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Tiger Wins in the end... XP loses

Appleuser201

Appleuser201

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 12, 2018
401
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I Know I’ve been away for quite a while due to personal issues and obviously need to catch up on the latest PPC development.

I'm gonna make this post short, but I’ve realized what a big following the whole Mac PPC has especially compared to old windows operating systems and machines. Not only is there still ppc development from the community, with a high end G5 (for the time being), you can get by on tiger with a supported (mostly) secure web browser. The same can not be said for Windows XP anymore. Firefox had cut off security updates 2 years ago and even pale moon and community run browsers have left the OS behind... yet tiger which would have had much much less users than XP back in the day has a decent browser with updates. And Firefox support ended in 2010. Everyone thought tiger was almost dead right there...

But nope, XP lost. I never expected that honestly. the once worlds most popular OS being beat by Tiger in terms of browser support.
long live ppc!
 
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Is it really a competition though? I'm all for PPC and I would definitely prefer to use PPC OS X over XP for daily computing tasks (typing this using a Mac Mini G4 right now), but I don't see the reasoning for it needing to be a competition. I can use XP for some things I can't use PPC OS X for and vice versa. They both have their uses and those are different for each person :)

Given both the different processor architecture and the different base OS, it seems a little hard to compare the two directly and a little bit like you're (pardon the pun) comparing apples to oranges.
 
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Mac OS X Tiger Community Websites:


forums.macrumors.com

PowerPC Macs

Power Mac, PowerBook, iMac Gx, iBook, etc...
forums.macrumors.com forums.macrumors.com

Windows XP Community Websites:

VOGONS

www.vogons.org www.vogons.org

Windows XP

Discuss and get help on anything in the Windows XP Family of Operating Systems.
msfn.org

www.reddit.com

r/windowsxp

Welcome to r/windowsxp
www.reddit.com www.reddit.com

Web Browsers for Tiger:

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/ (One)

Web Browsers for XP:

https://rtfreesoft.blogspot.com/ (More than one)

Last Security Update for Tiger:

2009

Last Security Update for XP:

2014

Number of People Still Using Tiger:

< 100,000

Number of People Still Using XP:

> 100,000

Verdict:

XP Wins
 
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Appleuser201 said:
I Know I’ve been away for quite a while due to personal issues and obviously need to catch up on the latest PPC development.

I'm gonna make this post short, but I’ve realized what a big following the whole Mac PPC has especially compared to old windows operating systems and machines. Not only is there still ppc development from the community, with a high end G5 (for the time being), you can get by on tiger with a supported (mostly) secure web browser. The same can not be said for Windows XP anymore. Firefox had cut off security updates 2 years ago and even pale moon and community run browsers have left the OS behind... yet tiger which would have had much much less users than XP back in the day has a decent browser with updates. And Firefox support ended in 2010. Everyone thought tiger was almost dead right there...

But nope, XP lost. I never expected that honestly. the once worlds most popular OS being beat by Tiger in terms of browser support.
long live ppc!
Click to expand...
No, actually, it isn't even close. There are a ton of community created browsers for XP (K-Meleon, Pale Moon, Basilisk, Arctic-Fox, Otter-Browser, 360 Secure Browser, and there are probably a few others that I'm forgetting. If you include the POS Ready 2009 updates many people were installing (including me) on XP up til May of 2019, XP was supported for an entire decade longer than Tiger. This really isn't even up for debate
 
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Appleuser201 said:
I Know I’ve been away for quite a while due to personal issues and obviously need to catch up on the latest PPC development.

I'm gonna make this post short, but I’ve realized what a big following the whole Mac PPC has especially compared to old windows operating systems and machines. Not only is there still ppc development from the community, with a high end G5 (for the time being), you can get by on tiger with a supported (mostly) secure web browser. The same can not be said for Windows XP anymore. Firefox had cut off security updates 2 years ago and even pale moon and community run browsers have left the OS behind... yet tiger which would have had much much less users than XP back in the day has a decent browser with updates. And Firefox support ended in 2010. Everyone thought tiger was almost dead right there...

