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This is incredibly exciting. Slimbook has made some excellent hardware in the past, with terrific software support. They're much closer to being the Macbooks o

This is incredibly exciting. Slimbook has made some excellent hardware in the past, with terrific software support. They're much closer to being the Macbooks of the Linux world than either Purism's or System76's offerings are.

Aperocky 7y ago
The only problem is are PowerPC/Linux up to task? Correct if I'm wrong but from what I know the entire linux ecosystem is geared toward X86/64 and if you're on other architecture the selection of software that works shrinks substantially. While we could just compile everything, there's still the problem of untested architecture integration, bugs that doesn't happen in X86 might happen in PowerPC/ARM and it's not a trivial issue to debug a compiler/bimodal action for instruction sets.
- zeta0134 7y ago
  You would think this, but it's preeeetty amazing how much of the Linux world works on an ARM-based Raspberry Pi. It's mostly a matter of finding the source and doing a proper cross-compile, but it's kinda incredible how much work the community has put into making the little board usable. The later models and their substantial bump in available RAM have made desktop computing plausible: I can run Blender to produce a 3D model, switch to Utilimaker Cura to slice it, then run Pronsole and send the .gcode out to the printer, all on the same device! It's not particularly fast, but it's usable at least, and the driver support an OpenGL in particular have come a long, long way. If a $35 (okay, $55 for the ones with 4 GB RAM) computer running an older down-clocked ARM can do this? I have little doubt that a POWER architecture could theoretically do it just as well, if not better since it should presumably be a much faster chip. I think it's mostly going to come down to support from both the vendor and the community, but I wouldn't write it off entirely.
  - brirec 7y ago
    > I have little doubt that a POWER architecture could theoretically do it just as well, if not better since it should presumably be a much faster chip. I think it's mostly going to come down to support from both the vendor and the community, but I wouldn't write it off entirely. I actually think it'll come down to the validity of that first sentence I quoted. A Pi 4 definitely has relatively decent specs for a small server or low end laptop. If this isn't a Power9 (aka the series that the G5 and the latest Power arch chips are a part of) then all this has going for it is the openness of it. Is it more open than a Pi 4? If they release a successor to the Compute Module 3+ with better specs and someone builds a laptop chassis around it, is there any reason I shouldn't just buy that?
    - FrankBooth 7y ago
      The G5 (PowerPC 970) was based on POWER4.
      - kjs3 7y ago
        And a POWER9 is has quite a bit more horsepower than a Pi.
  - city41 7y ago
    Are you saying the end user should do the cross compile, or the package maintainer? I feel like for arm it's mostly been package maintainers who've been increasing the available software. For PowerPC, if the user needs to compile from source that is a big reason to avoid PPC IMO. A bit of a chicken and egg situation.
    - zeta0134 7y ago
      For the Pi in particular it's been a mix of both, I think. Its sheer popularity means that there's less pressure on the package maintainers to ship working builds; for example, you can technically "apt-get install cura" but it won't run, it crashes during initialization for unclear reasons. I'm running an AppImage of it put together by a community member. It's both exciting that this is even possible, and frustrating that it took so much research and tinkering. I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted, because this is a really legit angle to argue. Philosophies aside, I think the out of box experience is critical to adoption of a device like this, and it's a big risk for Slimbook to take when switching to a much less popular architecture. For the Pi it was acceptable because it was sold as a development board for education, so "batteries not included" is a feature. For a device poised as a workstation, I'm not sure how well the frustrations of early adoption will go. It's exciting that Slimbook is willing to take that risk, but it'll be up to the community to determine whether the devices (and their vendor support) are worth the cost of maintaining the packages in the long run. EDIT: For clarity, the out of box experience on the Pi here refers to Raspian, which is a debian-based image put together by the vendor. There are lots of other distributions that can run on it, and some of them might have better luck with the edge cases I hit.
- laumars 7y ago
  > Correct if I'm wrong but from what I know the entire linux ecosystem is geared toward X86/64 That's not been my observation. I mean sure, AMD64 tends to be the primary platform for most desktop Linux users but Linux has been ported to so many different platforms and used in a lot more exotic hardware outside of the desktop domain. Also this has reminded me one of the game servers myself and some friends on IRC used regularly was an old PowerPC desktop running Linux. Though that was a little while ago now.
