Re: Is a Raptor Blackbird (or other Power machine) a good general-purpose desktop?

[Lionel Élie Mamane <lionel@mamane.lu>]

On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 03:10:55PM +0100, Private Power9 Hardware Donation wrote:
> On Tue, 2023-03-21 at 00:16 +0100, Lionel Élie Mamane wrote:

>> Would a Power-based machine in general, and a Raptor Blackbird in
>> particular, be a good freedom-respecting computer to run a Debian
>> desktop?

> I personally gave up my similar idea of using my Raptor Blackbird
> Power9 as full desktop replacement (...)

> A quite comprehensive overview over working software was published
> by the maintainer of void linux

> https://repo.voidlinux-ppc.org/stats.html

I find that list quite encouraging. The only red things I recognise
and could use (and do use...) are:

 * signal - seems to really be a porting difficulty... barely supports
   arm64, and only due to Apple MacOS X switching to it...

 * texlive-bin - ??? TeX is really really very portable, so I expect
   this is distro-specific problem; in Debian texlive-binaries is
   up-to-date on long list of architectures including ppc64el and
   ppc64

 * xfsdump - distro-specific problem? Seems OK on Debian on long list
   of architectures, including ppc64el and ppc64.

Other stuff i:

 * heavily non-free software... faaar out of my radar, like opera,
   skype (that still exists even???), slack, steam, zoom

 * x86 specific stuff: lilo, seabios, tp_smapi, vbetool, wine, syslinux

 * things that are by nature attached to low-level system stuff, and
   need to be ported to each arch individually: virtualbox, xen
   (that's a loss, but I knew about that and the plan is to switch to
    kvm)