I have no idea which OSX to run, and I am not even sure i need it...
You don't, but this is probably something where you should just try a few configurations, get yourself a 2TB or smaller USB drive to back up data from your Power Mac, and then just have fun rconfiguring it and trying different things.
At this point, because every single person has a different personal idea on how to do things, you're never going to decide anything if you shift gears after every single post.
I would hold off on buying anything else, except perhaps an under-128GB IDE hard disk and just start trying things out. If I'm reading correctly you already have almost two or three whole machines worth of parts and you have yet to get it to boot into an OS.
It's great to bounce ideas around, but at some point you either have to
1) think about the advice and synthesize what you think might be the best strategy
2) given that you've laid down money and have hardware in your hands, start doing things.
My main use will be to go to Macintoshgarden (and other old software sites) to down load software and burn CDs & floppies that I can use in my Color Clasic Mystic. I am going to use this Yikes! so I can surf slightly faster then my Color Classic using Netscape 4.08. It works, but it is so darn slow...
So:
Macintosh Garden will be Fine(TM) on a G3. Like I said, I use it on a beige g3/300 in netscape 4.08 and 4.7 and on my 8600/300 and it's "fine." It will still look ugly in almost any browser on OS 9, but it should run a lot faster.
Hell, given how fast your "CC" is, you could have just bought a SCSI CD burner by now and burned all your software archives using it.
Yes, that works, but it is jut too slow....
That's at least some of the charm! I think that's
most of why there's such a huge obsession with web browsing on vintage Macs. It used to be reasonably possible. Hell, a machine like your CC would've been annoying-but-competent into almost 2002 or 2003, depending on your needs. I was using an 840av and Perf578 for all my Internet needs at that time, sometimes either alongside of or instead of my iMac/233 and TiBook. (Later, in around 2005-2006 or so, my 840 I used as an IRC and AIM box alongside the TiBook when it was working on video and photo management work, which consumed all its resources at the time)
A <400mhz G3 running Classzilla truthfully isn't going to be "that" much better.
It will be faster, especially if you use a period browser instead of Classilla, but it will not render the page better.
Also keep in mind, the web of today is 100x the size of the web of 1999/2000 (the Heyday of the B+W G3), I mean this in a filesize way.. not in a content way (although probably true there too). Javascript is a real bitch for G3/G4's to process.
There's a different, larger problem being worked on from a few fronts, such as
vtools (
discussion) and
this member's archive (
discussion) along with
System 7 Today , which alleviate this specific problem. Because, you're exactly right here - the problem is largely that the place where these files are being stored aren't very compatible with the old machines we want to use the info on. I couldn't get Macintosh Repository to allow Netscape 4.x on my G3 to download anything at all. Macintosh Garden downloads but the modern site relies heavily on technologies that outright do not work in v4 browsers, so it's annoying.
Anecdotally I remember Photoshop CS2 for Mac OS X being really painful to use on a 350 MHz G3 slot loading iMac.
In my experience, and of course I'm imagining that our workloads were different, it was Fine(TM) on my G3/450 (yikes with a G3 CUP) and Pismo/500 -- both of which have 1MB L2 cache.
In particular, because my most intensive tasks at the time (because iphoto and aperture just utterly barfed on my tibook) were building contact sheets out of NEFs and DNGs, I think the bad disk on the stock tibook vs. the faster disks I had in my G3s made a HUGE difference.
Between a better disk (by a little bit) and the much faster Intel CPU and dual cores, (even with the overhead of Rosetta) the first-gen 1.83 MacBook Pro did that task just about as well -- but
that hardware was much better at Aperture and iPhoto, negating the reason I ran CS2 in the first place.
Again, my primary benchmark was to point Bridge at a folder of 30 or 36 DNG files and tell it to make a 600dpi contact sheet with some default-for-the-size sharpening filter applied. The G4 would obviously have run a Gaussian Blur faster.
Of course, it's important to note that CS2 is from, like... 2005 or 2006. Photoshop 7 (the carbon version, which is both the last that runs on 9.x and the first that runs on X 10.x) should be faster, and 5 or 6, which are actually contemporary to the B&W, should be faster, to the extent that they've just slimmer programs.
Another shout out to GraphicConverter, by the by - for the things I tend to need to do on my old Macs (converting piles of PICTs to something modern) it does an admirable job and is easily batchable. If you're looking for conversions, crops, and similar basic tasks, GC is great. Last time I tried it, the most modern version still opens PICTs on new Macs, too.