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People are getting quite excited on LEM Facebook page as they're start to install the Sorbet Leopard. ?
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Sorbet Leopard - Your Power Mac Unleashed
- Thread starter z970
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People are getting quite excited on LEM Facebook page as they're start to install the Sorbet Leopard. ?
@Dronecatcher Sorbet Leopard should not be compared to traditionally-optimized Leopard installs of the past. As is the case with foxPEP, there is a lot more going on here under the hood than the user might at first realize, including network transfer rate optimizations, system-wide ad blocking, no Spotlight, no BeamSync, no unnecessary background services, slimmed-down libraries, frameworks, bundles, files, and databases, etc ... the changelog details the rest.
Architecturally, it is identical in concept to how Snow Leopard was designed to take full advantage of the Intel machines, but the execution is different. Because most operations on PowerPC OS X are CPU-bound to begin with, it is essentially the equivalent of systematically chopping up regular Leopard into bite-sized chunks so that these older processors (and GPUs, to a lesser degree) can chew through it faster, and therefore do everything else faster as well because now there are many more CPU cycles to spare. In my past experience with the Trimcelerator scripts, mere tweaks on their own (probably) would not be able to accomplish a feat of that scale.
@fra9000 There are few things in life I enjoy doing more than to serve my communities of choice.
On another note, I can't wait until the overview videos start to surface ... at this point, they're inevitable.
Architecturally, it is identical in concept to how Snow Leopard was designed to take full advantage of the Intel machines, but the execution is different. Because most operations on PowerPC OS X are CPU-bound to begin with, it is essentially the equivalent of systematically chopping up regular Leopard into bite-sized chunks so that these older processors (and GPUs, to a lesser degree) can chew through it faster, and therefore do everything else faster as well because now there are many more CPU cycles to spare. In my past experience with the Trimcelerator scripts, mere tweaks on their own (probably) would not be able to accomplish a feat of that scale.
@fra9000 There are few things in life I enjoy doing more than to serve my communities of choice.
On another note, I can't wait until the overview videos start to surface ... at this point, they're inevitable.
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I have read through the changelog and read all the posts leading up to it's release but found nothing new in terms of tried and tested hacks to get Leopard moving along - so that's why I view it as a tweaked Leopard.
If the apps inserted from Snow Leopard increase performance system wide that is indeed a new improvement but until I get round to testing myself I'll wait for others to make that judgement.
Please explain how you've broken down Leopard's code into "bite-sized chunks" that now moves faster?
I concur with the points @Dronecatcher makes. Unless you have re-coded the system to use code blocks, Grand Central Dispatch and so forth then this is a false claim and one that not only disrespects the intelligence of the other members here, but also in misrepresenting your work you are doing yourself a disservice. Sorbet is being received well for what it is, why muddy the water with exaggerated claims?@Dronecatcher Sorbet Leopard should not be compared to traditionally-optimized Leopard installs of the past. As is the case with foxPEP, there is a lot more going on here under the hood than the user might at first realize, including network transfer rate optimizations, system-wide ad blocking, no Spotlight, no BeamSync, no unnecessary background services, slimmed-down libraries, frameworks, bundles, files, and databases, etc ... the changelog details the rest.
Architecturally, it is identical in concept to how Snow Leopard was designed to take full advantage of the Intel machines, but the execution is different. Because most operations on PowerPC OS X are CPU-bound to begin with, it is essentially the equivalent of systematically chopping up regular Leopard into bite-sized chunks so that these older processors (and GPUs, to a lesser degree) can chew through it faster, and therefore do everything else faster as well because now there are many more CPU cycles to spare. In my past experience with the Trimcelerator scripts, mere tweaks alone would not be able to accomplish a feat of that scale.
@fra9000 There are few things in life I enjoy doing more than to serve my community.
Can't wait until the overview videos start to surface ... they're inevitable.
How to Completely Disable Spotlight
We’re big fans of Spotlight here at OS X Daily, but we realize it’s not everyones cup of tea. If you’re someone who dislikes Spotlight enough to want it disabled completely then t…
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Instructions to re-enable too.
