Not sure what bugs you imply in 10.5; while this is not OS of my choice, I used 10.5, and don’t remember any particular issues with it. Probably on a slow hardware some graphical bells and whistles are to be turned off, to improve GUI speed.
However, context of my comparison was using MacPorts (or rather any build system for 3rd party software), and here it is just bad on 10.4. Perhaps with a move to gcc14 some long-standing issues got fixed, but the SDK is too backward, and that is unlikely to change much. I think none of end-user apps like QMPlay2, VLC and abaddon will build on 10.4, and this is what people want often, besides browser. Once new Palemoon is fixed properly, I am pretty sure it will be for 10.5–10.6 on PowerPC but not 10.4. NetBSD’s pkgsrc has some support for 10.4, but look how many ports they got built for it. Compare it against 10.5 and 10.6, where thousands of ports build fine for PowerPC. As for “10.6 is better”: well, it is, and if some other people here spent a bit of their time on helping with fixes instead of sabotaging them, we would have had 10.6.8 on PowerPC earlier. Anyway, FYI: 10.6.8 on PowerPC is fully usable now, the only major issue standing is a broken UDP (and no DHCP therefore). Currently dns is resolved via tcp, this works fine for web access, but DHCP remains broken, so network setup needs to be done manually. You may want to give it a try. On Jan 24, 2025 at 05:19 +0800, Riccardo Mottola <[email protected]>, wrote: > Hi, > > Sergey Fedorov wrote: > > No point supporting anything below 10.5. All PowerPC machines that are > > actually usable can run 10.5–10.6. > > 10.4 is much more broken than later systems and got no advantages. > > > > While I do not appreciate Homebrew policy and do not think it would be > > wise to mimic it, it is reasonable to expect that MacPorts on PowerPC > > implies at least 10.5.8. > > no, to be honest it is not "reasonable", although convenient. > Unfortunately 10.5.8 is a buggy/bloated OS. While very nice to look at > and it has the "beginnings" of new APIs that make it a little bit less > hard to port things to, it is inefficient. 10.6 is better... > unfortunately there was no 10.5.9 :) > Get an old PowerBook and with 10.4 you can use it and while TenFourFox > was updated it was usable. Compare it with 10.5 and it gets unusable. > Literally, except in raw computing power, my 2x 1Ghz G4 with 2GB of RAM > with 10.5 is slower than my PowerBook with 10.4. > > > Riccardo
