Ubuntu MATE Is One of the Last Major Distros to Officially Support PowerPC

If you have an old Mac, you can use Ubuntu MATE

  Ubuntu MATE desktop

Ubuntu MATE has been providing PowerPC support for some time now, but the developers have made some serious improvements to this particular feature in the latest 15.04 Beta 1 update.

The Ubuntu MATE devs had quite a changelog for the 15.04 Beta 1 release, and most of the stuff they posted were very interesting. We already covered the "panel selection" that allows users to change the look and feel of the system with just a single click. It might not seem like much, but not too many Linux devs have this kind of features.

Among the myriad of improvements, there was also an entry about PowerPC, and I thought it deserved much more attention than it got. It's true that there aren't too many PowerPC-powered Apple computers around, but there are enough to make it count. If we take into consideration that Ubuntu MATE is one of the few operating systems that still have active support for this old architecture, than it's all the more important.

"Added PowerPC as an officially supported architecture for Ubuntu MATE 15.04. Running Linux on PowerPC can require some tinkering," wrote Martin Wimpress on the official blog. He also linked to PowerPC Known Issues and PowerPC FAQ to make life easier for potential users.

You can download Ubuntu MATE 15.04 Beta 1 for PowerPC and give it a spin or you can wait until April to get the stable edition.