Optimal OS for ibook G3 (white)

[MinuteBracelet]

So, I have a G3 iBook with 612 MB of ram, 800 MHZ processor, and mac os 10.4. I recently restored it to 10.4 off a friend's unneeded backup image, so now it is fully revitalized
however, I do notice that Tiger is sluggish at times on the G3 compared to it's predecessors. While this does not affect my retro gaming at all with Quake III and the likes, there are some old apps that I would like to run less... choppy. So I resolve to make a new partition on the HDD and have an older, less processor-consuming OS running alongside tiger.

TL;DR
So my Question is, for a G3 ibook of aforementioned specs, should I install panther or jaguar on the partition in terms of a balance between impact on the processor and number of apps that can be run?

 

[Aldaris]

Puma baby! Mac OS X 10.1.

 

[goMac]

Panther.

 

[tom vilsack]

puma-no! (it runs slower then jag or panther)
jaq-ok but web browsers will be to old
panther-(i have running on my clam 366 ibook)...upside is you can run firefox 2.0.0.20 that still supports most web pages today.
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/2.0.0.20/mac/en-US/

 

[Jethryn Freyman]

I'd say Tiger, I've found every successive release of OS X up to 10.5 to be a big leap ahead as far as usability goes. That's just me though, I'm the guy that used to run Leopard on a 466MHz Power Mac (way slower than Tiger, but because of app compatibility and stuff I found it to be worth it.)

 

[MinuteBracelet]

I'd say Tiger, I've found every successive release of OS X up to 10.5 to be a big leap ahead as far as usability goes. That's just me though, I'm the guy that used to run Leopard on a 466MHz Power Mac (way slower than Tiger, but because of app compatibility and stuff I found it to be worth it.)

...Where did tiger come from? the whole thread is about finding a faster OS to run alongside Tiger...
In any case, thanks everyone for your input; I'll go to my old school and see if they have any unneeded copies of panthee lying about.

 

[Jethryn Freyman]

...Where did tiger come from? the whole thread is about finding a faster OS to run alongside Tiger...
In any case, thanks everyone for your input; I'll go to my old school and see if they have any unneeded copies of panthee lying about.

LOL. oops. yeah I liked Panther, it was the first OS I ran on a Mac of my very own... certainly better than old Jag. Nothing against Jag, but at the time I used it, Jag was getting dropped behind.

 

[mkrishnan]

LOL. oops. yeah I liked Panther, it was the first OS I ran on a Mac of my very own... certainly better than old Jag. Nothing against Jag, but at the time I used it, Jag was getting dropped behind.

I think it's the RAM and not the processor that's making Tiger sluggish. When I tried Tiger on my iBook G4, if I remember correctly, it was terrible with 640MB of memory, but when I upgraded to 1.125GB, it ran really well. If OP would want to consider making Tiger work better, he/she might also consider tricks to kill Dashboard and Spotlight -- this will actually make a big difference in memory consumption. Tiger itself is actually faster on comparable hardware than Panther, IIRC by about 8-10%, once memory is out of the equation, so Tiger without these features (which are not in Panther anyways) may be faster than Panther, and will have benefits like better modern browser support.

Nontheless, Panther is a really good option. I was really happy with its stability by the final dot release.

 

[zen.state]

Panther (10.3) for sure. Thats when Apple finally got the OS X Finder right.