Usability of 10.3.9 in 2017

[TarableCode]

Hiya!

I've tried a few operating systems on my clamshell iBook SE and so far OS9 and Panther are the only ones that run well or have a somewhat decent amount of available software.

Panther runs fairly well with 576MB aside from the graphics being laggy which I kind of expect.

Tiger issues:
Too goddamn slow.

Panther issues:

SSH Client is too old to connect to modern servers.

Needing a different browser for various applications, the most annoying being that Safari works great sometimes but will not load any https sites at all.

OS9 Issues:

SSH Client is too old to connect to modern servers, is fairly slow.

While Classilla is an amazing browser, some sites (like my mini router/wifi adapter thingy's config page) do not work correctly.

Linux Issues:

No. Just no.

Even though there is Xorg acceleration it's slower than dog balls in January even with an SSD.

I did manage to compile dropbear under Panther which works fine for SSH, the best browser still escapes me though.

Are there any good hacks/workarounds to increasing the usability of Panther?

 

[Gorgonops]

Tiger issues:

Too goddamn slow.

Have you tried disabling Dashboard and/or Spotlight? Those are the go-to suggestions for cutting the fat out of Tiger on slower hardware. Supposedly with them disabled and not sucking up RAM and CPU/Disk in the background it's no slower overall than Panther is.

 

[johnklos]

I'm curious whether Panther really is all that much faster than Tiger. Sure, when Spotlight is running it's pretty pokey, but leaving the machine on overnight usually fixes that.

I have Tiger on my original tray-loading iMac with a Sonnet G3 accelerator and 512 megs of memory. It's not fast, but I keep all my movies on it (via a 2 TB drive) and use it when I want to run Classic apps. It also acts as a print server for an ImageWriter II. But I've never felt like it was TOO slow - just a little pokey.

BTW - NetBSD's pkgsrc still supports Tiger, so lots of newer software can be compiled easily. I don't know whether anyone has tested Panther lately, though. It might be worth a try.

 

[TarableCode]

I can try disabling spotlight and dashboard and see how it goes, SuperDuper is currently backing up my Panther installation (A whopping 1MB/s over FW) so I can go back easy enough.

I guess time to desktop from the chime is the easiest way of measuring?

 

[johnklos]

Booting time doesn't mean much because it can change so much from one boot to another.

How about the time it takes to launch half a dozen common apps until all of them are ready to be used?

 

[commodorejohn]

Disabling the glitz effects (drop shadow, etc.) on Tiger is also a good way to perk it up a tad on hardware with weaker GPUs.

 

[Gorgonops]

I'm pretty sure I killed Dashboard on the tiger install on my B&W G3(4) but left Spotlight alone. As johnklos notes it shouldn't be much of a problem once it's done indexing, which can indeed take a while to complete originally.  Dashboard is more of a memory hog than a CPU hog per-se so I never found it an issue on my G4 Powerbooks (which typically had 1GB or more), but the B&W only had 640MB, which was low enough that Dashboard was borderline problematic.

Honestly I don't really recall any meaningful speed differences in OS X between 10.2 and 10.4. (10.2 was a huge improvement on point zero and one, which were still effectively public betas so far as I'm concerned.) I would caution that "boot time" is a pretty bad way to really judge the speed or overhead of an OS. A fundamentally faster OS may well have to do more initialization at startup than a slower one; it could be spinning its wheels for a few seconds on something completely incidental like the startup queries made by a network daemon or something that has *zero* impact on its performance later.

 

[bunnspecial]

I've found Tiger more than acceptable on the Clamshells where I've run it.

I leave Spotlight on because I use it(one of the killer features that I always miss in earlier OS X versions when I use them) butt the key is giving it time to index. Once that's done, it really isn't so much of a resource hog.

Disabling eye candy DOES help a lot also, especially with lower powered GPUs. Fortunately Tiger can at least get hardware acceleration out of the Rage graphics in a Clamshell.

 

[TarableCode]

Okay, I guess the better test is to use it for a few days to a week and see how well it runs

 

[TarableCode]

So far, so good.

Webkit based browsers kept complaining about certificates, I installed new ones from my El Capitan installation and it's at least connecting to sites now albeit with a warning message.

Unfortunately TenFourFox is not usable with this machine so I'll keep looking for more workarounds.

Bonuses so far:

SSHFS Is waaaaay better than tunneling AFP over SSH

OpenSSH can actually connect to my server

It's pretty snappy provided all the animations are disabled.

