Hey I have a question that I'm sure will become a hot button issue, but here goes anyway, I'm getting ready to buy a new computer pretty soon, but I can't decide which hardware platform to use, should I just stick with the x86 arch or should I go PPC? Distro choice is somewhat irrelevant, because I'm willing to use just about anything, as long as it isn't a headache to install, my needs are fairly straightforward, I want a 2.6.x kernel, Reiser4, and KDE, now I don't expect a distro to come with these, (except KDE) I'll add them myself later,
I'll be using it mostly for programming, compiling, word processing, things of that nature, games and 3D performance are at the bottom of my list (although I am interested in playing Doom3, but as long as it has a decent framerate, 60fps or up, and looks bearable, I'll be perfectly satisified, no need to go crazy with a 256mb DDR or something like that) so I ask the ultimate question, x86 or PPC? I hear that nearly identical linux configurations on say a G5 vs a P4 running at the same clock speed, are much faster on the G5, so I am intrigued, up to now I've been running a Celeron @ 733mhz with 256mb of PC133 SDR-SDRAM, but it's starting to get on my nerves because a lot of the new programs I'm running, while respectable, are just TOO SLOW, and lately I've been playing around with my friend's PowerMac G3 @ 266mhz with the same amount of RAM, and I'm just blown away by how responsive it is compared to the junky Pentium/MMX @ 233mhz box I've kept tucked in the corner for whatever reason, so now here I am ready to buy a new computer, and I'm suddenly at a loss over which platform, PPC or x86. Truth be told I'm really interested in going PPC, but I've got a 5 year history with x86, so I don't know what to expect, so any insight would be great, I'm anxious to hear both sides of the arguement, so let the flame wars begin!

Welll... PPC are nice and tasty, but you will have some headache running linux on this. Sure, lot of linux distro support PPC but you will have to wait for package to be ported to PPC architecture, so you will always be some version late (or in worst case some application might never been ported!!). So unless you agree with this, stick to x86.

On the other hand PPC are nice, apple computer are a fine piece of work, if you agreed to the previous condition and like nice computer/want to learn about it, you will have lot of fun using PPC.

Well I'm used to running a few versions behind the current release, that's never bothered me in the slightest, as long as I can run KDE 3.x, use Reiser4, MPlayer, of course FireFox, and KOffice I'll be perfectly happy, and of course the prospect of porting applications to PPC by myself with little or no help from other programmers, kind of intrigues me, (I'm like Linus, I think playing with code can be fun :-)) And i am interested in how PPC compares to x86 on both the hardware level and the code level, maybe I could put a little money down for a last generation G4, for tinkering and playing around with, and just get a new Athlon based PC for my main system? That way I'm covered on both ends, and if the G4 experiment yields some positive results, consider getting a Mac for my main system down the road, the problem is I just don't know enough about Mac I guess, and I am quite curious now.

Well, if you have the money and like to learn, go with the PPC, at least that would be my choice. I suggest you to choose Gentoo as a distro, I believe they have the best PPC support. If I could find some money, my next computer would be a sexy G5 powerbook

Oh and keep in mind that with a Mac you could run the 3 most used OS : Linux, Mac OS and Windows in virtual PC. Virtual PC is in any ways better than vmware and it has been bought by micro$oft recently... if they don't destroy it, they might improve it further more.

acording to apple the g4 & g5 are aprox 1.5x to 2x as fast as a x86 of the same clock speed the G5 is 64bit so no fair compairing it to a P4. I own both a 2.68Ghz P4 and a 1.25Ghz G4 and they are about the same (my p4 is a little faster but it has more ram) also Mac OsX is so much like linux I never saw a need to pu linux on my mac and I can do almost anything from the command line. But it's harder to build a mac and I think that as far as bang for your buck you'd get more with x86 or even a Amd64.

Intel Pentium 4 are just lousy processors because they are mainly software processors that uses SECC extension to provide better performance. An AMD processors are better to compare them to Apple computers because AMD processors has raw power which does not need help from extensions. An AMD Opteron system beats a G5 computer. Also dual AMD Athlon MP system beats a dual G4 system. To get good performance from a G5 system. You need two G5 processors.

If want to get a new system that can run Doom 3, I suggest an AMD 64-bit processor system that has support for ECC memory. Right now AMD has dual-core server processors and soon there will be dual core desktop processors, so ECC is needed when using a multi-processor system. It could not hurt to use ECC memory. I think only some nForce4 boards comes with ECC memory support.

If you want an Apple computer, I suggest just use Mac OS X. This is because there is software support for Mac OS X and it has some pieces of Linux or BSD code as its engine. I suggest an iBook or Powerbook instead of the tower cases. Though the slot loading drive may look sleek, but these types of drives has problems in the past.

I do not think Apple has a G5 Powerbook. It is too expensive to build a Mac because many manufactures are worry about Apple. Packard Bell try to make a compatible Mac system that was cheaper but Apple sued them and took the logo that Packard Bell created.

IMHO, VMware works very well. I can use my USB devices in a supported OS such as Windows, if there is no support for them in Linux. Also VMware is providing 3D support.

If you want to run Doom 3 on PPC, you'll have to do it under Mac OS X as the Linux Version of Doom 3 is for x86.

PPCs generally tend to suffer performance penalities with float to int conversions, which is something that games tend to heavily use, so they tend to be slower in terms of gaming.

If you are only getting a computer to run Linux, I'd invest in an AMD64 instead of spending more money on a PPC. Even AMD64 versions of Linux tend to get stuff ported faster and they are backwards compatible for the most part with 32-bit binaries.

So it looks like my best is an AMD64? To be completely honest, up until I recently got a taste of PPC, I was considering building a dual AthlonMP system, with an AMD MPX chipset, (I've had some pretty bad experiences with third party chipsets, don't get me started on VIA!) As for the P4, I was just using it as an example, personally I'm beginning to *HATE* Intel CPU and chipsets, I've always found AMD processors to be much nicer, especially when programming, but I would tend to steer away from them because I don't typically trust third party chipsets, although I have heard great things about these new-ish nVidia chipsets, so I guess now I'm leaning back to my original idea of just going with an AMD CPU for my main system, so, dual Athlon, an AMD64, or should I say f*ck it and go dual AMD64? And what chipset?

Your best bet would to go with Single or Dual AMD64s. Most open-source programs already have AMD64 64-bit ports and a 64-bit AMD64 version of Linux can run 32-bit x86 programs.

As for chipset, I would suggest an NForce. I agree with you about VIA, they tend to break a lot of stuff, in both Windows and Linux, however I have had no such problems with NForce Chipsets.