POWER news and olds

POWER news and olds
===================

Last few weeks have been interesting. There is a POWER version of the
Devuan [1] (a Debian without the systemd). A POWER port of the
Slackware [2] is also a thing [3]. And the Void is still alive and
well, of course [4].

The Apple is going back from Intel to a more RISC platform (the ARM
this time) which may be good news or bad news (or both) [5].

Based on current knowledge I have made a few conclusions for me:

* I will keep the Fedora on POWER until I finish some of work projects
* after that I will have to try the Devuan first and then the Slackware
* I should abandon plans to get an Apple computer for testing/porting

The reasons are simple: I have some running projects (both work-related
and personal) which depends on some software/libraries which I are
available on the Fedora (or which I have had to compile here) it was
time-consuming to set up my environment so I don't want to change it
just now. But in longer term I want to have something lighter and more
configurable on my main workstation. It also seems that I will keep my
system without the separate GPU as soon as possible. And a distro which
plans to switch to the Wayland is not compatible with such plan (the
Wayland is slow without acceleration but the X11 with a FVWM - or even
with the whole MATE - isn't; I do not 3D acceleration for most of my
works so I don't thing I have to use 3D card just to be able to move
windows). The Slackware includes very little form packages on which I
depend so it's the last option to try (the Devuan should require much
less compilations).

Well, now the Apple case. There are plans to port one of our software
tools to the OS X/maOS platform. There are people who would benefit
from that. But there is a question if this group of users will continue
to use the AARM apples as they will no longer able to use x86 windows
applications (in technical/engineering area there is very limited
choice of native apple apps - for some tasks there are none - so people
use both OS X and Windows of some form; if there will be any speed
degradation and/or annoying incompatibility in their expensive tools
then it is very possible than they will switch back to Windows/x86). So
I see very little reason to buy any apple stuff (no matter if
second-hand or new) until the situation will be clear.

Reference:

[1] https://devuan.org/
[2] http://www.slackware.com/
[3] https://mirror.riscyslack.org
[4] https://voidlinux-ppc.org/
[5] https://www.howtogeek.com/678940/how-the-mac-will-switch-from-intel-to-apples-own-arm-chips/