@Dronecatcher @ChrisCharman Perhaps I worded that wrong. As you may know, I view the value of something in the form of the end result that it provides. My present understanding is that very few people today (outside of passing tinkerers as well as the members of this forum) have actually taken advantage of the individual tweaks for Leopard that have been uncovered over the years, even though they have been available to the public for some time - which means their existence by itself didn't do much as far as the average Joe using his old Mac is concerned. Case in point, last I checked, only several people seemed to have made use of the specific optimization methods I mentioned. Those were all by and large obscure threads that were buried relatively quickly, if memory serves.
But when they've been pre-assembled in a user-friendly manner and given an identity for instant recognition, their benefit suddenly becomes available to passerby, as well as folks who just want to get to work (who usually aren't inclined to do any tweaking to their installs in the first place). It is for this same reason that eyoungren's TFF tweaks never took root outside of this forum, while foxPEP (which used entirely different tweaks) did. As I've explained before, I've seen over time that if something isn't perfectly plug-and-play, people just aren't going to use it. In which case, naturally, that thing is then doomed to total obscurity.
Similarly, my above comment wasn't meant to mislead or disrespect anyone's intelligence, but to simply offer another way of looking at this. Altering the system to not render displayed graphics more times than is necessary, to not autonomously index disks while the user is busy doing something else, and to not endlessly search for AirPort devices by default (even if no AirPort card is installed) are all examples of chopping up Leopard into bite-sized chunks, just through a different lens of interpretation.
And actually, given that Darwin (and by extension XNU) is open source, creating a new and performance-optimized kernel version for future inclusion isn't necessarily off the cards at this point in time, since the base system has already been established.
In the end though, I suppose I'm thinking about this more in a right-brained sense, which doesn't seem to be matching up with the consensus here ...
In which case, I'll keep quiet.
@Romain_H Applications > Utility Scripts > Spotlight > Enable Spotlight
The included scripts interface with launchctl as Apple intended. If Spotlight is enabled or disabled by the displacement of relevant system files instead, it will likely introduce an endless stream of errors in the system log as the mdutil daemon was never disabled and is by then effectively wondering where the files went.
But when they've been pre-assembled in a user-friendly manner and given an identity for instant recognition, their benefit suddenly becomes available to passerby, as well as folks who just want to get to work (who usually aren't inclined to do any tweaking to their installs in the first place). It is for this same reason that eyoungren's TFF tweaks never took root outside of this forum, while foxPEP (which used entirely different tweaks) did. As I've explained before, I've seen over time that if something isn't perfectly plug-and-play, people just aren't going to use it. In which case, naturally, that thing is then doomed to total obscurity.
Similarly, my above comment wasn't meant to mislead or disrespect anyone's intelligence, but to simply offer another way of looking at this. Altering the system to not render displayed graphics more times than is necessary, to not autonomously index disks while the user is busy doing something else, and to not endlessly search for AirPort devices by default (even if no AirPort card is installed) are all examples of chopping up Leopard into bite-sized chunks, just through a different lens of interpretation.
And actually, given that Darwin (and by extension XNU) is open source, creating a new and performance-optimized kernel version for future inclusion isn't necessarily off the cards at this point in time, since the base system has already been established.
In the end though, I suppose I'm thinking about this more in a right-brained sense, which doesn't seem to be matching up with the consensus here ...
In which case, I'll keep quiet.
@Romain_H Applications > Utility Scripts > Spotlight > Enable Spotlight
The included scripts interface with launchctl as Apple intended. If Spotlight is enabled or disabled by the displacement of relevant system files instead, it will likely introduce an endless stream of errors in the system log as the mdutil daemon was never disabled and is by then effectively wondering where the files went.
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You don’t have to keep quiet! I’m just suggesting you word your marketing posts more carefully, as you stated, you’re aiming this primarily at less tech savvy or possibly even a younger generation of users that aren’t familiar with the specifics. My opinion is only that with influence comes responsibility. It’s your project and you’re free to say whatever you like of course.
A custom kernel would be indeed worth considering - many systems administrators do this to optimise for their specific environments.
Edit: Food for thought. A young child downloads Sorbet and makes a YouTube video boasting that they are running ‘10.5.9’ or ‘Snow Leopard for PPC Sorbet Edition’ and gets ridiculed and trolled because of it. Now that may seem a leap but as a father I consider these things seriously, i’m just hoping you’ll do the same. We need more honesty and transparency in this world. Apologies for the preaching but i’d rather get things off my chest straight away when something bugs me.
