While Fedora is often times eager to introduce new spins and other variants as well as supporting a comprehensive set of CPU architectures, it doesn’t always drive new users. In the case of atomic versions of Fedora Linux for desktop use on POWER hardware, it turns out there are seemingly no active users.
Fedora 42 is likely to stop building Atomic Desktop images for PowerPC 64 LE (PPC64LE) as it looks like no one is using these atomic variants… After all, desktop use of POWER hardware isn’t too common especially with the likes of Raptor Computing Systems’ interesting open-source hardware still being limited to aging POWER9 processors. And aside from those Raptor POWER systems like Blackbird suitable for desktop use, most POWER hardware interest is for servers rather than desktops. The non-atomic versions of Fedora will continue to be produced for PPC64LE.
The change proposal to stop building Atomic Desktops for PPC64LE spells out the situation clearly:
“We will stop building the Fedora Atomic Desktops for the PowerPC 64 LE architecture. According to the count me statistics, we don’t have any Atomic Desktops users on PPC64LE.”
By no longer building the atomic desktop images for POWER, it’s less taxing on the Fedora infrastructure itself, less maintenance, and not having to worry about any testing/QA there.The resources can instead be focused on architectures where hardware is more readily available and with much more users.
This change still needs to be voted on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee, but given no apparent users of these builds, it makes sense to not waste resources producing them.
