PowerPC Macs, Linux and real life

If you are looking for a better Operating System, Linux is good for you. Linux can offer far more things than Microsoft Windows, and for free. A wide variety of apps are available to download and install, and in addition to that, you can also download the code of an application, enhance it and compile for yourself. Linux on x86 is a wonderful operating system.

In the other hand, Linux is not very friendly with PowerPC Macs. It seems like every distro release was rushed, untested and it lacks so many things that it is close to useless. Even compiling an application that should take not less than a minute, take ages on a PowerPC macs, IF you find the tools for compiling your application, which in PowerPC is getting harder and harder.

Some claim that Linux is right for you on a PowerPC mac, when actually it will bring you more headaches than benefits. Let me ask you this: Who would want a car that always breaks, even with the smallest task?  No one, of course. In real life, Linux on a PowerPC mac is not helpful at all, you will end up with a buggy operating system with an "up to date" web browser.

Compiling XMMS for Jaunty Jackalope iBook G3

Even playing an MP3 audio file can make Linux crash on you. I remember I had Amarok player, but I didn't like it because it always crashed and was/is a lame audio player. So I decided to install XMMS, but surprise surprise, XMMS had become a command line audio player. It wasn't bad it was just pointless. So I had to uninstall it and download the source code of XMMS to compile it. It took 3 hours to compile it, 4 if we add the time I spent finding and downloading the development tools required to compile an application. Yeah, it took me 4 hours just to get a decent audio player. I didn't care that much because I really loved how open and flexible XMMS was. I even compiled an AAC extension for XMMS, you know for my HD music.

Nevertheless, you shouldn't have to do all sort of things just to get one task done. There's a person who always say that "point and click" people are ignorant. I doubt he ever worked developing an application, or even make the simplest C++ program. Why? Well, we developers always want to make complex tasks easier for others. Why do you think Linux is so user friendly on x86? Because as developers we want you to have a great experience, we want you to succeed, we want you to save you time and money by creating an stable and easy to use/setup application. We don't want you to change 20 lines of code for a program to work. We want to just sit, relax and do what you need.

I just hope one day we get an optimized and dedicated PowerPC Linux Distro.