Update #14 (can I still call it an update even though the challenge is over? Consider this an epilogue of sorts.)
Here is my retrospective on the 2024 PowerPC Challenge, the first I was to participate in. It truly was challenging at times! But what may be puzzling to some was that the challenge didn’t lie in the hardware, but the software! I'd say 75% of the time whatever task I had the iBook perform, it performed it with flying colors. The hardware wasn't the issue in the slightest (aside from my low 512MB of built-in RAM at the start), but rather selected software running on it. It was the software that led to me reaching the most amount of roadblocks and dead-ends in my use of the iBook, my chosen computer for this January. Finding, testing, and optimizing the truly most compatible software for my tasks was the most time-consuming aspect of this challenge. Even gathering a collection as vast as what mine is now and pooling from such a selection of 100+ programs to see which held the greatest ability to still be useful in the present day, when compared to today’s software, wasn’t enough. Also, from what I found in my week-long search for programs compatible with PowerPC hardware (nearly all of which are long since deprecated and near-forgotten, which made the search more difficult), upgrading to 10.5 Leopard would not have yielded me much greater result than what I currently received. I'm just guessing a number here, but I think I found so far only about 20 programs that dropped Tiger compatibility while still keeping PowerPC compatibility in future versions. In other words, more often than not I found when a program dropped support for Tiger, they also dropped all support for PowerPC in general, leaving users with a 10.5 Leopard Intel-only option thenceforward. So, usually, when Tiger went, so did PowerPC. With any particular PowerPC program, I likely would have only gotten a few point releases farther in Leopard than in Tiger, say, a version 3.2.5 in Leopard rather than a version 3.1.4 in Tiger, and thus wouldn’t have seen much difference with choosing Leopard over Tiger. Sure, the Leopard-only program is better and maybe a year newer, but you won’t get much more than mere bug fixes and a few new features here and there.
At times, using the iBook was very frustrating, especially with trying to use software contemporary of the time for today’s use cases and especially with the most basic of video editing I did at the end of the challenge. Even software testing/troubleshooting by means of process of elimination all the broken, incompatible, or incomplete software in favor of searching for the best of each’s use case was a hurdle. More often than not, the latest and newest possible software compiled for the PowerPC Mac platform was the most feature-rich, least buggy, and most capable for its time, but not always, which made it all the more necessary for my software testing with each one to be thorough. Sifting through different programs that lack compatibility with modern file formats or codecs, lack many features and creature comforts we take for granted today aside, using the iBook for video editing in 2024 in particular was troubling. All I wanted was to add music to my silent screen-recording video (I couldn't get built-in audio recording to work with Soundflower, see previous posts), it shouldn't have been that strenuous of a task. Just one audio track and one video track on a timeline and export within a reasonable amount of time. No special effects or anything. If I had more time, maybe I could have figured out a quicker way, but I'm certain doing this simple of a task back in the day wouldn't have yielded the amount of impatience I endured. It should have been no harder than a simple drag-n-drop, export, and boom you're done. It's possible I have unrealistic expectations for video editing of this vintage since I’ve never been much of a video editor to begin with, and the little editing I did on iMovie within the last decade didn’t go beyond having one or two tracks on a timeline and splicing together clips for a personal montage video, but all those instances were far more involved than what I sought out to do with the video I made on the iBook. Even with that said, the iBook utterly struggled at having just one video track and one audio track on a timeline.
That hiccup aside, I found in my general software search several potentially good software ruined by timed trials or features in a demo locked behind a paywall never to be restored because the software’s company went under or discontinued their registration servers. Or, software that looked promising but never made it out of alpha or beta development, leaving the user with a buggy and/or incomplete experience void of many would-be mainstay features whose absence or removal would be unthinkable. That I encountered equally as frequent, perhaps more so.
All this is not meant to say that I didn't have a wonderful time with the iBook, and in fact I found plenty of software that I feel has no rival in capability. I'm essentially personally complete in having a great image viewer, a great audio player, a great module/tracker player, a great automatic wallpaper-switcher, a great file manager (Finder is good out of the box too, though), a great video converter, a great PDF viewer (Preview is okay too) a great audio converter, a great web browser, a great bulk image resize and converter, a great terminal, a great system monitoring menubar applet, and a great system-wide theme changer, so I'm set in many regards as to what types of capable software are at my disposal on PowerPC Tiger. This doesn't even cover the many other programs available to us and installed to my system that I use on a less frequent basis but are still worthy of being mentioned nonetheless like a word processor, an image editor, a text editor, a disc burner, an iPod disk mounter and manager, and video games. With such awesome software rocking rich feature sets, this Mac's abilities seem a lot more modern-esque and open new windows of opportunity to what this Mac can still do in the current era.
Giving commentary on my contributions to this year's challenge now; I was meant to demonstrate my iBook going online using Links2, and later InterWebPPC and Arctic Fox, the first of which I already stored on the iBook in a folder over a week ago, but I was stretched thin for time trying to balance work life with this challenge. I don’t use social media, and I groan when having to visit any mainstream website infested with JavaScript, unneeded processor-intensive animations, cookie disclaimers, and annoying messages demanding that I sign in with Google, so I don’t think web browsing on a PowerPC would even be that bad. While the average person would have to give up a tremendous amount to be satisfied with the comparatively lackluster performance granted by PowerPC web browsers, I on the other hand wouldn’t be losing out on much. Yes, I watch YouTube frequently, so that would undoubtedly be the point at which my iBook’s internet browsing performance would undoubtedly slow to a crawl, even when using Invidious as a substitute for the actual YouTube website - which, I wouldn’t dare to load on such hardware as my iBook - especially considering Invidious as a much more lightweight de-bloated Javascript-less frontend to YouTube. Just video streaming in general would likely result in frequent frame rate drops at anything higher than 360p resolution. I also wanted to demonstrate gaming on the iBook, and had planned for that, along with web browsing, to be the last things I would do for this challenge. The video I posted last night was meant to demonstrate gaming with Minecraft as the example, but getting to the title screen before ending my screen recording doesn’t demonstrate much of anything outside of “it can run on a late G4 processor”. I’m not much of a gamer in the slightest anymore anyways, but I had a few games in mind to demonstrate for this challenge, since gaming is a big part of people's lives (Minecraft being considered a big “must have on my system or else” for many today), but time escaped me.
Hey everybody!
It's been so cool to see everyone's experiments, upgrades, acquisitions, etc over the (currently) 7 pages of this thread. Mac Yak will be going live tonight at 9PM EST to go over a summary of the 2024 PPC Challenge, but that by no means means everyone has to stop tinkering, modding, or making videos. Feel free to keep contributing here, and coming up in March we'll all be observing #MARCHintosh.
Well, if I must be so encouraged, I think I will continue detailing my experiences of how I'm using my iBook accompanied with uploading relevant pictures this February as well!
