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/