More GNU/Linux Distros Silently Drop PowerPC (original article from OSnews)
At least two major GNU/Linux distributions have decided to drop PowerPC support; OpenSUSE has dropped support already, and Fedora is going to drop it in Fedora 13.
The strangest thing, though, is the total lack of official information about this subject. They are deprecating the entire architecture silently; no announcements, no press-releases, nothing. Even Wikipedia doesn't seem to know that openSUSE is now x86/x86_64 only (since three months ago). Worse yet, the "Get it" icon on the openSUSE homepage still reads "PPC".
I asked openSUSE maintainters for some information. "Linux distros are just following what the market is dictating," they replied, "I think our usage data showed something like less than 1% of users had PPC."
This is odd, since there was never more than 1% of non-x86 GNU/Linux users to begin with. "The question isn't whether it's less than before," they replied, "It's just that it was decided that it doesn't make sense for us to allocate resources to maintain PPC."
Ubuntu, which dropped official support for PowerPC a long time ago, is an exception to the rule, making an announcement and publishing a PowerPC FAQ.
