Sorbet Leopard vs 10.4?

[shaocaholica]

Back in 2013 when I was into PPC the last time I was always told 10.4.x was the fastest OS on PPC especially G4s. I only have G4s and G5s. I'm now seeing stuff about Sorbet Leopard and was curious if it would run any better than 10.4.x on my 1.67ghz G4 powerbook? Right now I'm just doing web browsing, Lightroom and photoshop on this powerbook.

 

[ww2_1943]

In my experience on a G4 that powerful, it will run just as smooth and fast. My only issue with Sorbet Leopard is there are some missing 64-bit dependencies (I think that is the right term) that will throw errors on a G5. On the G4, you should be good to go. Some people will point out that you can optimize a vanilla install of Leopard tailored to your liking and needs. Sorbet is a nice out of the box experience depending on your needs. The other thing to keep in mind is if you want to run Classic. You can't do that in Leopard and I have found that most things that work with Leopard, also work with 10.4.11.

 

[eyoungren]

Back in 2013 when I was into PPC the last time I was always told 10.4.x was the fastest OS on PPC especially G4s. I only have G4s and G5s. I'm now seeing stuff about Sorbet Leopard and was curious if it would run any better than 10.4.x on my 1.67ghz G4 powerbook? Right now I'm just doing web browsing, Lightroom and photoshop on this powerbook.

Sorbet Leopard is the end result of a thread that was started on this forum about optimizing Leopard. The dev was a member here (still is I think, just not as frequent) and took that thread as well as some other optimizations and put it all together in a nice installer package.

I have never installed Sorbet because at the time all my PowerPC Macs were already running Leopard. I would suspect though that in some areas it may be comparable in speed to Tiger, but not in everything.

Tiger is faster because it's a lighter OS. But Leopard has features and stability that Tiger does not. As optimized as Sorbet Leopard is, that I do not believe has changed.

 

[barracuda156]

My only issue with Sorbet Leopard is there are some missing 64-bit dependencies (I think that is the right term) that will throw errors on a G5.

Instead of tweaking the OS to a state of being broken, it could be worth just using a normal 10.5.8, if ppc64 is a consideration.

 

[barracuda156]

Back in 2013 when I was into PPC the last time I was always told 10.4.x was the fastest OS on PPC especially G4s. I only have G4s and G5s. I'm now seeing stuff about Sorbet Leopard and was curious if it would run any better than 10.4.x on my 1.67ghz G4 powerbook? Right now I'm just doing web browsing, Lightroom and photoshop on this powerbook.

As always, if you want the best stability, go for the normal 10.5.8. If you want newer software, go for 10.6.8.
If the hardware cannot handle either, go for 10.4.11.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Back in 2013 when I was into PPC the last time I was always told 10.4.x was the fastest OS on PPC especially G4s. I only have G4s and G5s. I'm now seeing stuff about Sorbet Leopard and was curious if it would run any better than 10.4.x on my 1.67ghz G4 powerbook? Right now I'm just doing web browsing, Lightroom and photoshop on this powerbook.

You might find this interesting:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/tiger-vs-leopard-2022-edition.2360713/

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

You might find this interesting:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/tiger-vs-leopard-2022-edition.2360713/

There is also Shuriken; tweaked Tiger.

 

[Jubadub]

Quick facts:

Tiger is the fastest OS X. Even compared to previous OS X versions.

Mac OS 9.2.2 is the fastest Mac OS (among versions with Appearance Manager present).

Mac OS is faster than OS X.

TL;DR Mac OS 9.2.2 is MUCH faster than Tiger, which is faster than Leopard ("Sorbet" or otherwise) and later

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Regarding Tiger vs. Leopard and later, Tiger has more features in some regards, the most obvious one being Classic (which is much better in Jaguar, but they all suck compared to running native Mac OS), and being able to use the command line interface without password when there's a password prompt, unlike Leopard, which requires you to uselessly waste time by REQUIRING your current user to have a password, else whatever you were trying to get done SILENTLY fails, which is MASSIVELY unproductive (and will leave you confused as to why it's not working).

 

[barracuda156]

Quick facts:

Tiger is the fastest OS X. Even compared to previous OS X versions.

You mean GUI on a slower hardware? I don’t buy that 10.4 will be faster on the Quad as compared to 10.5 or 10.6, as long as GUI bells & whistles are off, that too consistently so. And I assume nobody tested CLI at all.

