On Mar 29, 2011, at 6:54 AM, [email protected] wrote:
What's the best/newest version of OS X for my 1.33 GHz PowerPC G4 PowerBook?
I had a friend with a 1.67GHz PowerBook that I upgraded to 10.5.8 and he hated it, and made me downgrade it back to 10.4.11. He mainly used Adobe Photoshop, and said that it was crawling slow in Leopard compared to Tiger.
If you look on the Xbench or GeekBench archives, you'll see that Tiger is the fastest for all PPC G4 Macs, and you'll get a substantial slowdown with Leopard, usually in the 20-30% range.
There are a few advantages to Leopard. Time Machine for backup is probably the largest advantage. Spaces for multiple (albeit slow) Desktops is another advantage. Some software such as the latest VLC will only run on Leopard.
There are also disadvantages to Leopard. One is that Leopard is "universal" so that it's going to be at least twice a large as Tiger because it's loaded down with both the PPC & Intel versions of the System software. This makes it easy to migrate from PPC to Intel, but bloats your HD with useless code. You can removed this useless Intel code using Monolingual or Xslimmer, but this can break some Adobe software, so read the manual before striping out Intel code.
I'd recommend Tiger 10.4.11 for all PPC G4 Macs unless you can live without smooth video and with 20+% slower overall functionality.
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