Dicking around with the 2.0DP (in my office.) I wasn't happy with Debian and it was mostly ATI's fault. The Linux drivers for old Radeon cards are notoriously bad and compounded with the limited development resources of Debian PPC meant all kinds of issues. Since the desktop I installed (Cinnamon) relies heavily on the GPU it wasn't overly pleasant to use. It was also sitting right next to a much more powerful machine running Fedora so was kind of pointless as I'd set them up pretty much the same.
Incidentally I was using a 128MB Radeon 9600 with an ADC (Apple sort-of proprietary) connector for the 'second head'. I had a better, 256MB Radeon with 2xDVI but it suffered from the dreaded black screen of death with the Linux driver. I wanted that second display and the extra vram!
So my boxed copy of OSX Leopard arrived:
(Nice holographic box cover art, I hope whoever was responsible for this got a raise.)
As aside, you can still get Leopard (10.5 - the last version that will run on PPC) and Snow Leopard (10.6) straight from Apple. Snow Leopard will cost you $19 US and Leopard will run $159. I have absolutely no way to describe my lack of comprehension of this pricing scheme. Fortunately I got mine off a classifieds site for $10.
Anyway I threw it on the G5 and it works great! Set up everything the way I like and it runs just like a modern Mac, plenty of power and really feels like a solid machine. Even the pokey 5400RPM laptop drive doesn't slow it down too much. I'm going to enjoy using this.
Loaded my usual suite of apps; still lots of great progs kicking around for the PPC. Finding a working download for Visor, the PPC-supporting predecessor of my favorite drop down terminal, was tricky, and getting Python up to date was a pain as it is on *any* OSX (in fact I think I've figured out what's wrong with my Macbook now that I got it running on this.) Dusted the cobwebs off my free Apple Developer account which gave me the last version of Xcode for Leopard (3.1.4) along with gcc/make/etc. Homebrew (actually a fork called Tigerbrew) works great for Unix-like stuff. You could tell me this thing was built last month and I'd believe you.
The only thing missing is an equivalent to XtraFinder or a file manager that doesn't suck (can somebody PLEASE port KDE Dolphin to OSXPPC? PLEEEEEASE?) - open to suggestions here.
I was so happy with how well I got it set up I just cloned the drive to use in the 2.3DP at home. It'll replace my clunky homebuilt Linux box for audio recording.
BTW here's my salvaged quintuple-head setup in my office, for the curious -
My coworkers must hate me.
EDIT: just chiming back in after working with the G5s some more. Was thinking how computers seem to have stagnated... here's a quick comparo:
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Macbook Pro G5 tower 1 G5 tower 2
2.5GHz i5 x 4 cores 2.0 GHz G5 x 2 CPUs 2.3 GHz G5 x 2 cores
4GB DDR3 4GB DDR 7.5GB DDR2
512MB video RAM 256MB video RAM 256MB video RAM
Intel HD4000 PCIe Radeon 9600 AGP GeForce 6600 PCIe
500GB SATA 200GB SATA 500GB SATA
runs UNIX runs UNIX runs UNIX
Mfgd. mid-2012 mid-2004 late 2005
Yeah I'm not gonna pretend that 2 cores of Intel I5 wouldn't blow away 2 cores of PowerPC or that 4~8GB of RAM was remotely common for a workstation in 2005, but I remember the ridiculous arms race around the turn of the century when we went from 166MHz and 32MB of RAM to GHz+, SMP, 64-bit instructions and 512MB in the span of like two years. Doesn't it seem like things have slowed down?
I guess the equivalent today are mobiles which have gone apesh*t crazy in the same timespan. Maybe we're running up against the limits of how powerful a full-featured desktop workstation *needs* to be.