I’ma pull up
the SuperWikiPost from this forum to throw out the ideas of trying out maybe Void Linux, Debian sid, or even Adelie Linux as other versions which might work. OpenBSD might be another to look into. There’s also MorphOS (the direct descendant of Amiga), which has kind of an interesting licence but is known to work well on most G4s.
Oh yeah, I tried Adelie as well but I couldn't get it installed because I needed an ethernet connection and I didn't have an ethernet cable at the time, so I forfieted it. It was also a bit slow to load at times. I hear Debian is meant to be good. I know OpenBSD from Action Retro. He put it on a G3 Machine, I think and it seemed to run well on it.
Is MorphOS the one you pay for a full license? If so, I saw some videos on that, and it seems a bit limited for my tastes. But I didn't know it worked well on G4 too.
Which doesn't really exist for PowerPC - closest is Morphos but it's not compatible with your GPU.
Any other OS that is modern is also heavier than Tiger and Leopard - unless you run it from console which will limit you considerably.
Yeah I wouldn't want anything heavier than Tiger/Leopard to be honest lol. And running it from the console doesn't really seem ideal to me.
You also said you're a Linux noob - Linux hates noobs - be prepared to get your head down and start learning terminal commands
The Lubuntu remixes from
@wicknix are your best noob friendly Linux installs but if you're prepared to suffer a little, Void makes most sense - but you'll never escape the basic truth of using old hardware to try and run modern code.
Yeah, I didn't think that Linux disliked noobs that much though. I like the concept of Linux in theory and running it on a PowerPC machine, but in practice it doesn't seem to fare well, unless you have a High End G4/G5. I only have one G5 Machine (my iMac) and I don't want to mess with it until I upgrade the Harddrive to something better.
I had a go with Lubuntu 16.04 and it worked alright but it was a bit too slow on the Powerbook G4. But I guess you're right. I should go with the software that runs on it and it was designed for, even if it's been out of date for the past 14 years, at least. (Well, 15-16 for me now that I am just running Tiger).
I say stick with Tiger or Leopard, slim the installs down to the bone and enjoy all the abandonware made specifically for your hardware
Yeah, I am trying to optimise Tiger for this machine; it has a 250 GB SSD installed in it, I put 10.4.11 on it for the meantime, and I installed lightweight programs (FStream, Arctic Fox works much better than Interweb or TFF on it, I did some things in settings).
It has a big enough space, if I ever change my mind and want to dual boot Linux. IF anything good ever comes out.
It has gotten to the stage now where you really can't do all the modern things on your 20 year old PowerBook G4. It's a great little machine, but you've got to make a special use for it. Like finding your fave retro games or dedicating the machine to a specific task (or range of tasks). The general purpose use-case of a newer Mac or PC just isn't going to apply here.
I use my PowerBook G4 almost daily with a trimmed down Tiger (i.e disabled spotlight, dashboard, and a few other background tasks), as I chip away at my various projects in Xcode and Textwrangler. I can quite easily run Remote Desktop [Admin] (or ssh) on Tiger to connect to and control all my other Macs to get quick access to a modern browser and my file servers.
Yeah, it's a shame because I love the design and the 4:3 aspect ratio of it, and the iBooks too. I used to have a 14 inch iBook and I loved the screen on that. But now, it doesn't want to work. I was using it as my main portable Leopard machine until I got my firewire enclosure.
But yeah, I am using the PB G4 for radio stations, some writing and light web surfing. Nothing overly severe. It kinda sits on my desk as a media player of sorts. It can run video fine from PPCMC as well. And I am trying to strip it down as much as I can. Spotlight is a killer and I am glad I turned it off.
I can also stream music in VLC/iTunes by taking it from files/my Mac Mini server. It works a treat most of the time. It's good you can use yours for programming and screen share too. Stuff like that is simple enough.
There are PowerPC Macs being used for tasks like audio production and writing, but going online is getting trickier as each year passes. In saying that, we have simple, lightweight workarounds - Like using Retrozilla w/ Frongfind as a super-lean search console with a 2000's era tone.
I can quite easily install modern versions of tools like git, curl, python3, zsh (w/ oh-my-zsh) using MacPorts and run the old iTerm on Tiger and I am happy tinkering away on my PB12" with a decent battery for quite a few hours at a time each night, before getting thrown back into all the modern tech and services in my day job.
Frogfind is a cool search engine. Used it on my iMac G5 before to tinker around, and I like it.
Yeah, I can write for a good while on my iBook 12 inch (that is pretty much primarily a writing machine now) without being distracted, which is nice. It's good to be supported on an older machine for your needs, whenever you can be.
To kind of answer the OP; Of all the alternative operating systems for these Macs, I keep coming back to Tiger (and Leopard on the top-end G4s and G5s) as nothing else feels "quite right" and has been full of shortcomings or sub-par performance when compared to OS X. This is purely opinion, but could be part of the reason why most PowerPC linux distros have come to a halt.
Maybe I should just run Tiger, then. Linux is a nice concept, but if Tiger/Leopard is the most stable, then I might as well stay with them for now.
I concur with the other posters, especially
@Dronecatcher. If you don't want to "go through all the commands/download things to improve the performance" of Leopard, then Linux on a PPC Mac really won't be good choice for you because a significant amount of time and effort will be spent doing exactly that - and unlike macOS, there'll be no guarantee that it will even yield success.
A couple of years ago I attempted to set-up Linux on an
Intel Mac and eventually threw in the towel after
weeks of troubleshooting.
Oof. Weeks? That's so annoying! It's annoying that it didn't tell you the exact file that was corrupting the Linux version on your Air. I thought it would actually run better on an Intel Mac, and be more supported.
Stay with Tiger and tweak Leopard - actually tweak both of them. It would only take a couple of hours at the most. You won't get through Linux that quickly, especially as a noob...
Yeah, I think I will do that lol. I am sure it would take me some time and dedication to do that; if it took me almost a whole day to create an HTML 4 website page from scratch, I can't imagine how long it would take to learn Linux lol.
Adding to all the helpful advice supplied by everyone here, we have a post which summarizes some of the bigger, mostly one-time tweaks one can make with Leopard on
The Leopard Thread wikipost.
Thank you, I'll have a look. Tweaking Leopard will help a lot. I tweaked Tiger and it runs a lot better now.
It's a shame that the 12" PB's GPU rules it out, because MorphOS seems to tick most of the boxes. It's modern, lightweight, fast and has a "decent" browser, plus the ability to run 68k Amiga applications.
Yeah. I bet it probably would have ran better on my 14 inch iBook lol. It was 1.33 GHz and running Leopard before it died on me (should fix that someday, or try to).
I made a
post on my blog about this very topic and while it's non-exhaustive and very Linux-focused there's way more options than you might think.
If you follow the guide, Debian is quite easy to get going, but if you're seriously allergic to the terminal than maybe not.
OS X is the play, unless significant progress happens on the PowerPC port of Haiku-- highly unlikely.
Thank you, I had a look and you have a decent list there. Some of those options, I would never have thought about or considered using, or knew existed. I bookmarked your blog to come back to.
Yeah, I would need to spend some time learning all the commands and remembering them to use Terminal.
Hasn't Haiku been in development for years and nothing really has happened? That's a bit of a bummer but oh well, nothing we can do about it.
Sidebar, if your RAM is running at 1GHz I'm concerned please return it to stock clock speed before something goes wrong. 😅
Lol, I mean my processor is 1 GHz
My RAM is like 133 MHz BUS speed or something. Yeah 133 lol.
