PowerPC operating systems

In the modern day and age.

Preface

Lately I have been very interested in PowerPC Macintoshes and the PowerPC architecture as a whole. I myself don’t really understand what prompted this, perhaps I just grew tired of the long and boring total domination of the x86 architecture after collecting PCs for so long. I am actually very excited towards RISC-V and ARM developments but as it stands you won’t usually find those in any high end workstation or commodity PC.

Anyway, that’s not what we are going to talk about today. I want to talk about modern operating systems for Apple PowerMacs since I acquired a PowerMac G5 quad, the very fastest Apple PowerPC Mac ever made, with the intention of daily driving it. However there are many different operating systems and community efforts available for these aging Apple systems.

I have done most of my testing on a PowerMac G5 quad (which will get it’s own series of articles in the near future) but I have done some testing on a dual processor PowerMac G4 Mirror Drive Doors as well. This article is a work in progress and will likely see updates in the future as I test more operating systems and hardware combinations. It is subject to change.

The OS matrix

The table below will contain operating systems that I have tested, as well as some operating systems that I have not tested yet, the latter being indicated by an asterisk. Note that this article will only cover Big Endian operating systems as these Macs cannot run in Little Endian mode.

The focus here will be on modern operating systems but MacOS 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard will be included as these are the two last operating systems Apple released for these systems hence making them significant. They are also different enough to warrant listing both of them.

Details