Ubuntu, but then many of us subscribe to the Ubuntu spirit, which is fostered by community support. If that isn't valued, then Ubuntu is nothing more than a marketing buzzword.
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 saivann (Moderator) wrote on the 11 Apr 08 at 22:21
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-1 for the initial described idea, I believe that it was a great idea to abandon PPC as a "officially supported" architecture since the pourcentage of user was very low. Supporting officially all PPC releases needs a lot of work and resources that most of people will never use, so I believe that it's not worth, also considering that PPC is not used by Apple anymore.
The current user-contributed PPC ISO sounds really the better solution to me, also since having two ISOs for Macs (Intel & PPC) would have been very confusing. Perhaps that it can be more evident that this port exist on official ubuntu pages, but people that knows what PPC means are probably able to find easily the PPC ports IMO.
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ubuntubrian wrote on the 24 Apr 08 at 22:47
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I support this, not just because I use a TiBook G4 PPC but because if we don't keep support we will very probably end up with one supported arch and that will be which of Intel and AMD survives. No Sparc or other archs. It reminds me of my brother whose wife is a graphic layout person. She had to use Quark because the newspaper she was contracting to used it and Macs. She wasn't used to the different interface even on her PC and my brother exclaimed, "Why can't Apple just make computers like Dell or HP and quit making an OS? Everything would be so much more efficient if everyone used WINDOZE!"
Agggghhhh!!!!!!!
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gphaze wrote on the 13 Jun 08 at 10:28
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I am new to Ubuntu and to Linux; Ubuntu is my first Linux installation, and I'm quite impressed with the effort, and happy to be part of the Ubuntu-using world.
My reasons for trying Ubuntu and Linux are that 1. I want to expand options available to me in terms of OS and Applications I can use, 2. I want to escape what I consider to be the exploitative model of commercial software, and 3. I want to continue to use my PPC hardware as long as it will run.
With regard to #3, anyone familiar with Apple hardware knows that it tends to last; often FAR after it's considered current.
Given today's climate of resource depletion and economic recession, many of us are not eager, willing or able to constantly upgrade our hardware/software every 6 months, as industry might want us to. For one thing, it's very expensive to do this. For another, I personally do not believe that we gain anything as a culture by declaring constant, 24/7, nonstop obsolescence of things in favor of the next, faster thing, which can only hold the "fastest" title for 6 months at most.
The PPC hardware that I have is plenty fast, tho it never has been "the fastest," even when I bought it; there were FAR faster Macs available at the time.
Yet it spends more time waiting on me than I on it, and is more than capable of doing all of the work I use it for: 2D design and illustration, 3D illustration and animation, and Video, all widely recognized as demanding tasks for any computer.
So I guess I'm making the case that continuing PPC support is in-line with the "Green" Philosophy of extending the useful life of what has already been manufactured, in addition to withdrawing a certain amount of support from the exploitative commercial software model, which I'd say we'd all agree is far less than ideal.
Thank you for your wonderful efforts in bringing Ubuntu to the PPC platform.
gphze
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Auzy wrote on the 13 Jun 08 at 10:51
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A lot of Apple's PPC hardware had terrible reliability issues on a lot of their hardware (mainly the iMacs), and apple's service fees to repair them in most cases is more then the cost of a new computer.
And seeing as OSX has GCC & Fink available, there isn't much of a market.
Saivann has the right ideas.. Everyone wins.
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