Fedora is proposing to stop building their Atomic desktop versions for PPC64LE. PopwerPC 64 LE basically comes down to IBM’s POWER architecture, and as far as desktop use goes, that exclusively means the POWER9 machines from Raptor Computing Systems. I reviewed their small single-socket Blackbird machine in 2021, and I also have their dual-socket Talos II workstation. I can tell you from experience that nobody who owns one of these is opting for an immutable Fedora variant, and on top of that, these machines are getting long in the tooth. Raptor passed on POWER10 because it required proprietary firmware, so we’ve been without new machines for years now. As such, it makes sense for Fedora to stop building Atomic desktops for this architecture.
We will stop building the Fedora Atomic Desktops for the PowerPC 64 LE architecture. According to the count me statistics, we don’t have any Atomic Desktops users on PPC64LE.
Users of Atomic Desktops on PPC64LE will have to either switch back to a Fedora package mode installation or build their own images using Bootable Containers which are available for PPC64LE.
↫ Timothée Ravier
I’ve never written much about the Talos II, surmising that most of my Blackbird review applies to the Talos II, as well. If there’s interest, I can check to see what the current state of Fedora and/or other distributions on POWER9 is, and write a short review about the experience. I honestly don’t know if there’s much interest at this point in POWER9, but if there is, here’s your chance to get your questions answered.
>”According to the count me statistics, we don’t have any Atomic Desktops users on PPC64LE.”
I have a feeling that this is not the only Fedora version with zero actual users.
>”I honestly don’t know if there’s much interest at this point in POWER9, but if there is, here’s your chance to get your questions answered.”
The Talospace blog is a very rich resource about everything Blackbird and Talos and Power chips – https://www.talospace.com/
Excellent place to waste an evening or two (or more) reading about machines that I’ll probably never own, even though I secretly desire one. One of the truly great gems of the blogosphere.
This is not surprising. Fedora’s Atomic distros are pretty niche and PPC64le is even more niche.
In other new, I found out about Bootable Containers, and they are interesting. I’m kind of wondering if they could be PXE booted, and why UEFI doesn’t support them natively.
Since we are mentioning PPC64le, I will mention that Chimera Linux supports PPC64le as a first-class platform. In fact, it is the primary platform of the lead developer. They used to be the PPC64le maintainer for Void Linux.
Chimera Linux is not an atomic distro of course but the unique build system combined with the transactional apk tools provide many of the same advantages.
https://chimera-linux.org/
I want PPC64le to become bigger than just Raptor Computing. It’s a (mostly) open ISA, unlike ARM or x86, and it is more established and powerful than RISC-V. It’s a shame that PowerPC for normal people ended with Apple’s switch to Intel about 20 years ago.
I really wish I’d had the cash to fork a Talos when they originally came out. I ended up migrating from a G5 to a used Mac Pro.
Now I am spending most of my productive time on FreeBSD, with the eventual booting into Windows for a game or two.
I do appreciate the longer time-to-not-being-cutting edge of the more obscure platforms. =)
In https://t2linux.com every CPU ISA and libc variant is a first-class, AAA supported platform, … 😉
What a super interesting project. Thank you for the link!
Perfect for people that want to run the COSMIC desktop on their WiiU or SGI Octane.
Some of those pre-built binaries probably have no users. I love projects like this though for the portability and compatibility testing if nothing else.
It’s pretty admirable that they only decided to stop supporting the platform when they realized that literally zero people needed it. It reminds me of the Japanese railroad station that was being used by one schoolgirl to commute to school, so the railroad kept the station in service until she graduated, then decommissioned it.