I think you’ve missed the point that i was making @mortlocli and @z970 has already responded to it with a considered and respectful reply. With regard to ‘marketing’ you may wish to consider his position rather than my own, as he has clearly stated many times that he enjoys the hyperbole. For the record i like marketing, i’ve studied marketing among other things, so in no way do i deem discussing it as derogatory or unnecessary.
In response to your question to me (I’m going to treat it as a single question asked 3 times over two separate posts) I don’t suggest it needs a new name at all. It has a name ‘Sorbet Leopard’ which is apt and doesn’t confuse the project with anything else. ‘10.5.9’ is a misnomer and inaccurate but still ties it to Leopard at least. I actually think ‘10.5.8+‘ is better, you should reconsider the value of your own suggestion - it is still 10.5.8 after all but with additions.
I’ll put this a different way in the form of an analogy. If you buy a 3 bedroom house and you customise it, improve it. You redecorate the house and fix the plumbing etc. You could tell everyone that you have a mansion or a castle if you wanted. You can call it whatever you like because it’s your house. It’s now a much better house, subjectively, but it’s still the same house. If you then want someone else to live in that house or to buy that house from you, unless you build an extension to that house so that it now qualifies as a mansion, then obviously it’s not what you claimed it to be. You would be selling something based on the connotations associated with a word that is used to represent something completely different. Words are important. It’s a renovated house not a mansion.
In response to your question to me (I’m going to treat it as a single question asked 3 times over two separate posts) I don’t suggest it needs a new name at all. It has a name ‘Sorbet Leopard’ which is apt and doesn’t confuse the project with anything else. ‘10.5.9’ is a misnomer and inaccurate but still ties it to Leopard at least. I actually think ‘10.5.8+‘ is better, you should reconsider the value of your own suggestion - it is still 10.5.8 after all but with additions.
I’ll put this a different way in the form of an analogy. If you buy a 3 bedroom house and you customise it, improve it. You redecorate the house and fix the plumbing etc. You could tell everyone that you have a mansion or a castle if you wanted. You can call it whatever you like because it’s your house. It’s now a much better house, subjectively, but it’s still the same house. If you then want someone else to live in that house or to buy that house from you, unless you build an extension to that house so that it now qualifies as a mansion, then obviously it’s not what you claimed it to be. You would be selling something based on the connotations associated with a word that is used to represent something completely different. Words are important. It’s a renovated house not a mansion.
I thought I got the point you were making ..and it had some merit...as theres an element in social media that a bit like lynch mob mentality. Its sometimes hard enough for an adult to cope with..let alone a kid. I thought the point you were making was that a child could be in for a rough time thru no real fault of his own.
I admire z970s skills, but he is, like all of us - human and sometimes we dont always see possible spin offs from things.
Thats why I wondered about the name and raised the question. None of us is good at everything.. and maybe the world of marketing or packaging is another factor...or just another step along the way in this, wot I think is, a rather good thing z970 has done. Never the less, it is 'his baby'..so he calls the shots on wot ever it is called. We just offer comment..and I believe Z is always interested to hear our thoughts.
If marketing is your field (or one of them) of expertise then I imagine theres a lot more to it than I have knowledge of...so your comments have the benefit of insight we may not have.
I did wonder if the plus sign in 10.5.8+ is actually a possibility in certain computer fields ie numerals only accepted...which would stuff up that idea..lol.. dont ya love computers..theres always something!!!
One thing for sure... its certainly given us something to think about.
I admire z970s skills, but he is, like all of us - human and sometimes we dont always see possible spin offs from things.
Thats why I wondered about the name and raised the question. None of us is good at everything.. and maybe the world of marketing or packaging is another factor...or just another step along the way in this, wot I think is, a rather good thing z970 has done. Never the less, it is 'his baby'..so he calls the shots on wot ever it is called. We just offer comment..and I believe Z is always interested to hear our thoughts.
If marketing is your field (or one of them) of expertise then I imagine theres a lot more to it than I have knowledge of...so your comments have the benefit of insight we may not have.
I did wonder if the plus sign in 10.5.8+ is actually a possibility in certain computer fields ie numerals only accepted...which would stuff up that idea..lol.. dont ya love computers..theres always something!!!
One thing for sure... its certainly given us something to think about.
I finished the Sorbet review. It's a bit long so I've put it in this below spoiler box. It's also not particularly complete because booting and rebooting is a pain and I wanted to mitigate that as much as possible. Enjoy.