TL;DR Mac OS 9.2.2 is MUCH faster than Tiger, which is faster than Leopard ("Sorbet" or otherwise) and later

Such uniform claims always sound strange, already because no one would have preferred Leopard at all, if Tiger was much faster, back then when it was introduced and anyone could compare directly on then-current hardware. In such a case Leopard would be a total failure, which is not the case. Sure enough, Tiger might be faster in specific tasks and/or on specific hardware.

and being able to use the command line interface without password when there's a password prompt, unlike Leopard, which requires you to uselessly waste time by REQUIRING your current user to have a password, else whatever you were trying to get done SILENTLY fails, which is MASSIVELY unproductive (and will leave you confused as to why it's not working).

I.e. Tiger has garbage security, okay.

Anyway, `su` starts root session, which should not keep requiring password, if I remember correctly. It is also probably possible to set the time-out for a password once entered, without using `su`.
I don’t get what you mean by “silently” failing – could you clarify?

 

[eyoungren]

Quick facts:

Tiger is the fastest OS X. Even compared to previous OS X versions.

Mac OS 9.2.2 is the fastest Mac OS (among versions with Appearance Manager present).

Mac OS is faster than OS X.

TL;DR Mac OS 9.2.2 is MUCH faster than Tiger, which is faster than Leopard ("Sorbet" or otherwise) and later

----------

Regarding Tiger vs. Leopard and later, Tiger has more features in some regards, the most obvious one being Classic (which is much better in Jaguar, but they all suck compared to running native Mac OS), and being able to use the command line interface without password when there's a password prompt, unlike Leopard, which requires you to uselessly waste time by REQUIRING your current user to have a password, else whatever you were trying to get done SILENTLY fails, which is MASSIVELY unproductive (and will leave you confused as to why it's not working).

You're passionate about OS9. Great, that's awesome.

I HATE IT!

I hate it about as much as you seem to love it. It was the OS I used from 1999 to 2004 for paying jobs and it sucked.

But if speed is the be all, end all for any OS to you, then yeah - OS9.

I need/want functionality. OS 9 ain't it for me.

 

[Doq]

Unless it's actually hindering your ability to use your machine, which OS it runs doesn't really matter.

These performances differences are single digit percent, maybe 10% at best.

End of the day, if it runs the software you want, it's a good choice.

 

[Project Alice]

I typically dual boot 10.5.8 and 10.4.11.
More recently, on my “main” PowerBook (15” 1.5GHz Aluminum) I replaced 10.4.11 with 10.2.8 as the main the I used Tiger for was classic apps, or some older games. Leopard takes care of everything else.

Personally, and I feel like I’ll be the minority here but I find Leopard (vanilla 10.5.8, not Sorbet) to be more solid, less buggy than Tiger. Tiger is faster, especially if you don’t have a Core Image capable GPU. But I to this to day notice even small but noticeable bugs show up in Tiger where I don’t notice any in Leopard. And Leopard starts feeling a lot faster with Core Image. This is the type of question where you need to ask yourself what your usecase is.

I’ve ran Sorbet, and I ended up going back to vanilla Leopard. Where I never had a problem with Leopard, I’d have some miscellaneous bugs and instabilities arise with the modded image. A lot of the useful optimizations can be done yourself if wanted such as disabling spotlight or dashboard or whatever else.

 

[eyoungren]

I typically dual boot 10.5.8 and 10.4.11.
More recently, on my “main” PowerBook (15” 1.5GHz Aluminum) I replaced 10.4.11 with 10.2.8 as the main the I used Tiger for was classic apps, or some older games. Leopard takes care of everything else.

Personally, and I feel like I’ll be the minority here but I find Leopard (vanilla 10.5.8, not Sorbet) to be more solid, less buggy than Tiger. Tiger is faster, especially if you don’t have a Core Image capable GPU. But I to this to day notice even small but noticeable bugs show up in Tiger where I don’t notice any in Leopard. And Leopard starts feeling a lot faster with Core Image. This is the type of question where you need to ask yourself what your usecase is.

I’ve ran Sorbet, and I ended up going back to vanilla Leopard. Where I never had a problem with Leopard, I’d have some miscellaneous bugs and instabilities arise with the modded image. A lot of the useful optimizations can be done yourself if wanted such as disabling spotlight or dashboard or whatever else.

The issues with Tiger become more pronounced when you start working with PCs and PC servers. I became adept at stopping myself from doing more than one file copy, file move, or file deletion at a time in Finder. Anymore than one operation at a time and Tiger tended to beachball.

 

[iBookmaster]

On all my G4 iMacs I have partitioned them with 10.2.8, 10.3.9, 10.4.11/Shiruken & 10.5.9/Sorbet Leopard. I boot to which one I want to mess with. Most of the time I am just playing music on iTunes with the best iTunes plugin ever VolumeLogic with Mac OS 10.3. I have VolumeLogic working on all but 10.2. Mac OS 10.3 feels the fastest but, 10.5 is probably the best usable OS of the 4. My Agfa Snapscan software works on all of them. I have Adobe Creative Suite 1 installed on them and that works great. My 2 favorite games on some of them...Apeiron and Arcade Typing Tutor. I even have PageMaker 4.2 and 7.0 installed on the ones that can run Classic. A solid state hard drive makes them all run so fast. I still love the old G4 iMacs!

