Hi Konstantinos, Konstantinos Margaritis wrote:
I do not disagree on those points, but it's all a matter of resources. We do not have the resources of testing on all those platforms, and I personally know of no Linux powerpc developer that works on a non- altivec system -except for embedded which is a different case.
define "developer" - I am not a debian developer, but I am definitely an open-source developer and take proudly care of supporting most architectures I can and have access to. All the GNUstep stuff I have access to, maintain or even write myself. That goes from FTP applications up to 2D FFTs on Images, convolutions, filters, etc.
Actually, I use my iBook mostly for that - development and testing. To Browse the web I use x86 or amd64 nowadays. It is a fact that the PPC port is mostly about "old macs" so the age of our HW is older for most! However I do run debian also on older x86 hardware without the newest SSE2/SSE3 stuff and it runs. I even have NetBSD on an original Pentium system and it does work. Apparently most software still copes better with various x86 differences than e.g. G3 vs G4.
Currently however, I consider my iBook fully functional - except for the glitch with the newer kernels breaking ATI xorg, but that is a different question from here.
I go further: all the people I know that use PPC use it on older Mac or Amiga boards. Not cool IBM machines. There is a lot of different usage... from embedded to datacenters!
Riccardo