Post #1799649
2026-04-12 01:38 UTC
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
Replies (1)
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@csgordon@discuss.systems 2026-04-12 01:39
Installing OpenBSD on the G4 was just like on any other computer. Uneventful. (Beyond that installing OpenBSD always gives me vague Linux-from-Scratch vibes.) It booted. Needed a USB wifi, but that's it. Sticking to the basic window manager for light resource use, very snappy. The lack of modern browser and lack of Rust support were the main blockers for my personal longer-term use (see linked thread above, no binary packages for Firefox it Chrome variants b/c they need too much RAM for a native PPC build). 3/n