A Press Release From the Future

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Cupertino, California--May 4, 2018--Apple® has unveiled a developer preview release of the next incarnation of their popular operating system OS X code-named "Persian Kitty."  The release comes ahead of schedule and includes a bevy of new features ported from their iOS such as lick gestures and scratch 'n sniff.

"We're beyond excited about the new features," said Apple CEO Tim Cook.  "We're putting the finishing touches on a journal app that not only looks like moldy old paper, it smells like it, too!"

The new operating system is targeted for official release in September at a retail price of $159, though its moniker at this point is still a matter of contention.  "We're not completely sold on the Persian Kitty name," added Cook, "but we're running out of cats."

As with all new releases, users of certain hardware, i.e. Macs made before 2017, will be unsupported* and must upgrade.  In addition, this release marks the end of several legacy technologies such as the Finder, menus, and preferences.  Login will be disabled without a credit card number.

Apple designs Macs, the most bestest computers in the world, along with OS X, iMWatchingYou, iForYourOwnGood, and iMustNotResist.  Apple leads the digital music revolution with its credit card swipe iPods, and continues to reinvent everything from phones to toasters to even the hair on your ass.  Also, too--iPad.

*Except for only the most condescending of security updates.

Linux MintPPC the Future?

Dr. Dave pointed me out in comments to MintPPC which I used briefly and forgot to write about. Dave says it's the future of powerpc, and I'm prone to agree with him. Basically it's an out-of-the-box-everything-just-works distribution that ports the Linux Mint Debian distribution over to PPC and includes some fixes specifically for PPC hardware. These are features Debian's main distribution makes you enable manually, giving birth to some of my more verbose and prose-award worthy blog posts, specifically wireless, graphic hardware rendering, and sound.

Wireless on an original Airport card and some hardware rendering don't work out of the box in Debian because of licensing issues, and sound doesn't work apparently out of ultra caution about some bug in the past that may not even exist anymore. But instead of making you, the user, muck around forums and horribly written blogs looking for answers, MintPPC takes care of all these features for you and has them enabled by default. Much easier on the newbie.

When I was using it, I was generally impressed. It has a slick look (screenshots) and snappy performance, and the MintPPC developers have even compiled the newest versions of Iceweasel (Firefox re-branded), something unavailable to Debian PPC users. I ended up going back to regular Debian, though, because I wanted to use Openbox on top of Gnome-core for my iBook install, which you can do on MintPPC but you'd end up with a bunch of Mint-specific software you weren't using. Also I'm a masochist.

So go ahead and check out MintPPC's website. It's completely painless.