To start this off, I should mention firstly that I'm not on the Sorbet Leopard development or testing team; I'm a regular follower just like most of you. I didn't experience the journey of getting here, and only have the final product in hand. I did follow the process of development through the Feature Showcases, and wrote this up with the intent on playing to its strengths.
This review of Sorbet Leopard was done on my Companion, an A1046 PowerBook G4 15"-- Aluminium 2003, with 1 GiB of RAM and a 1 GHz G4 processor, within the requirements listed. It's in a 7-way multiboot on a 512 GiB mSATA SSD in PATA adapter. Comparisons in perceivable performance are made against a bog standard install of Leopard 10.5.8 with no modifications.
Installing Sorbet Leopard
Sorbet Leopard comes in the form of a deployable disk image, unlike a standard installation. This means that while installation is very straightforward given you have at least a spare 10 GiB partition (z970, the primary developer, recommends 20 GiB), it also means that options on install are nonexistent-- it's all or nothing. Image deployment took about fifteen minutes for me, but your mileage may vary, especially if you're installing Sorbet Leopard to a hard disk instead of something solid-state.
On first boot, there is no indication of where to go. Most uses will find the Welcome document on the desktop, but while you can use the system in its current state, there is a script that should be run on first boot. The Welcome document will tell you this, but I would've liked to see it run automatically on first boot instead.
After the maintaince script was run (which took an exorbitant amount of time-- almost an hour) and the system rebooted, I decided to check on startup times to see if there was an improvement there. I discovered that there was an improvement; though not as significant as I was expecting, there was about a 10-12% improvement in startup.
Regular Usage
One of the first things I noticed when using Sorbet Leopard is that the mouse movement is unbelievably fluid-- much more fluid than on Leopard or Tiger. This was one of the things Sorbet Leopard touted-- 'smoother and more fluid UI animations'. I wasn't expecting UI performance rivaling my M1 Mac mini, but the interface did feel particularly snappy, especially after enabling some of the tips in the Welcome document.
One of the most notable things you'll notice in regular usage is that Safari has been deprecated in favour of the most recent Leopard Webkit. Now, I don't really do normal web browsing on my PowerBooks. I have more modern machines for this, and if I pull up a web browser on a PB, it's for a specific purpose. But, web browsing is still something some PowerPC users will do, so after connecting to the Lab Wifi, I fired up LWK.
Websites loaded reasonably quickly; I didn't feel like it was sluggish all that often, though patience is still key. My website loaded in about 10 seconds, and the animations, while quite a bit choppier compared to a modern system, worked well and didn't bog down the experience. The Web 1.1 variant loaded basically instantly, as expected, as the much lighter website would be less aggressive compared to the flashy 2021 variant. Webkit crashed while clicking on a certain link on ame.lmao.rip, which was surprising, but not completely unexpected.
Before leaving the web, I decided to check out this very PowerPC forum and catch up on some of the threads. A lot of patience got me through that-- you'll definitely want to pour a glass of Kool-Aid for browsing the MR forums, though it's not unuseable in the slightest. One of the worst offenders is YouTube embeds, and trying to avoid them is quite difficult. These are also problems in vanilla Leopard, and are not as bad here in Sorbet Leopard.
Going back offline, Sorbet Leopard comes with applications from Snow Leopard. I'm not entirely familiar with the differences between the two systems for these applications, but they do run with minimal issues, if any. I think the worst thing I ran into is that the date string in System Profiler does not have the date and only says 'date'. Obviously not a breaking issue, but is representative by what I mean by 'minimal issues'.
Notably omitted from Sorbet Leopard is Spotlight. It comes disabled by default, as Spotlight has been identified as a significant performance bog. A script can be run from the Utility Scripts to reenable it if you so desire, but I opted to install Alfred 0.9 instead-- or I would have if I could still get it. No matter how far I dug, I couldn't find it, and I didn't feel like installing all of LeopardRebirth just to get their PPCStore and hope it still works there and--
Sidetracked. In any case, I realised later on that PPCStore could be downloaded separate. Alfred should be on the Garden, though. I should note that Alfred doesn't actually work on Sorbet Leopard without Spotlight enabled.
App startup is snappy, though that may be more down to my solid-state drive than any optimisation in Sorbet Leopard (they do recommend an SSD though).