  - ajdlinux 7y ago
    Thanks to Android, there's probably an order of magnitude more ARM Linux kernels running out there than AMD64 Linux kernels.
    - laumars 7y ago
      I doubt that. At least not "an order of magnitude more". Bare in mind AMD64 is used heavily in servers where Linux also dominates. Even in cloud providers, most of their services will be Linux under the hood.
      - ajdlinux 7y ago
        As someone who works for a server manufacturer I very much know how dominant both AMD64 and Linux are. But there's literally billions of Android phones out there.
        laumars 7y ago
        The world population is "only" 7 billion so also doubt there's "literally billions" of Android phones out there once you discount iPhone users, non-smart phone users (eg many elderly), young kids, and people too poor to own a phone (homeless, people in developing countries, etc). You might get more favourable figures if you also count old and unused Android handsets but then you'd have to do the same for Linux servers as well -- and Linux servers have been around a lot longer than Android phones have. AWS alone had 1.3 million active servers in 2016 alone - most of which would have ran Linux. AWS has grown massively since then (averaging at around 40% year on year) so that figure has certainly raised significantly since then. Plus AWS might be the largest player in town but it's not the only one, so you'd have to include GCP, Azure, Oracle, OVH, Digital Ocean, etc. Not to mention all the literally thousands of other hosting providers out there. Then you have on-prem gear in schools, offices, shops, home labs, etc....and we've no way of estimating all the deprecated instances over the last 2 decades (longer to be frank, but lets round down for simplicities sake). Where as Android is 11 years old and took a little while to gain momentum...? Even if you only talk about tech in active use, people only need 1 phone (or maybe 2 if you have a separate work and personal phone). That one phone isn't automatically an Android and, as mentioned in my opening paragraph, a great many people don't even have phones to begin with. But lets just focus on those who do...each of those people will interact with more than one service. You'd interact with point of sale systems which would need a server backend. You'd interact either hundreds of online endpoints a day just browsing the web; and many of those endpoints would have a multitude of servers backing them. Not to mention online endpoints for games, mobile apps, etc. People's daily lives revolve around 1 or 2 phones but require so many more servers for all of that connectivity to work. So I just don't see how Linux phones outnumber Linux servers by an order of magnitude. I think your estimations there are way off. Also, being someone who "works for a server manufacturer" doesn't give your opinion here any more credibility. More than 90% of the people on here (myself included) could make similar arguments for authority. In fact I'd be more surprised if I was chatting someone who hadn't any professional experience in either servers nor mobile phones.
- ajdlinux 7y ago
  (disclosure: I'm a PowerPC kernel developer at IBM) The PPC64LE Linux ecosystem is doing quite well, due in large part to the amount of effort that distributions (Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian, SuSE) as well as IBM and its partners have been putting in to making sure Linux on Power is a competitive and fully supported server platform. The focus has been on server software more than desktop software, the desktop ecosystem works well enough that most Raptor Talos II owners are happy but there are of course still a few gaps. In the case of this notebook, they're using an older NXP QorIQ chip rather than a POWER8 or a POWER9, so things will be a little trickier for them, but at least when it comes to common open source software of the kind shipped in Linux distros, it's not at all insurmountable.
- kakwa_ 7y ago
  That's not accurate. For years I have run Linux (Debian and Gentoo mostly) on various architectures, including on an old PowerBook Pismo (G3) and an IBM Power 5, and I have rarely encountered architecture related limitations. True, you will encounter issues (proprietary software, arch specific software (ex: chromium)), but these are not the norm. Wet fingering it, I would say at least 95% of packages worked without any issue, and this includes big things like Firefox, Libreoffice, OpenJDK, Apache... I was a bit sad when Debian dropped support for ppc32.
kjs3 7y ago
Why is it "incredibly exciting"? Near as I can tell from the web site, it's a relatively very slow processor (~1GHz) with little memory (max 2Gb?). There are other "Open Platform" options with similar limitations (Longsoon).
