Whats the absolute newest/latest linux for G3 processors?

[wicknix]

The above statement was for OpenBSD and it's lack of browsers on PowerPC. I haven't messed with OpenBSD in awhile, but what is available is pretty up to date. They just aren't full featured or very capable outside of basic browsing.

Linux on the other hand is much better off. It has current webkit based browsers like eolie and epiphany (gnome web), pale moon, sealion etc for 32bit. PPC64 (G5) also has current firefox, but it had some endianess color issues last i used it. You'll be able to access most of the web, but unless you're on an intel or arm machine running chrome (or its variants) don't expect every site to work. Without widevine for PPC there is no way to use sites like netflix, hulu, spotify, zoom, etc etc.

TenFourFox / InterWebPPC / ArcticFoxPPC all play youtube fine, but you need a G5 to get 360p/480p/720p playback. A G3 just doesn't have the muscle to do it these days. That's where apps like PPCMC come in handy.

 

[Appleuser201]

The above statement was for OpenBSD and it's lack of browsers on PowerPC. I haven't messed with OpenBSD in awhile, but what is available is pretty up to date. They just aren't full featured or very capable outside of basic browsing.

Linux on the other hand is much better off. It has current webkit based browsers like eolie and epiphany (gnome web), pale moon, sealion etc for 32bit. PPC64 (G5) also has current firefox, but it had some endianess color issues last i used it. You'll be able to access most of the web, but unless you're on an intel or arm machine running chrome (or its variants) don't expect every site to work. Without widevine for PPC there is no way to use sites like netflix, hulu, spotify, zoom, etc etc.

TenFourFox / InterWebPPC / ArcticFoxPPC all play youtube fine, but you need a G5 to get 360p/480p/720p playback. A G3 just doesn't have the muscle to do it these days. That's where apps like PPCMC come in handy.

Does Leopard Webkit still play YouTube in the browser on 10.5? I remember seeing a video of a 400?mhz G4 cube playing a yt video in that browser with surprisingly little stutters (once the video was paused at the beginning and fully loaded).
If Webkit in 10.5 was still getting security updates, that would be the best browser for 10.5 due to it's rather lightweight-ness. Tenfourfox and classic Firefox was always clunky. Mozilla never got it right until Quantum in my opinion. I do wonder though if there would be a way to get current Firefox working on 32bit ppc Linux.

 

[wicknix]

Rust and Node.js are the show stoppers for current firefox on ppc32 Linux. There really is no need though as the UXP based browsers (pale moon, basilisk, and sealion) aren't far behind in web standards ability (minus any DRM enabled website) and can be built fairly easily on ppc Linux.

LWK can still play YT for now. Once YT drops older TLS (1.0 and 1.1) like discord and many other sites did recently its game over. LWK only has partial TLS 1.2 support and no 1.3 support at all. So it's life is near an end. It's already broken on half the web, and has been for a few years now.

 

[Appleuser201]

Rust and Node.js are the show stoppers for current firefox on ppc32 Linux. There really is no need though as the UXP based browsers (pale moon, basilisk, and sealion) aren't far behind in web standards ability (minus any DRM enabled website) and can be built fairly easily on ppc Linux.

LWK can still play YT for now. Once YT drops older TLS (1.0 and 1.1) like discord and many other sites did recently its game over. LWK only has partial TLS 1.2 support and no 1.3 support at all. So it's life is near an end. It's already broken on half the web, and has been for a few years now.

Would there be any way to rebuild Leopard Webkit or even possibly a version for Tiger with more up-to-date standards? It's definitely the lightest and fastest. It was leaps and bounds ahead of TFF back in the day. I think an iMac G3 could play a 240p video in the browser if it could run Webkit.

 

[wicknix]

Would there be any way to rebuild Leopard Webkit

Nope. There's a reason the original developer stopped updating it. Tiger and Leopard are just too old, and apples proprietary secure transport is just way too outdated on those OS's. That's the reason LWK doesn't support full TLS 1.2 or 1.3. If apple had used opensource gnutls or openssl things could have been different. But apple had to be apple.

 

[Ryan Bremer]

Midori. Hands-down the best web browser available for low-end machines such as G3 Macintoshes, Intel Pentium 2, OpenRISC, and other architectures

 

[Dronecatcher]

I think an iMac G3 could play a 240p video in the browser if it could run Webkit.

A G3 can play 240P in Safari/Webkit 4

 

[TheShortTimer]

You can do web browsing without much issue in 10.4, as outlined above. Now for the rest:

Word Processing/Office Productivity: Office 2004 (best version ever and can read docx with a plugin), AppleWorks, WordPerfect 3.5e in the Classic Environment. Pages is in its infancy but is good at page layouts. All of them are good choices.

Photo Editing: iPhoto is weirdly robust for some editing. I used it just to brighten up a bunch of old newspaper scans I did for example. You can also use GIMP if you have the X11 environment installed, just like in Linux.

The rest just depends on what else you want and you just grab from the Garden.

To add to this excellent advice, in 10.4 you can also achieve good results for video playback with standard definition files on a machine as modest as a iMac G3/350. @Appleuser201 if you want to push a G3 Mac to its limits then I think this is the perfect avenue to explore.

There's a multi-page thread on the subject that contains invaluable tips by @Dronecatcher.

 

[MysticCow]

To add to this excellent advice, in 10.4 you can also achieve good results for video playback with standard definition files on a machine as modest as a iMac G3/350. @Appleuser201 if you want to push a G3 Mac to its limits then I think this is the perfect avenue to explore.

There's a multi-page thread on the subject that contains invaluable tips by @Dronecatcher.

I actually left out a word processor. There used to be one called Jer’s Novel Writer or something like that and it worked nicely if you just needed to type something out.

 

[TheShortTimer]

I actually left out a word processor. There used to be one called Jer’s Novel Writer or something like that and it worked nicely if you just needed to type something out.

I hadn't heard of that one. You'll be pleased to know that it's still available directly from the programmer's blog and the latest release restored G3 compatibility.

 

[MysticCow]

I hadn't heard of that one. You'll be pleased to know that it's still available directly from the programmer's blog and the latest release restored G3 compatibility.

Wow because you can still download it. If you just want to write, this app is awesome. It doesn’t handle a lot of things like tables iirc. Overall it isn’t bad if you write for a living or just write fanfic.