This is a proposed Change for Fedora Linux.
This document represents a proposed Change. As part of the Changes process, proposals are publicly announced in order to receive community feedback. This proposal will only be implemented if approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee.
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.
Users of Atomic Desktops on PPC64LE will have to either switch back to a Fedora package mode installation or build their own images using Bootable Containers which are available for PPC64LE.
Not building for PPC64LE means less infrastructure load, less maintenance, less testing to be done. We can focus on the architectures where hardware is more easily available and where we have a lot of users already (i.e. x86_64 and aarch64).
Scope
Proposal owners: Remove the ppc64le builds from the pungi & bodhi configs.
Policies and guidelines: N/A (not needed for this Change)
Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)
Alignment with the Fedora Strategy: N/A
Upgrade/compatibility impact
Users of Atomic Desktops on PPC64LE will have to switch back to a Fedora package mode installation or build their own images using Bootable Containers which are available for PPC64LE.
Note that this change is only about the Atomic Desktops images and installers and thus all the RPM packages will still be available for anyone to build images using the Bootable Container flow.
Early Testing (Optional)
N/A
How To Test
N/A
User Experience
N/A
Dependencies
N/A
Contingency Plan
Contingency mechanism: (What to do? Who will do it?) We keep things as is
Contingency deadline: Beta release
Blocks release? No
Documentation
Fedora Atomic Desktops are not longer built for the PowerPC 64 LE architecture.
Release Notes
Fedora Atomic Desktops are not longer built for the PowerPC 64 LE architecture.
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@siosm this would seem to affect Fedora flatpaks as well, as they were enabled for ppc64le as of F39 because the Atomic Desktops were available thereon (and there was supposedly at least a little demand). Therefore, I would like to see some guidance as to whether Fedora flatpaks should be discontinued for ppc64le as of F42, and for this to be amended to reflect that.
From my perspective, the two challenges to Fedora Flatpaks on ppc64le have been 1) it has consistently been the slowest to build, and 2) a number of notable desktop packages cannot be built for it (in general, not just as flatpaks). Of the approximately 480 flatpaks currently in Fedora, 33 are excluded from ppc64le (mostly due to the lack of qt6-qtwebengine), while only 3 are x86_64-specific (excluded from aarch64). But these are both manageable if there is still demand.
Indeed, with this change, the Atomic Desktops won’t be using the PPC64LE Flatpaks anymore.
As I do not maintain Fedora Flatpaks, that decision is not up to me, but likely up to the Flatpak SIG / the people building the Flatpaks in Fedora (which is mostly you as far as I know).
Feel free to let me know if you want to join this change and drop Fedora Flatpaks for PPC64LE and I’ll update it to include that.
@siosm at this point, I think I would need a justification to continue them, although it would help if I had access to some sort of usage statistics (such as image pulls). When would you need a decision to amend this?
According to the schedule, the deadline is for Self Contained Changes is Tue 2025-01-14.
I don’t know when this will be submitted to FESCo as we are entering the holiday period but I will be back around January 10th so that would be a good time.
We can also add a mention for it now with a note and finalize the decision later.
After discussions with other in the Flatpak SIG, we agree that flatpaks should also be dropped in tandem with Atomic desktops. Does it make sense to amend this change to cover both (in which case, add me on the flatpak side), or do we need a separate change?
That us strange if immutable systems are the future we are heading like we see distros with newer immutable technology like ab root in vanilla os or bootc in ublue distros and even ubuntu core is making a immutable and suse have designed one for there called kalpa and aeon so on so droping does not make sence in my opinion maybe ppc64le is for a nich usebase mainly servers.
I agree ppc64le for servers and users are mainly using commercial distros like rhel or alma for that… And userbase cor ppc64le is also extremely low…
Summary
instead of reiterating. You can even do this by email, by replying with the heart emoji or just “+1”. This will make long topics easier to follow.