- katmannthree 7y ago
  It's exciting because having viable diversity in computer architectures is valuable. Programming* for different architectures forces one to carefully consider their design choices, and provides an incredibly powerful incentive to write high quality portable code. *This assumes that you can take the performance hit of not using platform-specific hardware / inline assembly. As a related example, every few months I cycle between Windows, MacOS, Linux, and a handful of BSDs for my personal computing needs. Doing so has forced me to consider carefully what software I use, how I have my systems / environments set up, and which libraries are a good idea to use in development and which are not. I am a better linux developer for having an appreciation of freebsd's jails and macos's attention to design, a better openbsd user for having dealt with securing linux and windows boxes, etc.
  - kjs3 7y ago
    It's not a matter of 'viable'. It's a fund raising exercise. You don't need a PPC box to try out "Windows, MacOS, Linux, and a handful of BSDs". If you need to play with slower, poorer supported hardware architectures, there are vast numbers of options, many of which don't require placing speculative bets on marginally performing hardware. I don't, per se, disagree with anything you said, but nothing you said needs a seriously sub-par laptop to achieve.
    - katmannthree 7y ago
      >It's not a matter of 'viable'. It's a fund raising exercise. As it stands there are very few usable PPC laptops, just like there are relatively few usable ARM laptops (although that is improving quite rapidly). The development of a modern PPC laptop would go pretty far towards making PPC a viable general purpose computing architecture, albeit one likely always reserved for enthusiasts. >You don't need a PPC box to try out "Windows, MacOS, Linux, and a handful of BSDs". I'm not saying that I need a PPC box to switch OS's, I'm saying that doing things on a different architecture is a good exercise and helps you learn things that can be improved your current one / shows you things that it does well that you should appreciate. It is a good exercise if you want to have a greater understanding and perspective on things you might ordinarily ignore. The specs of their proposed laptop are indeed fairly weak, and last I checked PPC support was not particularly great in linux. There's also the issue of hardware bugs on a complex new system. I completely understand people not being excited by this device, and even wondering why anybody would care. I care because it's different, and because I've seen significant value for myself in sometimes doing ordinary things differently.

Aperocky 7y ago

The only problem is are PowerPC/Linux up to task? Correct if I'm wrong but from what I know the entire linux ecosystem is geared toward X86/64 and if you're on other architecture the selection of software that works shrinks substantially. While we could just compile everything, there's still the problem of untested architecture integration, bugs that doesn't happen in X86 might happen in PowerPC/ARM and it's not a trivial issue to debug a compiler/bimodal action for instruction sets.

zeta0134 7y ago
You would think this, but it's preeeetty amazing how much of the Linux world works on an ARM-based Raspberry Pi. It's mostly a matter of finding the source and doing a proper cross-compile, but it's kinda incredible how much work the community has put into making the little board usable. The later models and their substantial bump in available RAM have made desktop computing plausible: I can run Blender to produce a 3D model, switch to Utilimaker Cura to slice it, then run Pronsole and send the .gcode out to the printer, all on the same device! It's not particularly fast, but it's usable at least, and the driver support an OpenGL in particular have come a long, long way. If a $35 (okay, $55 for the ones with 4 GB RAM) computer running an older down-clocked ARM can do this? I have little doubt that a POWER architecture could theoretically do it just as well, if not better since it should presumably be a much faster chip. I think it's mostly going to come down to support from both the vendor and the community, but I wouldn't write it off entirely.
- brirec 7y ago
  > I have little doubt that a POWER architecture could theoretically do it just as well, if not better since it should presumably be a much faster chip. I think it's mostly going to come down to support from both the vendor and the community, but I wouldn't write it off entirely. I actually think it'll come down to the validity of that first sentence I quoted. A Pi 4 definitely has relatively decent specs for a small server or low end laptop. If this isn't a Power9 (aka the series that the G5 and the latest Power arch chips are a part of) then all this has going for it is the openness of it. Is it more open than a Pi 4? If they release a successor to the Compute Module 3+ with better specs and someone builds a laptop chassis around it, is there any reason I shouldn't just buy that?