But nope, XP lost. I never expected that honestly. the once worlds most popular OS being beat by Tiger in terms of browser support.
long live ppc!
Click to expand...

lol.

I don't think so buddy. XP can run on hardware with 4+ cores at 3+ gigahertz. It can support 3d accelerator cards. If needed, it can spin up a modern web browser in a virtual machine of a modern platform like Linux or Windows 7 onwards. It can support 32GB of RAM or more.

A PPC G5 running Tiger will be outperformed by PC hardware from 10-15 years ago.

XP also got security updates until a few years ago. Tiger? No security fixes for what... a decade now?

Claiming Tiger "Won" is like claiming the Amiga won because there's still a hardcore Amiga fringe.
 
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Dronecatcher said:
I always keep at least one PC box loaded with Micro XP for legacy stuff, especially an Amiga emulator. It's blazing fast on even modest hardware.
Click to expand...

If only it weren't such a gotta-put-missing-DLLs-back-in-for-some-stuff-to-run nightmare.
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throAU said:
XP can run on hardware with 4+ cores at 3+ gigahertz. It can support 3d accelerator cards. If needed, it can spin up a modern web browser in a virtual machine of a modern platform like Linux or Windows 7 onwards. It can support 32GB of RAM or more.
Click to expand...

So can Tiger - on Intel. And 32-bit XP is limited to 4 GB RAM.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
Given that there are community efforts to make even the 20-year-old Windows 2000, which received updates till 2010, run applications requiring XP or run on hardware much newer than the OS itself, that statement is quite odd.

Edit: And there are similar efforts for the 21-year-old Windows 98 SE.
Click to expand...

A few weeks ago, I did a new Win2K install. It was a special purpose computer for something at work to interface with old hardware, but I was able to do it on a Dell Optiplex GX620. The software I need to run doesn't work properly with even XP(it was written for NT 4.0) and the GX620 is a popular platform for this specific application.

In getting it set up, I was pleasantly surprised at just how much I was able to get working properly. I threw Geforce 220 that I had lying around my office in it, and that gave me access to high(ish) resolution DVI displays. I still have one more PCIe slot to play with if I were so inclined, although I don't have any need for anything else(the interface card that I needed to install is PCI). Printer drivers, which are important for what the computer does, are also fairly comprehensive.

This computer will not see any web use, but it's nice that there's decent support out there if I do need it.
 
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I haven't used XP since..Probably around 2009 or 2010. I prefer Tiger and Leopard. However everyone else in this thread have a point. And it is useful for certain things. I just prefer Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 (Yes, Sever 2003) over XP. 2003 is the XP we all love only 10x more stable.
Windows 7 runs on very modest hardware btw.. I'd put it in the same category as Snow Leopard (or Leo if vs a PPC Mac). I have it installed on a Pentium 4 IBM netvista right now, and I ran it for a long time on a ThinkPad A22m (Pentium 3) before I got my iBook G4 back in the day.

Tiger PPC has a decent "cult following" but not as much as XP... I'd even wager that Mac OS 9 has a bigger following than Tiger does right now.
 
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Project Alice said:
I'd even wager that Mac OS 9 has a bigger following than Tiger does right now.
Click to expand...
You're likely correct about that ;)

It seems that Tiger is sadly a little outdated in terms of infrastructure so most devs who do PPC development target Leopard. I do enjoy the programs that work everywhere so I can use them no matter what system I'm running. :)
 
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XP is more usable now, but I will always appreciate Tiger, in all its aqua glory.

Coming from XP, Tiger was a revelation: stable, full of features and simply beautiful to look at. This was when Apple were 10 years ahead of Microsoft and it would go on to be the first OS X release for Intel Macs and the base from which iPhone OS was built on. It will always be my favourite OS because it made me fall in love with computing all over again and showed me that I needn't be beholden to Windows' stagnation, ugliness, precariousness, and mediocrity.
 