Tinkering
Other than the Tuneup script that you run on first boot, Sorbet Leopard comes with a swath of various scripts for enable/disabling features, switching themes, hardware tweaks, and a bunch of other trinkets. A normal user would not need to touch this outside of that first run System Tuneup. If you are a system tinkerer, though, then you'll appreciate that some customisability is restored after being stripped by way of lack of installer. Of course, the standard tinkerer apps such as OnyX will also work in Sorbet Leopard, though I did not check every function for full compatibility. Your mileage will vary. But it's nice to see an easy-to-find set of tweaker scripts that even an intermediate user could understand.
Performance
Sorbet Leopard touts performance as being paramount, so it would be rather who of me to not check it out. I'm not going to dwell too much on benchmarks, but I did run a quick Geekbench and got a 244 for Sorbet Leopard, compared to 224 with regular Leopard. If you're paying attention, that's far less than the 542 that this model achieved. I'm convinced it's to do with the recently failed DC-in board, but the results are consistent between systems to make a valid comparison. Sorbet Leopard is marginally faster in synthetics-- your mileage will vary.
Conclusion
Before I wrote the conclusion to this review, I read a post on this very thread by z970 talking about how Sorbet Leopard is a culmination of years of tweaks to Leopard that really haven't seen widespread use beyond a few astute power users, and I really have to agree with that sentiment. I have never used or even attempt to use one of these tweaks be it foxPEP or AuroraTrimcelerator or whatever. I've just taken to using the operating system and its applications how it comes, and for someone like me, Sorbet Leopard is absolutely eye-opening by how much more useable my Mac is.
For the average user who just wants things to work, the classic Apple mentality, Sorbet Leopard is 95% there. There's but a few things that could be better, but it's a stellar all-in-one package to make Leopard a lot more useable on PowerPC. For the tinkerers who've already gone and optimised their system the way that they want it, Sorbet Leopard is less appealing because the gains are far less prominent compared to their already optimised Leopard install.
tl;dr: Sorbet Leopard is a great package for regular people who just want to get the most of their PowerPC Mac. Power users might be underwhelmed though by the difference between their already existing install.
This review of Sorbet Leopard was done on my Companion, an A1046 PowerBook G4 15"-- Aluminium 2003, with 1 GiB of RAM and a 1 GHz G4 processor, within the requirements listed. It's in a 7-way multiboot on a 512 GiB mSATA SSD in PATA adapter. Comparisons in perceivable performance are made against a bog standard install of Leopard 10.5.8 with no modifications.
Installing Sorbet Leopard
Sorbet Leopard comes in the form of a deployable disk image, unlike a standard installation. This means that while installation is very straightforward given you have at least a spare 10 GiB partition (z970, the primary developer, recommends 20 GiB), it also means that options on install are nonexistent-- it's all or nothing. Image deployment took about fifteen minutes for me, but your mileage may vary, especially if you're installing Sorbet Leopard to a hard disk instead of something solid-state.
On first boot, there is no indication of where to go. Most uses will find the Welcome document on the desktop, but while you can use the system in its current state, there is a script that should be run on first boot. The Welcome document will tell you this, but I would've liked to see it run automatically on first boot instead.
After the maintaince script was run (which took an exorbitant amount of time-- almost an hour) and the system rebooted, I decided to check on startup times to see if there was an improvement there. I discovered that there was an improvement; though not as significant as I was expecting, there was about a 10-12% improvement in startup.
Regular Usage
One of the first things I noticed when using Sorbet Leopard is that the mouse movement is unbelievably fluid-- much more fluid than on Leopard or Tiger. This was one of the things Sorbet Leopard touted-- 'smoother and more fluid UI animations'. I wasn't expecting UI performance rivaling my M1 Mac mini, but the interface did feel particularly snappy, especially after enabling some of the tips in the Welcome document.
One of the most notable things you'll notice in regular usage is that Safari has been deprecated in favour of the most recent Leopard Webkit. Now, I don't really do normal web browsing on my PowerBooks. I have more modern machines for this, and if I pull up a web browser on a PB, it's for a specific purpose. But, web browsing is still something some PowerPC users will do, so after connecting to the Lab Wifi, I fired up LWK.
