A recent decision however by the dev team at Canonical to drop PPC as a supported distribution concerns me. It concerns me in that it would appear there is no long term revenue in supporting PPC as a technology and it has seriously made me wonder just how true the idealism of Ubuntu really is.

I myself run Ubuntu Edgy on two PCs and my iBook G4 but to know that Ubuntu for PPC will ultimately be turned over to the community to support is a growing concern for me. My initial reaction was to move over to Debian but in chatting on the forum I have decided to, where possible, get involved in the PPC community because clearly there is a market and one that needs supporting.

While I realise that PPC doesn’t provide much commercial value for Ubuntu does this then not go against everything that Ubuntu is supposed to be in providing greater accessibility to the world? I’m curious to know your thoughts because I am certainly damaged in my perception by this recent decision.

Response from Mark:

Justin

It’s difficult to make a philanthropic case for PPC over other architectures. Most people with a PPC desktop or laptop have multiple devices and can afford either to purchase an OS, or to contribute to a free OS like Ubuntu. We see relatively little community contribution, rapidly declining installs (if you read the spec, the details are there). So would it be better to spend three people making the x86 desktop better, or keeping the PPC desktop alive?

At this stage, I think the better philanthropic argument is in favour of improving the desktop of 98% of our users. If you are willing to become one of the community members that it will take to keep PPC officially-supported, then please make your voice heard in the distro mailing lists and channels, sign up, contribute time, make it happen.

I’m sure this consept could be adapted to any country trough some kind fo franchising agreement or similar. Of course, it might need some more funding.. you don’t happen to know somebody with extra money to invest?

I remember going into a print shop in Seattle once with a PostScript file that I’d written for our wedding invitation. Turns out their printers didn’t have the font I’d specified, but the dude behind the counter had a Tux T-shirt on, so I asked him to just edit the file and change the font. No prob. That guy might have been able to convince management to put a sticker on the door. The guy working at the coffee shop with free wireless might be able to, also. Geeks *want* to advertise Linux, you just have to give them a consistent way to do it and suddenly people are seeing “Linux” stickers all over the place.

Just a thought.

The same is said for other companies that state ‘Linux Supported’ and they turn their customers down, especially end users who tries to lean Linux, so the end user, just gives up and stays on Microsoft Windows.

So, really, if I where a hardware vendor and know my product is Linux compatible, I’d rather state ‘Linux Compatible’ than ‘Linux supported’ or do some research and post a page on the website with some instructions or link it to a forum that talks about the hardware or Linux as a topic.

Regards,
Tobias Cloete
The Alpha Centauri Network
info@centauri.co.za | http://www.centauri.co.za

go ahead and ask those who ask for support, the kind of ’support’ they wish to have. it will most of the times centralise on where to get ready upgrades, how local the penetration of resellers is and certification they can put on their cv’s. certification releated to brand is more ’sellable’ than open certification (lpi??) based on our experience. thats where we should head to demistify ’support’.