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That’s where I made the leap as well. At that point I was using all sorts of apps to effectively build a windows GUI that operates like an Apple desktop. Tiger was so elegant and I didn’t have to do anything to it. That & it was very stable & I transitioned from a series of big clunky gaming towers to a clean, sleek AIO design.

I still appreciate 98se, w2k & xp with physical boxes that run them but Tiger-Leopard-Snowleopard is my own personal OSX sweet spot.

XP definitely lost to Tiger from my own personal use & experience :apple:
 
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Project Alice said:
2003 is the XP we all love only 10x more stable.
Click to expand...

Case in point - the Itanium 2 and x86_64 versions of XP are Server 2003's codebase compiled as client.
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Project Alice said:
Tiger PPC has a decent "cult following" but not as much as XP... I'd even wager that Mac OS 9 has a bigger following than Tiger does right now.
Click to expand...

Tiger is in that weird spot of only being the end of the road if you're on a G3 or even older PPC. The majority of PPC Mac users these days probably run Leopard, followed by Linux. And OS 9 will probably always have a cult following since it's the end of an era.
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Aika said:
Coming from XP, Tiger was a revelation: stable, full of features and simply beautiful to look at.
Click to expand...

Same here, even tho I was coming from W2K. And Aqua was also miles ahead of the desktops you could get on Linux back in the day.
 
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RhianB said:
XP definitely lost to Tiger from my own personal use & experience :apple:
Click to expand...

Same here. I still enjoy using Tiger in 2020 but I haven't booted XP in years (although I still have it installed on a dedicated box) and have no desire to.
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Amethyst1 said:
The majority of PPC Mac users these days probably run Leopard...
Click to expand...

This means I'm an oddity because my PM G5 is the only PPC Mac that I run Leopard on. All the others have Tiger, Panther and OS 9 - or in one case, all three.
 
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TheShortTimer said:
This means I'm an oddity because my PM G5 is the only PPC Mac that I run Leopard on. All the others have Tiger, Panther and OS 9 - or in one case, all three.
Click to expand...

So am I - I prefer Tiger to Leopard, and also have Puma, Jaguar and Panther on some boxes as well as OS 8.6 and 9.2.2. But Tiger is, hands down, the most frequently used one.
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TheShortTimer said:
I haven't booted XP in years
Click to expand...

I'll go as far as to say that XP's been around for so long that I've kinda gotten sick of looking at it. That grass wallpaper and the Luna theme were literally making me want to puke. Yay for custom themes. :)

Dronecatcher said:
I always keep at least one PC box loaded with Micro XP for legacy stuff, especially an Amiga emulator. It's blazing fast on even modest hardware.
Click to expand...

I wonder what a copy of Windows 2000, slimmed down to the same level as MicroXP, would be like. ;)
 
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TheShortTimer said:
This means I'm an oddity because my PM G5 is the only PPC Mac that I run Leopard on. All the others have Tiger, Panther and OS 9 - or in one case, all three.
Click to expand...
Same for me. My go-to OS is Tiger, and only Leopard if I have a processor that meets minimum spec and I have at least 1GB of RAM. I also dual-boot OS 9 if possible when I install Tiger, but I don't bother with Leopard because of Time Machine generally messing with the directory structure of everything.
 
Hi drone,

Can you detail the changes you do.
I would like to slim down my win2000 VPC too ;-)

Best regards,
voidRunner
 
Dronecatcher said:
This is the list I work from:
Click to expand...

That sounds familiar - I would advise against not installing a service pack though. Another tweak kinda mentioned is replacing W2K's explorer.exe shell (and file manager) with something more lightweight, e.g. geoshell . I did try using NT4's shell at some point but it was a lot of work and not quite working correctly IIRC.
 
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