Is a Raptor Blackbird (or other Power machine) a good general-purpose desktop?
Would a Power-based machine in general, and a Raptor Blackbird in particular, be a good freedom-respecting computer to run a Debian desktop? Or will I have "many" problems like the one described in https://www.talospace.com/2023/02/firefox-110-on-power.html that Firefox WebRTC doesn't work on Power? I don't particularly want to get deep into being a porter, but I want a good desktop to run XFCE, emacs, mutt, gdal, Firefox ESR, etc, developing my pet software, maybe get back into LibreOffice (a beast to compile...) development and/or become active as Debian package maintainer again. Is there any other Power-based machine that I should consider? No candidate laptops I presume? Thanks in advance for your advice, -- Lionel
Re: Is a Raptor Blackbird (or other Power machine) a good general-purpose desktop?
Hi Lionel, On Mon, 20 Mar 2023 at 23:36, Lionel Élie Mamane wrote: > > No candidate laptops I presume? > There is perhaps some day, this project is making slow but steady progress. Looks like it may be crazy expensive in the end though https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/ Best, Ed > > Thanks in advance for your advice, > > -- > Lionel > >
Re: Is a Raptor Blackbird (or other Power machine) a good general-purpose desktop?
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? RaptorCS devices in particular are quite good apparently. Other POWER devices are likely either too old and only supporting powerpc or way too expensive and having freedom issues (IBM POWER10). The POWER10 issue still blocks RaptorCS from upgrading their CPUs btw. I note that the libre firmware for the RaptorCS Ethernet is not yet packaged in Debian though. I think the device still works without the libre firmware though, since Debian members use RaptorCS but haven't packaged it. I expect there is probably other RaptorCS firmware or software to package too though. The RaptorCS folks are very friendly to Debian so it might be worth talking to them about this. https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware/Open > Or will I have "many" problems like the one described in > https://www.talospace.com/2023/02/firefox-110-on-power.html > that Firefox WebRTC doesn't work on Power? There aren't many open bugs tagged as affecting POWER ports and most of them look like build related failures rather than not working. Probably folks don't bother to usertag their POWER-only bug reports though. https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/bts-usertags.cgi?user=debian-powerpc%40lists.debian.org https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Debbugs/ArchitectureTags There are of course various build/test issues on POWER ports too. https://buildd.debian.org/status/architecture.php?a=ppc64el https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/ftbfs.cgi?arch=ppc64el https://ci.debian.net/status/failing/?arch[]=ppc64el > I don't particularly want to get deep into being a porter Personally I think users of every non-amd64 port should consider doing porting work to keep their ports viable, since your personal package set might not be on the radar of vendors like IBM or other users. In case you do, we now have a document about the different ways to contribute to creating new ports (it applies to existing ports too). Some of the steps may be missing for existing ports, for example all of the POWER ports are missing a page based on the status template. https://wiki.debian.org/PortsDocs/New https://wiki.debian.org/PortTemplate > Is there any other Power-based machine that I should consider? The unreleased Libre-SOC might be something for the future. https://libre-soc.org/openpower/ > No candidate laptops I presume? Not sure of the status but this project has been around a while: https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/ -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: Is a Raptor Blackbird (or other Power machine) a good general-purpose desktop?
On Tue, Mar 21, 2023 at 02:43:44AM +, Edward Robbins wrote: > On Mon, 20 Mar 2023 at 23:36, Lionel Élie Mamane wrote: >> No candidate laptops I presume? > There is perhaps some day, this project is making slow but steady > progress. Looks like it may be crazy expensive in the end though > https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/ Thanks for the link, interesting and I didn't know about this one indeed. Beyond "not available this year", I see the one-but least FAQ https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/faq/ says that it won't run a "modern distro" in little-endian mode, as "although it does support LE, modern distros require some functionality that are not available to this CPU". And Debian's only 64 bit Power port seems to be... little endian? Big endian is not even listed on https://www.debian.org/ports/ as being in progress, it is not there at all.
