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Projects For Old Versions of OS X

You're all very welcome, although really I made these things for my own use. That's why a lot of them are explicitly for 10.9 Mavericks, the OS I run. I bring Snow Leopard and similar versions along for the ride when I can.

IMO, the real heroes are (1) Bluebox, who maintains Chromium Legacy (it's just one app, but it's an absolutely critical one) and (2) the various MacPorts developers, such as @kencu, who are keeping developer toolchains backwards compatible. That stuff is a lot more work (and takes more skill) than anything on my page, and nothing I've done could exist without it.

I think the weather widget is the only thing with PPC support. I said this on Hacker News yesterday, but I don't personally have any affection for old hardware, except insofar as it allows me to run certain old software. I'm running Mavericks on the newest, fastest hardware I possibly can.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
Which, being of the Haswell generation, is nearing eight or nine years old. :)
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The thing about my 4790K, though, is that while it's not exactly new, its performance is perfectly competitive with modern hardware.

One of these days I really want to get Mavericks working on Ryzen. A custom kernel exists, it's reported to work, and I even had it working myself minus graphics acceleration... if only I'd had more graphics cards to try out before I had to return the cpu...
 
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Wowfunhappy said:
I'm running Mavericks on the newest, fastest hardware I possibly can.
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The latest G5s are quite okay even by modern standards. Well, they aren’t the fastest, admittedly, but compilation speed on my G5 Quad is comparable with that of MacMini Server 2012. And I run a developer release of 10.6 on the Quad – hardly too much optimized OS.
 
barracuda156 said:
The latest G5s are quite okay even by modern standards. Well, they aren’t the fastest, admittedly, but compilation speed on my G5 Quad is comparable with that of MacMini Server 2012. And I run a developer release of 10.6 on the Quad – hardly too much optimized OS.
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I don't mean to get into a holy war, but: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=PowerMac-Intel-KBL

These charts don't include a 4790K, but the 4770K is close.

You guys do great things with your PowerMacs, but I need more speed than that! It's basically my only computer. (I have a much weaker laptop that also runs Mavericks and a PC I use exclusively for video games.)
 
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Amethyst1 said:
Exact same code, compiler and OS?
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Exactly same is impossible for obvious reasons :)

I was building some version of gcc (likely 10.2 or 10.3) not too long ago on both machines and had time tracked. Quad was marginally slower. (And with ppc code it is considerably faster, of course.)
 
Wowfunhappy said:
I don't mean to get into a holy war, but: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=PowerMac-Intel-KBL

These charts don't include a 4790K, but the 4770K is close.

You guys do great things with your PowerMacs, but I need more speed than that! It's my only computer.
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His PowerMac G5 v2 with the PPC970 is dual-core and clocks up to 2.0GHz. This Apple computer has 2GB of RAM, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra graphics, and was running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with the Linux 4.4 kernel and GCC 5.4 compiler.

Neither I mean to get into a holy war, but just to note: he used results provided by somebody with a low-end G5, minimal RAM, low-end GPU, running a random Linux and an ancient gcc (and I bet HDD, not SSD). Perhaps not the best choice to compare against the modern machines.
 
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I don't think I could live off of a 2012 Mac Mini either!

When I'm not at home, I use an 11-inch 2014 Macbook Air, with 8 GB of memory and an i7-4650U (the most powerful Mavericks-compatible Mac in this form factor). It's perfect for e.g. taking notes in class (I'm in grad school getting a teaching degree), but even during casual use I can absolutely feel the speed difference.

By contrast, when I use e.g. a modern iMac at the Apple Store, I don't feel like it's any faster than my desktop. If anything, the iMac is ever-so-slightly more sluggish, presumably due to modern macOS bloat.

Which, again, isn't to say I wouldn't jump to something even faster if I could! I'm just not sure how to do another Ryzen experiment without potentially wasting tons of time and money.
 
