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 < macports-dev@lists.macports.org> 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 <pe...@piermont.com> 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 > > > >
