Stephan Somogyi reviews the many operating systems available for
the PowerPC platform, including Yellow Dog Linux, SuSE Linux for
PowerPC, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. To his surprise, he found that they
performed better on the PowerPC architecture than Mac OS X.
"While I simply haven't had the time to install all these
different OSes, I have had a chance to get SuSE Linux 7.1, OpenBSD
2.9 and NetBSD 1.5 onto my 266MHz thrasher iMac. Of course, given
the strength of my personal Murphy field, this machine is the one
with a version of Open Firmware that makes booting these OSes
somewhat less than straightforward at times. On the glass-half-full
side of the equation, I learned rather a lot about how to drive
Open Firmware in the process."
"None of these OSes is nearly as easy to install as OS X--or
even Darwin--is on this same iMac. That said, these Unixes have
significantly more mature code-bases and appear to behave in a more
sprightly manner on the same hardware than Apple's new flagship
OS."