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Wowfunhappy said:
When I'm not at home, I use an 11-inch 2014 Macbook Air, with 8 GB of memory and an i7-4650U […] but even during casual use I can absolutely feel the speed difference.
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The MBA’s biggest Achilles heel is its dual-core CPU.

Wowfunhappy said:
I don't think I could live off of a 2012 Mac Mini either!
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If it has the quad-core i7 (i.e. is the Server model), 16 GB RAM, an SSD and a good eGPU hooked up via Thunderbolt, it’s still a powerful little bugger.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
The MBA’s biggest Achilles heel is its dual-core CPU.
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Mine has two cores and four threads, and regularly boosts to over 3 ghz. It's hard to know what's contributing to subjective performance, but I don't do a lot of multi-tasking on my laptop, so I usually suspect I'm more limited by single core performance.

You might be right about the Mini of course, 16 GB of memory and especially an eGPU probably makes a big difference! Of course, my Mavericks desktop has 32 GB of memory and a GPU that can use the full bandwidth of PCIe x16! :)
 
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Amethyst1 said:
So you built x86_64 code on the 2012 mini and ppc64 code on the G5? What OS and compiler?
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I believe I just mentioned the compiler above – gcc10 (less likely gcc11). gcc compiles itself :)
(Well, technically speaking stage0 is built with OS gcc-4.2, stage1 and stage2 with itself.)

I got 10.5.8 and 10.6 on G5 Quad. Either of these against 10.6.8 on MacMini. Both are quad-core with 16GB RAM.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
They probably are, depending on what you’re using them for of course — but they use lots of power for the performance you’re getting.
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Well, of course a 2005 machine won’t be literally on the same level as 2020 one. What I meant to say is that latest G5s are fast enough to be usable without discomfort even now: while they may lose in specific tests (esp where the code is optimised for Intel), subjectively they offer adequate performance. Using PowerBook G4 now is just painful, for comparison. If only there existed PowerBook G5s, I could stay on PowerPC completely.
 
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Sigh.

So this seems to have been picked up by a French blog: https://forums.macg.co/threads/re-installer-os-x-maverick-ou-mieux-si-possible.1373053/

Normally I'd be excited—and I mostly am, I think! But they seem to think I created Chromium Legacy. :(

I understand that this is a little confusing, since I make a Preference Pane I've dubbed the "Chromium Legacy Downloader". I try to explain in the readme:

Chromium Legacy is a version of the Google Chrome / Chromium web browser which has been modified to work on OS X 10.7 – 10.10. It was created and is maintained by Bluebox, who deserves massive kudos for his work.

The Chromium Legacy Downloader is a Preference Pane created by me, Wowfunhappy. It fixes some additional bugs and inconsistencies in the original Chromium Legacy, and it adds automatic updates. If you encounter a problem with this Preference Pane, or with installing updates, please email me, or leave a comment on this Github Discussion. Please do not report your issue to Bluebox.

I am proud of my Preference Pane, and I consider it the best way to use Chromium Legacy. However, it is a comparatively small project compared to Chromium Legacy as a whole. Please send your appreciation to Bluebox, who continues to do incredible work to make web browsing possible on old versions of OS X.
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But to see this, you have to actually read the readme.

While I don't want to get credit for anyone else's work, I especially don't want it for BlueBox. I am very reliant on Chromium Legacy, and quite frankly I want Bluebox to be motivated to keep maintaining it for as long as possible. I don't have the skill or the hardware.

At the same time, I think my downloader makes some significant improvements, so I do want to tell people about it.

I asked someone who reads this blog (and so presumably speaks French) if they can get in touch with the writer and correct the error...
 
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barracuda156 said:
Of course I refer to the native running OS.
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Does it recognise 8 threads and is the CPU confirmed to be running at full speed on 10.6.8? (If running 10.6.8 on a 2011 mini, some adjustments have to be made for that to be the case... but these are not applicable to a 2012 mini. We've already looked at this IIRC.)
 
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