iMac G3

Why not go with Jaguar if you already have the CDs for it and see how it suits you? It worked fine for me on my iMac G3 (a later generation to yours). I did upgrade to Panther however and I preferred it to Jaguar. It's an excellent OS in fact, though Jaguar was perfectly decent.

There will doubtless be various technical reasons why one of these OS releases will be the best option for your particular iMac model, but if you're upgrading memory and hard drive maybe Panther will turn out to be the better choice.

Maybe someone else on the forum can confirm for sure which would be your best option? Sorry I can't be more helpful.

From working with various PowerMacs and iBooks over the years, I can tell you that Panther is probably going to be the best OS. Although I have limited knowledge working with Jaguar specifically, Panther seemed to be a more stable OS on the various machines I've ran it on. Panther also has more application support and browsers (even though they are still outdated) compared to Jaguar. Obviously the more RAM you have, the better your Mac will run. The larger HDD will also give you a lot more room to work with (especially if you plan on running both OS 9.2 and OS X).

If you have Tiger, Tiger should also work fine on the iMac G3 (if it meets the requirements) and would have a lot more application support and web browser support than even Panther. Running Tiger though would require more RAM specifically, and Tiger is very heavy on RAM usage due to extra features running (like dashboard, spotlight... which can be disabled manually, though).

I would put Tiger on it. I have an old PowerBook G3 Lombard (400MHz CPU, and 512 MB Ram) and Tiger runs acceptable for browsing without flash, and perfect for wordprocessing.
So your machine with 1 GB Ram would be even better.

I use Camino on the PowerBook as a browser.

pistooli said:

I would put Tiger on it. I have an old PowerBook G3 Lombard (400MHz CPU, and 512 MB Ram) and Tiger runs acceptable for browsing without flash, and perfect for wordprocessing.
So your machine with 1 GB Ram would be even better.

I use Camino on the PowerBook as a browser.

Click to expand...

I agree completely.

@OP: I use Tiger on my iMac G3 (check signature) and it runs surprisingly well for its age. I can do some light web browsing (no flash, obviously) and I've even written a few papers on it. Granted, I have a faster processor, but my iMac certainly isn't leaps and bounds from yours. Also, another good reason to install Tiger is its compatibility with the web browser TenFourFox. I'm not alone in saying that it's an awesome PPC web browser (I used to use a G3 optimized build of Camino). Also, do your best to optimize the OS to help even more (disable spotlight and dashboard, change dock to 2D mode, change minimize effect to "scale" instead of "genie", etc. If you need help figuring out how to do these things, there are TONS of PowerPC optimization guides out there.

EDIT: Also forgot to mention that I use Tiger on my iBook as well.

I have the same iMac with maxed ram. It runs 10.4 fine and with Mactubes, it watches youtube vids with quicktime instead of flash.