  - FrankBooth 7y ago
    The G5 (PowerPC 970) was based on POWER4.
    - kjs3 7y ago
      And a POWER9 is has quite a bit more horsepower than a Pi.
- city41 7y ago
  Are you saying the end user should do the cross compile, or the package maintainer? I feel like for arm it's mostly been package maintainers who've been increasing the available software. For PowerPC, if the user needs to compile from source that is a big reason to avoid PPC IMO. A bit of a chicken and egg situation.
  - zeta0134 7y ago
    For the Pi in particular it's been a mix of both, I think. Its sheer popularity means that there's less pressure on the package maintainers to ship working builds; for example, you can technically "apt-get install cura" but it won't run, it crashes during initialization for unclear reasons. I'm running an AppImage of it put together by a community member. It's both exciting that this is even possible, and frustrating that it took so much research and tinkering. I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted, because this is a really legit angle to argue. Philosophies aside, I think the out of box experience is critical to adoption of a device like this, and it's a big risk for Slimbook to take when switching to a much less popular architecture. For the Pi it was acceptable because it was sold as a development board for education, so "batteries not included" is a feature. For a device poised as a workstation, I'm not sure how well the frustrations of early adoption will go. It's exciting that Slimbook is willing to take that risk, but it'll be up to the community to determine whether the devices (and their vendor support) are worth the cost of maintaining the packages in the long run. EDIT: For clarity, the out of box experience on the Pi here refers to Raspian, which is a debian-based image put together by the vendor. There are lots of other distributions that can run on it, and some of them might have better luck with the edge cases I hit.
laumars 7y ago
> Correct if I'm wrong but from what I know the entire linux ecosystem is geared toward X86/64 That's not been my observation. I mean sure, AMD64 tends to be the primary platform for most desktop Linux users but Linux has been ported to so many different platforms and used in a lot more exotic hardware outside of the desktop domain. Also this has reminded me one of the game servers myself and some friends on IRC used regularly was an old PowerPC desktop running Linux. Though that was a little while ago now.
- ajdlinux 7y ago
  Thanks to Android, there's probably an order of magnitude more ARM Linux kernels running out there than AMD64 Linux kernels.
  - laumars 7y ago
    I doubt that. At least not "an order of magnitude more". Bare in mind AMD64 is used heavily in servers where Linux also dominates. Even in cloud providers, most of their services will be Linux under the hood.
    - ajdlinux 7y ago
      As someone who works for a server manufacturer I very much know how dominant both AMD64 and Linux are. But there's literally billions of Android phones out there.
      - laumars 7y ago
        The world population is "only" 7 billion so also doubt there's "literally billions" of Android phones out there once you discount iPhone users, non-smart phone users (eg many elderly), young kids, and people too poor to own a phone (homeless, people in developing countries, etc). You might get more favourable figures if you also count old and unused Android handsets but then you'd have to do the same for Linux servers as well -- and Linux servers have been around a lot longer than Android phones have. AWS alone had 1.3 million active servers in 2016 alone - most of which would have ran Linux. AWS has grown massively since then (averaging at around 40% year on year) so that figure has certainly raised significantly since then. Plus AWS might be the largest player in town but it's not the only one, so you'd have to include GCP, Azure, Oracle, OVH, Digital Ocean, etc. Not to mention all the literally thousands of other hosting providers out there. Then you have on-prem gear in schools, offices, shops, home labs, etc....and we've no way of estimating all the deprecated instances over the last 2 decades (longer to be frank, but lets round down for simplicities sake). Where as Android is 11 years old and took a little while to gain momentum...? Even if you only talk about tech in active use, people only need 1 phone (or maybe 2 if you have a separate work and personal phone). That one phone isn't automatically an Android and, as mentioned in my opening paragraph, a great many people don't even have phones to begin with. But lets just focus on those who do...each of those people will interact with more than one service. You'd interact with point of sale systems which would need a server backend. You'd interact either hundreds of online endpoints a day just browsing the web; and many of those endpoints would have a multitude of servers backing them. Not to mention online endpoints for games, mobile apps, etc. People's daily lives revolve around 1 or 2 phones but require so many more servers for all of that connectivity to work. So I just don't see how Linux phones outnumber Linux servers by an order of magnitude. I think your estimations there are way off. Also, being someone who "works for a server manufacturer" doesn't give your opinion here any more credibility. More than 90% of the people on here (myself included) could make similar arguments for authority. In fact I'd be more surprised if I was chatting someone who hadn't any professional experience in either servers nor mobile phones.
