Using a PowerBook G4 Today (2019)

As the new Macs switch to ARM, I'm left thinking about this blog post I wrote last year. However advantageous the Mac might have been to have at that time, it seems that when it comes to running modern software, an x86 unit from that era is way more practical today (though still probably quite low-spec'd).

As certain people now foresee a massive architecture shift towards ARM, even on desktops, within the next decade, I wonder how this question will be answered 15 or 20 years from now. I am inclined to believe that amd64 units will still be useful in a decade and a half, even if no longer the most commonplace machines. But maybe that's just my bias from living in the moment, and we'll all be building ARM ServerReady rigs for our future Linux workstations.

I'll also add, as an addendum, that it was with debian-ports that my laptop came closest to being useful, but both it and Void came with many compromises at the lowest levels and both are a far cry from what you could eke out of even the most commodity-level of x86 laptops of the time.