The end of my personal First Age Of GNU/Linux Earth came to an end this week. I sold my PowerBook G4, and so for the first time since I started using LinuxPPC R4 in 1998, I have no powerpc hardware running the Linux kernel. PPC was my first architecture, and I was devoted in this peculiar way that only PPC people could be devoted: combining the slavishness of an Apple lover with the moral certainty of a GNU zealot. It really hit home when I unsubscribed from the debian-powerpc mailing list: I’d been ignoring its folder for months already (not least because I’ve been using Ubuntu for two years) but yesterday I realized I will really not have much to offer in the future.
This is all the more poignant because, just as I’ve ditched my PowerBook, Ubuntu has ditched official support for the powerpc architecture. Which, as a nice bookend, puts powerpc back into the status it had when I started using it.

So two months ago I would have objected pretty strongly to this development, but now I have to recognize that I’ve apparently reached the same conclusion.  The Intel Macs were announced three months after I started using a Thinkpad T41 as my work machine, and the level of hardware support was mindblowing — i.e., just normal.  No struggles with anything.  I knew some of this was Ubuntu and some of it the decent Thinkpad support.  In fact, Ubuntu Breezy was so great and stable, I had to install Edgy just to break some things and give myself some occasion to learn about my hardware.

But the Ubuntu announcement makes me want to get a G4 Mac Mini and start fooling around again.