Debian has more than 96% of packages compiled for POWER and IBM is working on porting the reset and optimising things.
https://buildd.debian.org/stats/ https://wiki.debian.org/ppc64el
It isn't hard to create new ports, you just have to have the source code, but everyone uses proprietary software so new ports have zero chance outside the open source world.
That would be cool because one of my disposables is an old Mac laptop with G4 CPU. Getting modern Linux distro on it would be cool.
Unforunately big-endian amd/radeon support seems to have bit rotted. So if that g4 laptop has an amd device accelerated video might not work. I'm not sure how well nouveau works for nvidia devices.
There have been some discussions about this problem on the debian-powerpc mailing list so check out the archives if you're interested. Some of us also hang out on OFTC/#debianppc.
Sound support should be the same as intel and printers are handled by userland so that shouldn't be a problem with most printers that work with linux.
JIT support for ppc64el is good because of IBM support. It has jdk and v8 ports.
"JIT support for ppc64el is good because of IBM support. It has jdk and v8 ports."
...I didn't even think about. Of course IBM's components might be usable for the desktop. ("Doh!") Thanks for the info.