The question is very simple. "Does anyone using MacPorts actually depend
on the machines in question for their daily work". Not "could someone in
theory do so". Not "is there a way that you could do such a thing if you
really really wanted to". Does anyone *actually* do it.
My assumption is no, or possibly a very, very small number of people.
You can buy a much newer and better machine for a pittance on eBay or
the equivalent.
I will note, however, that there are a huge number of people who rely on
Sonoma on Intel or ARM as their daily work machine.
Perry
On 1/8/24 13:17, Sergey Fedorov wrote:
I do not particularly get the question. By “not using as a hobby
project” you mean using it commercially? Obviously, “the latest
software” condition restricts this to open-source.
I can name at least a few areas where macOS PowerPC /can be/ used
either commercially or with the latest software but rather for
not-too-demanding academic applications. Obviously, even the best
machines from 2005 cannot compete speed-wise with the modern ones, so
if a commercial application is sensitive to processing speed (or
portability), PPC is not a reasonable option.
There is nothing preventing one from using a PowerMac today for print
media design and prepress, commercially. But software won’t be the latest.
There is nothing preventing from using a PowerMac for something like
econometric models in R. Perhaps not a very commercial stuff, but not
a hobby project either. Everything I did for Bayesian modelling on an
Intel Mac I can do on a PowerPC.
What is the real stopper is portability. If someone would give me a
PowerBook with G5 quad or at least dual cpu, I could use it as the
to-go machine.
Single G4 – no, thanks, that is only good for a hobby project.
On Mon, Jan 8, 2024 at 11:45 PM Nicklas Larsson via macports-dev
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi all!
I’m seriously curious: does anyone still today use a PPC machine
today as (1) main/only workstation with (2) necessary use of
latest software and (3) without using it as hobby project?
Best regards,
Nicklas
> On 8 Jan 2024, at 15:50, Perry E. Metzger <[email protected]>
wrote:
>
> There's been a bit of tension recently because of a group of
people who are very interested in keeping MacPorts working on
PowerPC hardware, none of which has been made for the last 18
years or so.
>
> I'd like to float the idea that we create a fork of the MacPorts
repository that is devoted to operating systems and hardware that
is more than (say) a decade old, and that we allow the people who
are interested in maintaining that software to freely work on it.
It doesn't hurt the rest of us after all, and it absolves us of
the need to keep the main MacPorts repository complicated by
patches to support very old systems.
>
> This way, people interested in old systems can keep them
running, and their work doesn't take up time for the rest of us
and vice versa.
>
> Perry
>
