It's a fair point, how is PowerPC competitive with ARM when even the former Motorola company's moving towards ARM chips. One PPC architect I knew who worked at Apple actually worked at ARM for a time, thought of their architecture as the closest thing to modern Mac silicon.
Personally, I absolutely hated working with the Pi because of a unique situation where the GPU is absolutely incapable of setting up more than one "surface" for rendering with OpenGL. Which means that most everything including Google Chrome and the default Raspbian desktop is piped through the CPU with MESA and X11. Which means that you'll have to overclock for anything resembling reasonable desktop performance, and it still feels pokey compared to a 68k Mac. Which has basically deadlocked efforts to update the Raspbian platform with Wayland or a similar, "modern" GUI platform for Linux development. All that despite the project's close ties to the GPU vendor, Broadcom. Too many politics about that project for not enough positive ROI.
IMHO, the GPU's a bit of a lost cause unless you're looking for something to just render some video or do some graphics demos. You'd be surprised at how many RasPi 3D demos are actually running on the CPU with MESA.
Getting back to your point Cory, I'd be happy to tinker with PPC as a weekend project if I had the time.
Maybe there wouldn't be much support for a project like that, but then, I question how many developers there really are who might be interested in an OS project outside of BYO Linux distro. There's a large pool of developers with a shallow understanding of the technology they work with, and only a small minority that really want to color outside the lines and dig deeper into truly strange areas of hardware and software. If there are friends willing to come along for the PPC OS ride, that's enough of a reason to start. And honestly, I'd take a long hard look into finding peers willing to keep the project going before really starting on the architecture.
The current state of software development's sad and pathetic enough that even some willingness to write a Linux kernel extension is more than enough to stand out from the pack. I don't see much present day demand in building a new operating system, but if that's what fires you up? Why not.
Similar reasoning could be used to ask, why build your own game engine. I tried, started, got quickly bored because nobody wanted to carry it on. But I never regretted trying.
Personally, I absolutely hated working with the Pi because of a unique situation where the GPU is absolutely incapable of setting up more than one "surface" for rendering with OpenGL. Which means that most everything including Google Chrome and the default Raspbian desktop is piped through the CPU with MESA and X11. Which means that you'll have to overclock for anything resembling reasonable desktop performance, and it still feels pokey compared to a 68k Mac. Which has basically deadlocked efforts to update the Raspbian platform with Wayland or a similar, "modern" GUI platform for Linux development. All that despite the project's close ties to the GPU vendor, Broadcom. Too many politics about that project for not enough positive ROI.
IMHO, the GPU's a bit of a lost cause unless you're looking for something to just render some video or do some graphics demos. You'd be surprised at how many RasPi 3D demos are actually running on the CPU with MESA.
Getting back to your point Cory, I'd be happy to tinker with PPC as a weekend project if I had the time.
Maybe there wouldn't be much support for a project like that, but then, I question how many developers there really are who might be interested in an OS project outside of BYO Linux distro. There's a large pool of developers with a shallow understanding of the technology they work with, and only a small minority that really want to color outside the lines and dig deeper into truly strange areas of hardware and software. If there are friends willing to come along for the PPC OS ride, that's enough of a reason to start. And honestly, I'd take a long hard look into finding peers willing to keep the project going before really starting on the architecture.
The current state of software development's sad and pathetic enough that even some willingness to write a Linux kernel extension is more than enough to stand out from the pack. I don't see much present day demand in building a new operating system, but if that's what fires you up? Why not.
Similar reasoning could be used to ask, why build your own game engine. I tried, started, got quickly bored because nobody wanted to carry it on. But I never regretted trying.