Websites loaded reasonably quickly; I didn't feel like it was sluggish all that often, though patience is still key. My website loaded in about 10 seconds, and the animations, while quite a bit choppier compared to a modern system, worked well and didn't bog down the experience. The Web 1.1 variant loaded basically instantly, as expected, as the much lighter website would be less aggressive compared to the flashy 2021 variant. Webkit crashed while clicking on a certain link on ame.lmao.rip, which was surprising, but not completely unexpected.
Before leaving the web, I decided to check out this very PowerPC forum and catch up on some of the threads. A lot of patience got me through that-- you'll definitely want to pour a glass of Kool-Aid for browsing the MR forums, though it's not unuseable in the slightest. One of the worst offenders is YouTube embeds, and trying to avoid them is quite difficult. These are also problems in vanilla Leopard, and are not as bad here in Sorbet Leopard.
Going back offline, Sorbet Leopard comes with applications from Snow Leopard. I'm not entirely familiar with the differences between the two systems for these applications, but they do run with minimal issues, if any. I think the worst thing I ran into is that the date string in System Profiler does not have the date and only says 'date'. Obviously not a breaking issue, but is representative by what I mean by 'minimal issues'.
Notably omitted from Sorbet Leopard is Spotlight. It comes disabled by default, as Spotlight has been identified as a significant performance bog. A script can be run from the Utility Scripts to reenable it if you so desire, but I opted to install Alfred 0.9 instead-- or I would have if I could still get it. No matter how far I dug, I couldn't find it, and I didn't feel like installing all of LeopardRebirth just to get their PPCStore and hope it still works there and--
Sidetracked. In any case, I realised later on that PPCStore could be downloaded separate. Alfred should be on the Garden, though. I should note that Alfred doesn't actually work on Sorbet Leopard without Spotlight enabled.
App startup is snappy, though that may be more down to my solid-state drive than any optimisation in Sorbet Leopard (they do recommend an SSD though).
Tinkering
Other than the Tuneup script that you run on first boot, Sorbet Leopard comes with a swath of various scripts for enable/disabling features, switching themes, hardware tweaks, and a bunch of other trinkets. A normal user would not need to touch this outside of that first run System Tuneup. If you are a system tinkerer, though, then you'll appreciate that some customisability is restored after being stripped by way of lack of installer. Of course, the standard tinkerer apps such as OnyX will also work in Sorbet Leopard, though I did not check every function for full compatibility. Your mileage will vary. But it's nice to see an easy-to-find set of tweaker scripts that even an intermediate user could understand.
Performance
Sorbet Leopard touts performance as being paramount, so it would be rather who of me to not check it out. I'm not going to dwell too much on benchmarks, but I did run a quick Geekbench and got a 244 for Sorbet Leopard, compared to 224 with regular Leopard. If you're paying attention, that's far less than the 542 that this model achieved. I'm convinced it's to do with the recently failed DC-in board, but the results are consistent between systems to make a valid comparison. Sorbet Leopard is marginally faster in synthetics-- your mileage will vary.
Conclusion
Before I wrote the conclusion to this review, I read a post on this very thread by z970 talking about how Sorbet Leopard is a culmination of years of tweaks to Leopard that really haven't seen widespread use beyond a few astute power users, and I really have to agree with that sentiment. I have never used or even attempt to use one of these tweaks be it foxPEP or AuroraTrimcelerator or whatever. I've just taken to using the operating system and its applications how it comes, and for someone like me, Sorbet Leopard is absolutely eye-opening by how much more useable my Mac is.
For the average user who just wants things to work, the classic Apple mentality, Sorbet Leopard is 95% there. There's but a few things that could be better, but it's a stellar all-in-one package to make Leopard a lot more useable on PowerPC. For the tinkerers who've already gone and optimised their system the way that they want it, Sorbet Leopard is less appealing because the gains are far less prominent compared to their already optimised Leopard install.
tl;dr: Sorbet Leopard is a great package for regular people who just want to get the most of their PowerPC Mac. Power users might be underwhelmed though by the difference between their already existing install.
Other OSes do not exist..?
(I have to say that I'm not using my quad really frequently. May be I'll try to set it up as "daily driver" but in a future .@ChrisCharman Understood. That's why the project was never branded as literally Snow Leopard for PowerPC, because no matter how accurately it recreates the end-user experience (to the best of its ability), it's not. That would indeed be misleading, and as I've said, that was never remotely the intention at any point in time.
