Post #1513707

2026-04-12 01:38 UTC

Related to this post, I&#39;ve really been wondering about this, and e-waste, and planned obsolescence for a while, and trying things I never found time to write up.... guess I&#39;ll dump my thoughts here for now. https://discuss.systems/@csgordon/116382050700479908 In 2023 I started trying various old hardware I have laying around, including a first generation (pre-ordered!) raspberry pi zero, and the G4 (not M4) PowerBook I took to college in 2004. Both 32-bit machines with 512MB of RAM. 1/n

Replies (1)

@csgordon@discuss.systems 2026-04-12 01:38

Nobody really maintains the mac PPC drivers for those machines in Linux, and distributions stopped maintaining macppc ports a surprisingly short time after apple switched to Intel chips. After some digging I managed to locate a mirror of an ancient copy of Yellow Dog Linux, but I was hoping to see how productive I could be today, not just boot a machine and declare victory, so I needed something modern. Turns out if you want to run a current-day OS on a G4, the only choices are NetBSD and OpenBSD, which both still (in 2026) maintain support for those machines. (FreeBSD discontinued all 32-bit support a number of years ago.) Options for the RPiZero are slightly less limited, as you can get various Debian derivatives (including Raspbian) for that hardware, even today. But my experience with those systems vs BSDs on newer hardware led me to focus on the BSDs first. 2/n

Open ##1799649