I think I might stick with 10.4 for development and just boot into MacOS 9 for classic gaming or when I wanna go full hipster.

 

[olePigeon]

I'm sort of a Go Classic or Go Home person.  The PowerPC OS X days were so short that I don't have any games or software that don't also run under Classic.

 

[IPalindromeI]

By guess: TLS libraries for old OS X are too old to support things like TLSv1.2. Grafting on newer OpenSSL could be difficult.

My recommendation: Have you considered implementing the needful^W SSH VFS for ye olde Mac OS?

 

[TarableCode]

I've considered it but MacOS programming docs seem to be few and far between and the way back machine only seems to have parts of the Apple developer site from that era.

That being said I don't see why something like Dropbear couldn't be ported to Classic MacOS, I'm not sure about the availability of BSD sockets though because of the sparse documentation.

Any bits of time I spend programming go to my 3DS port of Mini vMac, and that's if I'm in the mood.

 

[ibmxt286]

I like the way olePigeon thinks. Classic was great on G3 and G4 hardware. On a quad G5 though, I have to disagree there. Any quad G5 should be maxed out on ram (8gb?) and run Leopard SDRAM, DDR, and DDR2 are so cheap to find that there is no reason not to max older macs out on RAM. As to the OP's original post, I feel your pain. It seems as if every website is going SSL even when that's entirely unnessesary. 10.4 isn't slow as you might think - its all the HTML5 and CSS and "newer" web crap that eats up CPU time. I happen to be writing this post on Clasilla on OS9 on a sawtooth g4 and the speed is fine, but this site doesn't use up CPU power like Youtube/facebook do. Its all about how the website was written.

 

[Cory5412]

Quad can run 16 gigs of RAM, but not very much in the way of OS X software is 64-bit capable and none of the browsers that run on Leopard are multi-process, so I don't know if it will really make any difference to have 16 gigs of RAM, unless Compressor or a 3d rendering app is multi-process, at which point having sixteen gigs of RAM might make a difference. (Though I don't often see Compressor processes using more than a couple of gigs of RAM on my Mac mini, which has four threads.)

Regarding 10.2/3/4 - back in the day on my TiBook, I noticed a healthy speed increase from 10.2 to 10.3, it was the default narrative (and this was generally borne out by testing if I remember correctly) that each version of OS X improved speed.

10.4 did not make my Macs feel faster, although I don't believe I ever perfected the techniques of disabling the dashboard. 10.4 was perfectly usable on my systems, but I never really liked it. I got rid of all that hardware before 10.5 came out, but on my Intel-based iMacs, I liked 10.5 a lot better than 10.4, probably due more to lingering disappointment with how bad my 10.4 experience was (frequent crashes, perceived performance decrease) on my PPC hardware than due to 10.4 actually being any bad in 2006-2007 on Intel hardware.

 

[Cory5412]

About using 10.3/10.4 today: I never felt either was that bad on my G3, although that was a desktop /450-1M with a 16M Rage128 and anywhere between 586 and 896 megs of RAM, depending on the time, plus desktop hard disks.

I was annoyed with 10.4, but it was probably more problematic on my TiBook than on my G3, but what wasn't, right?

 

[TarableCode]

So far 10.4 has been very good to me after all the graphical bells and whistles have been disabled.

I've been using it (with the help of my server) for programming, and all of my latest commits to my github were done with this setup.

Not bad for when you wanna get stuff done and not be distracted by having a powerful enough computer to be distracted on.

 

[Gorgonops]

not be distracted by having a powerful enough computer to be distracted on.

Heh. Just the other day out of curiosity I decided I wanted to know how how a Raspberry Pi stacked up against a Powerbook G4 at least in some abstract sense, so I dug around and according to Geekbench 2 a Raspberry Pi 3 is about twice as fast as the fastest G4 PB they ever shipped. Or to put an even finer point on it, something like the iBook SE comes in at 70% as fast as a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero.

So, yeah, you sort of have to set your expectations accordingly.

 

[ibmxt286]

Gorgonops, you bring up an excellent point. I have customers all the time who tell me their phone is faster than their PC. Once customer who said this was running a Dual-Core AMD from 2008 with 4 GB of ram and Windows XP 32 Bit. XP only could see about 3.3 GB of this, of course. To his credit, he WAS running a current version of Firefox for his web browser. But he complained that even with minimal processes running, youtube videos and facebook were "dog slow". He mentioned his LG G5 was much "faster". I have never quite understood this myself and I didn't have an answer for him