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Apple moving away from PPC to x86 effectively ended any remnants of PPC in the consumer market. All that's left now is the server grade POWER, its really hard
by filereaper 9y ago
Apple moving away from PPC to x86 effectively ended any remnants of PPC in the consumer market.
All that's left now is the server grade POWER, its really hard now for anyone to get access to PPC without getting an expensive POWER setup.
You can see that in the ecosystem as well, ppcel builds exist from Ubuntu, but I don't think their performance is as well tuned as the x86 ones. This is another takeaway, if you don't have hardware in the consumer market, your ecosystem will die out. Nobody will know you.
- Decade 9y agoI don’t think either Linux or MacOS X was ever tuned well for PPC, even when consumer PPC hardware was available. MacOS X feels nice once you get above version 10.2 and above 1.5 GHz, but it never felt as snappy as MacOS 9 on 300 MHz. I always thought it was suspicious how snappy MacOS X was on the first Intel Macs, considering that NeXTstep was on x86 but never on PPC. Linux on PPC always felt sluggish. It felt sluggish back when Power Macs were contemporary.
- krylon 9y ago> it never felt as snappy as MacOS 9 on 300 MHz To be fair, I have never seen Windows XP on a 2 GHz Pentium 4 feel as snappy as Windows 95 on a Pentium 133.
- angry_octet 9y agoThe graphics implementation was always inferior, just a basic framebuffer, which could never compare to the hand tuned assembler speed of Aqua. That made everything feel slower, but Linux was as fast for everything else.
- Decade 9y agoNo, even starting text-processing commands in the terminal was oddly slow. Once the programs were running, they seemed fine.