Your house analogy was on point. If you go to Startup Disk within Sorbet, you'll see that the system still identifies itself internally as 10.5.8, as it was only the About This Mac window that was rebranded to 10.5.9 to serve as an identifier to the user, precisely for the reasons you raised.
If enough people are in agreement however, then I'll investigate swapping 10.5.9 with 10.5.8+, at least until this optimized-kernel idea materializes, if that does happen (which I think would then certainly justify a bump in point release, official or not).
@Doq That was a spectacular review, thank you for going to the trouble. Don't forget that although speed is the central focus, utility / application updates and built-in theming are second and third, as well as user-friendly system tweaking. The project set out to accomplish multiple things at the same time, and my hope is that it ended up reaching that goal in the end.
Otherwise, your inputs have been noted and are greatly appreciated.
Your house analogy was on point. If you go to Startup Disk within Sorbet, you'll see that the system still identifies itself internally as 10.5.8, as it was only the About This Mac window that was rebranded to 10.5.9 to serve as an identifier to the user, precisely for the reasons you raised.
If enough people are in agreement however, then I'll investigate swapping 10.5.9 with 10.5.8+, at least until this optimized-kernel idea materializes, if that does happen (which I think would then certainly justify a bump in point release, official or not).
@Doq That was a spectacular review, thank you for going to the trouble. Don't forget that although speed is the central focus, utility / application updates and built-in theming are second and third, as well as user-friendly system tweaking. The project set out to accomplish multiple things at the same time, and my hope is that it ended up reaching that goal in the end.
Otherwise, your inputs have been noted and are greatly appreciated.
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Next time read the original post. “Slower overall system performance than Snow Leopard”. Snow Leopard is Intel. The person who made this hack complains that leopard is slower than snow leopard. That’s a given.
But in all this @z970 I don't know why you criticised me for calling Sorbet a tweaked install of Leopard - not only is that not derogatory but it's also true - a preconfigured install of Leopard has always been useful and particular on a mechanical drive will be faster even without any hacks as all the data is written to the drive in one contiguous area.
They surely do. But I presume (with no offence intended) that the majority of people who run PPC Macs and are a member of this subforum run some version of Mac OS as primary OS on these, either in its "classic" form or the Darwin-based form. And my point was that as far as Mac OS X is concerned, Leopard is the newest official release-grade version.Other OSes do not exist..?
Looking back to Classic, 9.2.2 was just a collection of bugfixes to 9.2.1, which was just a collection of bug fixes to 9.2, which only had a small handful of new features (one of them being general optimization) over 9.1 -- same thing for 9.1 to 9.0.4, which was preceded by 9.0.3 and 9.0.2, both of which were just bugfix patches. According to Apple marketing, 10.5.8's only difference to 10.5.7 is bugfixes, patches to AirPort, and a Safari update. I'd say Sorbet Leopard's changes would easily be enough to change the major revision to 10.6 if Snow Leopard didn't exist to cause confusion, definitely radical enough to earn the 10.5.9 version number, if anything that's completely understated. I imagine that the actual reason for the pushback against calling it 10.5.9 is just because Apple didn't officially sanction it.
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People can call their OS whatever they want - my Snow Leopard is running a ton of hacks so therefore it is now....
You make a solid argument, much of which i agree with. Kernel versions and code changes make a difference though to be fair and I disagree with your point regarding a move to a 10.6 naming scheme had SL never been released - traditionally a major version number change requires significant under the hood changes that breaks compatibility and requires new APIs and so on. My point wasn’t against the use of the 10.5.9 moniker regardless, nor was I suggesting the project needs to be renamed, in fact if you actually read my responses you’ll see that the name only came into discussion because another user projected an argument onto me that wasn’t mine to begin with. I’m unsure as to why i’m having to clarify that again.
In my original response i only stated that i agreed with @Dronecatcher regarding the exaggerated claims as it is a disservice to the project, its creator and the community, and then went on to say that the project doesn’t need such exaggeration as it stands on its own merit for what it is.
I respect and appreciate the people coming forth to defend the project and its creator, but maybe save that for someone actually attacking them? @z970 has understood my points and responded to them. I also value his contributions to the community and have expressed interest in this project. I stand by the actual opinions i have expressed and i am free, just as you are, to express them.
10.5 Leopard is also Universal. Just putting that out there.