We all know about the efforts running Snow Leopard on PPC machines: running pre-release builds and replacing extensions to make it a somewhat usable upgrade for our machines. As I was working on porting reverse engineered games on 10.4.11, I wondered why I kept using Tiger when Leopard exists. For example, Tiger is stuck on OpenGL 1.5, thus making use of software rendering and severely limiting performance of ported 3d games (as can be read about in the GTA III PPC thread last year). Leopard is an obvious upgrade if you want more performance and application support, with the biggest dealbreaker being the dropped Classic support.
So after about 2 years of primarily using Tiger, I decided to try out Leopard. While all the new features and improved 3d gaming performance were welcome, I hated the UI. It felt annoyingly bloated with eye candy, and also dropped theming compatibility due to large UI changes between the versions. I want my pinstripe theme back! I wished I had something in-between, something familiar looking yet with the under-the-hood upgrades... it got me thinking, what about the Leopard pre-releases?...
Let's try and find the last themable Leopard build.
9A241 is the first dev build and the first one I tried. While OpenGL 2.0 was loaded, the graphical performance wasn't improved, and I had problems with Spotlight and disk images not unmounting. TenFourFox/Interweb PPC kept crashing as well and both Tiger and Leopard Webkit did not work. It might have been because I installed the beta on the same drive (I did not upgrade my 10.4.11 install, I picked the option to move the existing install to a separate folder, but I realized it still kept some folders). I was successfully able to theme by using ThemePark to first make a project of an applied theme on 10.4.11, and then re-exporting and applying with ThemeChanger on this build. Even though ThemeChanger crashes, it still manages to apply it.
9A343 is the last preview build before visible UI changes and the next one I tried. Spotlight was extremely buggy and unusable, but at least I could browse the web with TFF. ThemePark crashes and ThemeChanger could not apply a theme, so this seemed too close to the UI overhaul. In particular, the Terminal in this build introduces tabbed views, so it seems a lot of underlying code changes were made.
9A303 is the last known build for G3 processors and the current build I'm running. It seems to have fixed the issues from my 9A241 install and the user experience is surprisingly bug-free - everything seems to be working fine (maybe because I installed on a fresh drive). There are some smaller issues like time synchronization breaking, but you can fix it with the terminal, anyways.
9A321 is the third preview build. I have not tried this yet since I have been trying out using 9A303 for serious tasks, but I wouldn't doubt it had some minor improvements before the UI changes.
However. A lot of testing needs to be done to double check the functionality of Tiger apps as well as the built-in apps and features like Time Machine. It would be really sweet to get the Tiger Webkit build working too since it seems to have a hard cap due to seeing the 10.5 version number. If there was a way to fake the OS version for specific apps, maybe it could be useful.
So after about 2 years of primarily using Tiger, I decided to try out Leopard. While all the new features and improved 3d gaming performance were welcome, I hated the UI. It felt annoyingly bloated with eye candy, and also dropped theming compatibility due to large UI changes between the versions. I want my pinstripe theme back! I wished I had something in-between, something familiar looking yet with the under-the-hood upgrades... it got me thinking, what about the Leopard pre-releases?...
Let's try and find the last themable Leopard build.
OS X Leopard Pre-releases
Over at Macintosh Garden, there are four builds I was interested in trying as they are builds before the UI overhaul. 9A241, 9A303, 9A321 and 9A343. Notably, 9A321 drops support for G3 processors, and all of them has already removed Classic (interesting thread here about readding classic to Leopard) and added Time Machine. None of the builds can run Leopard-only apps (or at least the few I tried) but they all are mostly capable of running Tiger software.9A241 is the first dev build and the first one I tried. While OpenGL 2.0 was loaded, the graphical performance wasn't improved, and I had problems with Spotlight and disk images not unmounting. TenFourFox/Interweb PPC kept crashing as well and both Tiger and Leopard Webkit did not work. It might have been because I installed the beta on the same drive (I did not upgrade my 10.4.11 install, I picked the option to move the existing install to a separate folder, but I realized it still kept some folders). I was successfully able to theme by using ThemePark to first make a project of an applied theme on 10.4.11, and then re-exporting and applying with ThemeChanger on this build. Even though ThemeChanger crashes, it still manages to apply it.
9A343 is the last preview build before visible UI changes and the next one I tried. Spotlight was extremely buggy and unusable, but at least I could browse the web with TFF. ThemePark crashes and ThemeChanger could not apply a theme, so this seemed too close to the UI overhaul. In particular, the Terminal in this build introduces tabbed views, so it seems a lot of underlying code changes were made.
9A303 is the last known build for G3 processors and the current build I'm running. It seems to have fixed the issues from my 9A241 install and the user experience is surprisingly bug-free - everything seems to be working fine (maybe because I installed on a fresh drive). There are some smaller issues like time synchronization breaking, but you can fix it with the terminal, anyways.
9A321 is the third preview build. I have not tried this yet since I have been trying out using 9A303 for serious tasks, but I wouldn't doubt it had some minor improvements before the UI changes.
Developing
Since I develop on the OS X, it is also important to see if my tools actually work. A preview build of Xcode is bundled with the installation media and it works fairly well, I am able to open projects and compile them, although sometimes crashing out of the blue. What's more important to me is the terminal which took more time to figure out. I used Tigerbrew on my previous install, but since Leopard applications basically don't work on these dev builds, it got confused - but faking my version to be 10.4 in the tigerbrew files makes installing and running tools work correctly. Along the same lines, don't bother with Xcode for Leopard - the included utilities doesn't work. However, if you manage to compile newer versions of gcc from source, they seem to work correctly.Thoughts so far
So after the initial experimentation, I have to say this is a pretty usable upgrade. I had to accept the removal of Classic, but beyond that, it almost feels like a 10.4.12 with a few usability upgrades - which seems like how you should be treating these preview builds. It's like Tiger, but better, but still no 10.5 app support. So, a better Tiger. The user interface keeps the lightweight feeling and it even feels a bit snappier than both retail versions.However. A lot of testing needs to be done to double check the functionality of Tiger apps as well as the built-in apps and features like Time Machine. It would be really sweet to get the Tiger Webkit build working too since it seems to have a hard cap due to seeing the 10.5 version number. If there was a way to fake the OS version for specific apps, maybe it could be useful.
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