PowerPC builds of Ubuntu desktop are to be dropped by the end of this week.
The discussion comes after PowerPC builds of Ubuntu 13.10 have failed to successfully build for over a month.
Developer Steve Langasek, weighing up the effort:result ratio on the Ubuntu Developer Mailing List, says:
“It’s my belief that the audience for Ubuntu desktop on powerpc is currently zero, extending back at least to the 13.04 release, and that this is not going to change.
Short of any compelling argument in favour of retaining them he plans to ‘adjust the build scripts at the end of the week to drop Ubuntu powerpc’.
Ubuntu PPC
Ubuntu officially stopped supporting PPC builds of Ubuntu after 6.10, with duty deferring over to the community.
This news will surprise virtually no-one familiar with PPC Ubuntu. Since the ‘2D’ version of Unity was dropped several releases ago running Ubuntu’s default interface on PowerPC has been as joyous as trying to wade through treacle: slow, messy and not worth the hassle.
Thankfully for those running PPC Server it seems that Ubuntu Server will remain supported on PPC for now.
Desktop users needn’t despair, however. Lubuntu is one of a number of Ubuntu-based Linux distributions still supporting the platform.
Adam Conrad adds that Lubuntu 13.10 ‘should continue to function on old G4/G5 macs [once] we’ve sorted out some recent kernel woes.’