 

[eyoungren]

On all my G4 iMacs I have partitioned them with 10.2.8, 10.3.9, 10.4.11/Shiruken & 10.5.9/Sorbet Leopard. I boot to which one I want to mess with. Most of the time I am just playing music on iTunes with the best iTunes plugin ever VolumeLogic with Mac OS 10.3. I have VolumeLogic working on all but 10.2. Mac OS 10.3 feels the fastest but, 10.5 is probably the best usable OS of the 4. My Agfa Snapscan software works on all of them. I have Adobe Creative Suite 1 installed on them and that works great. My 2 favorite games on some of them...Apeiron and Arcade Typing Tutor. I even have PageMaker 4.2 and 7.0 installed on the ones that can run Classic. A solid state hard drive makes them all run so fast. I still love the old G4 iMacs!

I would have continued to use iTunes and now Apple Music but for one thing. My library is on my NAS and iTunes doesn't have the feature of being able to scan that library automatically for new additions or deletions.

So, for PowerPC I have Songbird, for Intel Mac I have Nightingale and Swinsian. All three of these apps monitor my library folder for any changes and add and delete music according to the change. One central library, shared by all Macs on my network, updated from that central location.

 

[iBookmaster]

I would have continued to use iTunes and now Apple Music but for one thing. My library is on my NAS and iTunes doesn't have the feature of being able to scan that library automatically for new additions or deletions.

So, for PowerPC I have Songbird, for Intel Mac I have Nightingale and Swinsian. All three of these apps monitor my library folder for any changes and add and delete music according to the change. One central library, shared by all Macs on my network, updated from that central location.

Yeah, you have to use what you like and I like what I'm using!

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

I would have continued to use iTunes and now Apple Music but for one thing. My library is on my NAS and iTunes doesn't have the feature of being able to scan that library automatically for new additions or deletions.

So, for PowerPC I have Songbird, for Intel Mac I have Nightingale and Swinsian. All three of these apps monitor my library folder for any changes and add and delete music according to the change. One central library, shared by all Macs on my network, updated from that central location.

Can you manually reindex your itunes library? I never realized that Itunes would not automatically update additions or removals.

 

[eyoungren]

Can you manually reindex your itunes library? I never realized that Itunes would not automatically update additions or removals.

Assuming I knew how to do that, I probably could have. But that's manually right?

All I have to do is add or delete some MP3s into the folder on my NAS and open the app(s) I mentioned above. Once opened, the app checks the folder, see's that there is a change and immediately updates the library on that Mac. It's automatic, no interaction on my part and every Mac will see the change as I open the music app on that Mac.

No futzing with anything and just ONE folder location update.

Now, if iTunes ever did do this, perhaps I just missed it all this time. But anytime I dropped MP3s into the music library folder and then opened iTunes the music was not there. I had to manually import. If I deleted music and then opened iTiunes, I was presented with music that iTunes told me could not be found. Maybe I was doing something wrong, IDK.

But I got sick of manually importing music on EVERY MAC! All I wanted was to update one folder on my network that every Mac could see/access. iTunes couldn't do it (or I just didn't know how to make it automatic (without a bunch of scripts)).

This is Swinsian…note, yeah. I never renamed the library folder.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Assuming I knew how to do that, I probably could have. But that's manually right?

All I have to do is add or delete some MP3s into the folder on my NAS and open the app(s) I mentioned above. Once opened, the app checks the folder, see's that there is a change and immediately updates the library on that Mac. It's automatic, no interaction on my part and every Mac will see the change as I open the music app on that Mac.

No futzing with anything and just ONE folder location update.

Now, if iTunes ever did do this, perhaps I just missed it all this time. But anytime I dropped MP3s into the music library folder and then opened iTunes the music was not there. I had to manually import. If I deleted music and then opened iTiunes, I was presented with music that iTunes told me could not be found. Maybe I was doing something wrong, IDK.

But I got sick of manually importing music on EVERY MAC! All I wanted was to update one folder on my network that every Mac could see/access. iTunes couldn't do it (or I just didn't know how to make it automatic (without a bunch of scripts)).

This is Swinsian…note, yeah. I never renamed the library folder.

View attachment 2515243

Yanno I had no idea that Itunes wasnt smart enough to track along with you making changes to your library. I just kind of assumed I guess that it would do that. Thanks for the app suggestions in your previous response that corrects that issue.