[G4] should I install OS X on G$ (400MHz)?

[Doug McNutt]

At 12:05 -0700 10/16/06, Frank haddock wrote:
>I have a 400MHz G4.  Will I experience a slowdown in computer performance
>if I install system X?

No

>Thanks in advance for opinions and advice.

Opinions come free and are surely worth what you  pay.

Be sure you have plenty of RAM and disk space on the G4. OS neXt simply doesn't care how much it uses and doesn't do well when the spare RAM gets low. The installer disk, after you pay for it, will check RAM for you. Consider installing a second - slave - ATA hard drive for the installation. The wiring for it is all there.

I stopped at 10.3.9 for my Sawtooth G4 40MHz. I kept this 8500 with a Sonnet G3 upgrade for things Classic like email, M$Excel, and banking, and I am careful not to let Classic run on the G4.

I find the UNIX part of OS 10 to be far better than the GUI. My dock is hidden away where no one can find it. Apple mail.app is killed. Terminal.app runs all of the time. Curl, perl, and BBEdit worksheets are used all of the time. Safari and Firefox work fine for the WWW. An ls command followed by an open in Terminal.app or a worksheet avoids Finder's GUI directory widows which are simply inferior to the older versions. They are typically wrong about dates, times, and even existence of files because they are updated so slowly. Standard File, for picking a new directory when you want to do a save-as, is simply worse than it was in Classic - if that's possible.

Apple killed connectivity using AppleTalk over ethernet with OS 10.4 so if you (like me) are still using an SE/30 file server you cannot go to 10.4 without spending money on the SE/30.

Music, video, photography, and other stuff that is entertainment oriented all works fine on a G4. For serious computing OS neXt allows access to a whole lot of free stuff from the open source UNIX world but there is very little in the way of Cocoa applications for that kind of thing.


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