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.
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