Re: Is a Raptor Blackbird (or other Power machine) a good general-purpose desktop?
On 03/22/23 Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
I was looking at those projects in the past, but there are two problems:
1. They are way too expensive in terms of a performance to price ratio.
2. They are getting way too less support to make that extra investment
worthwhile.
you just neatly summarised the entire problem with the Power community
which was what inspired IBM to buy Redhat, in their very special way
they thought would solve the problem, bless 'em.
IMHO the Linux and/or open source community is missing out on providing
a competitive truly open system for its users and fans. I'm sure that
quite a few Linux and/or BSD people worldwide would buy a system with
free and open firmware, that is usable also for the average "power
user", meaning it would have to have some "unbrick/reset" capability for
misflashed firmware.
Would a live BE<->LE translation be so different? I'd rather have a
slower but working emulated LE system than a in theory faster BE system
with constant problems, like the one mentioned in Firefox.[5]
it will be absolute hell. like a *thousand* times or possibly even four
orders of magnitude slower.
Thanks for the explanation.
at which point you're genuinely better off just running qemu, even
on a Power system.
Yes, and that's not an option.
I regret that more and more developers are dropping support for those
alternative systems (Itanium was just dropped recently, or it was
discussed with leaning towards letting it go). This is also true for Big
Endian (PPC64BE).
On the other hand, I don't really see performant and cheap (for desktop
systems) systems on the market that aren't mainstream x86 (Intel and
AMD). Letting those now older alternatives go (that were mostly servers
to begin with) is probably a reasonable decision. But also sad...
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