On 2025-09-21 at 20:33 John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
You're probably right with everything you said. Sorry for my opinions
and experiences...
Last I checked, I had problems with Brtfs and XFS on my G5 due to a
different pagesize. (Btrfs wasn't mountable with a kernel of a different
pagesize. That's an issue for me as I want to use it across systems,
also on external HDDs. Also, after changing the pagesize in the kernel
itself, because the Nvidia nouveau driver didn't work properly -- or was
it the radeon driver? -- I wasn't able to mount my root partition.
Gentoo, that was...)
Also, I had problems getting Java (OpenJDK) to compile on the G5.
And much more. As well as small inconveniences. Like, my Power Mac G5
"Late 2005" with CPC945 chipset (Apple called this U4) has
ECC-DDR2-RAM-DIMMs installed, which are not supported by Linux. The
predecessor CPC925 (Apple: U3) does support ECC-DDR-RAM with support in
Linux, but for my setup this ECC support is missing in Linux and with
very high probability will never come...
All those problems are not Debian related and I'm guessing that Debian
has all problems (and most inconveniences) figured out, as well as a
working package repository for PPC32 and PPG64.
When it's becoming more and more legacy software for the system, this is
something I tend to get unhappy with... (as opposed to how Linux was
handled in the past on the majority of systems I used, where I'd get
modern software on old hardware no matter what...)
I don't actually understand what you're trying to say in this paragraph.
When I last tried Linux on my G5, KDE Plasma wasn't well supported
(wasn't available, didn't work or had crashes, and so forth). But that
was bach when Plasma 4 (or was it Plasma 5) came out. I figure it does
work now. So forget what I just said...
Thanks for all the hard work!
I hope I'll find the time at last to install Debian on my Macs... Maybe
I'll be surprised how well it all works now! (The G5 is a 64-bit machine
for one, and secondly it has 16 GB of memory installed, so all should be
fine, even with Plasma, Firefox, LibreOffice, GIMP and so on...)
I perfectly get that older machines, like any Power Mac G4 with maxed
out "only" 1.5 or 2 GB of memory will have issues with some software
(Firefox) that need a lot of memory (especially when more tabs are opened).
Also, encryption will slow down any older hardware considerably, likely.
What's the suggestion in this area anyway?
For what it's worth, the plan is to install Linux (Debian most likely),
use an LVM partitioning scheme with XFS for / and /home, and run KDE
Plasma and use it as a desktop system.
I'm thinking that this will work perfectly. Again, partly (-- a great
part IMHO --) thanks to your hard work to keep it that way.
Mac User #330250