ajdlinux 7y ago
(disclosure: I'm a PowerPC kernel developer at IBM) The PPC64LE Linux ecosystem is doing quite well, due in large part to the amount of effort that distributions (Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian, SuSE) as well as IBM and its partners have been putting in to making sure Linux on Power is a competitive and fully supported server platform. The focus has been on server software more than desktop software, the desktop ecosystem works well enough that most Raptor Talos II owners are happy but there are of course still a few gaps. In the case of this notebook, they're using an older NXP QorIQ chip rather than a POWER8 or a POWER9, so things will be a little trickier for them, but at least when it comes to common open source software of the kind shipped in Linux distros, it's not at all insurmountable.
kakwa_ 7y ago
That's not accurate. For years I have run Linux (Debian and Gentoo mostly) on various architectures, including on an old PowerBook Pismo (G3) and an IBM Power 5, and I have rarely encountered architecture related limitations. True, you will encounter issues (proprietary software, arch specific software (ex: chromium)), but these are not the norm. Wet fingering it, I would say at least 95% of packages worked without any issue, and this includes big things like Firefox, Libreoffice, OpenJDK, Apache... I was a bit sad when Debian dropped support for ppc32.

kjs3 7y ago

Why is it "incredibly exciting"? Near as I can tell from the web site, it's a relatively very slow processor (~1GHz) with little memory (max 2Gb?). There are other "Open Platform" options with similar limitations (Longsoon).

katmannthree 7y ago
It's exciting because having viable diversity in computer architectures is valuable. Programming* for different architectures forces one to carefully consider their design choices, and provides an incredibly powerful incentive to write high quality portable code. *This assumes that you can take the performance hit of not using platform-specific hardware / inline assembly. As a related example, every few months I cycle between Windows, MacOS, Linux, and a handful of BSDs for my personal computing needs. Doing so has forced me to consider carefully what software I use, how I have my systems / environments set up, and which libraries are a good idea to use in development and which are not. I am a better linux developer for having an appreciation of freebsd's jails and macos's attention to design, a better openbsd user for having dealt with securing linux and windows boxes, etc.
- kjs3 7y ago
  It's not a matter of 'viable'. It's a fund raising exercise. You don't need a PPC box to try out "Windows, MacOS, Linux, and a handful of BSDs". If you need to play with slower, poorer supported hardware architectures, there are vast numbers of options, many of which don't require placing speculative bets on marginally performing hardware. I don't, per se, disagree with anything you said, but nothing you said needs a seriously sub-par laptop to achieve.
  - katmannthree 7y ago
    >It's not a matter of 'viable'. It's a fund raising exercise. As it stands there are very few usable PPC laptops, just like there are relatively few usable ARM laptops (although that is improving quite rapidly). The development of a modern PPC laptop would go pretty far towards making PPC a viable general purpose computing architecture, albeit one likely always reserved for enthusiasts. >You don't need a PPC box to try out "Windows, MacOS, Linux, and a handful of BSDs". I'm not saying that I need a PPC box to switch OS's, I'm saying that doing things on a different architecture is a good exercise and helps you learn things that can be improved your current one / shows you things that it does well that you should appreciate. It is a good exercise if you want to have a greater understanding and perspective on things you might ordinarily ignore. The specs of their proposed laptop are indeed fairly weak, and last I checked PPC support was not particularly great in linux. There's also the issue of hardware bugs on a complex new system. I completely understand people not being excited by this device, and even wondering why anybody would care. I care because it's different, and because I've seen significant value for myself in sometimes doing ordinary things differently.