4 ms·

My favorite thing about Tiger was that at the end of its life cycle it was incredibly stable.

by angio 5y ago

lostgame 5y ago
Which is pretty incredible, since Tiger was the first public version of OSX to have distros for both PPC and Intel! Tiger was solid - Leopard was where it was at. Snow Leopard may be my favourite, but as I can’t run it on any of my PPC systems I have no excuse to run it anymore.
- kergonath 5y ago
  It was in the middle of the 64bit transition, as well.
  - lostgame 5y ago
    I actually still use a quad core G5 with 16GB(!) of RAM, and 2x1TB SSDs for some audio production work in Logic 9. 64-bit started for me back when the G5 came out, and today that G5 screams, easily feeling as responsive as my girlfriend’s M1 MacBook Air most of the time. It’s almost unbelievable how the G5 performs like it’s got bloody Sonic the Hedgehog trapped in there on a hamster wheel generator. My Intel machines never came close, and a lot of it seemed to have to do with major bloat as the OS moved along. Probably also bloat in Logic. My G5 can handle the hell of a lot more effects and VSTs with about 50% the impact they have on my Intel machines. It’s surreal. I also find it absolutely pathetic and astounding that up until this year (16 inch MBP excluded) the maximum RAM a MacBook could have was the equivalent of a computer I got in 2005. 15 years later I still couldn’t get even 32GB RAM in a MacBook. And it was soldered so it couldn’t be upgraded. Shameful.
    - kergonath 5y ago
      The 8 DIMM slots don’t fit in a laptop anyway ;) Seriously though, the 16GB limit was mostly due to the Intel parts not supporting more LP-DDR. But yeah these things were beasts. The dual-CPU and then the dual dual-core were seriously impressive. I really wanted one at the time but could not justify it. I finally got one for €100 2 years ago, now it sits next to a G4 Cube. Both are some exceptional pieces of engineering.
- gurkendoktor 5y ago
  I actually liked Exposé a lot more in Tiger and Leopard than in Snow Leopard, where all windows were resized to a grid, and you lost relative window sizes as a visual cue. Thankfully, there was a hack to get Leopard Exposé in Snow Leopard, by overwriting a binary with one from a beta! https://superuser.com/a/212717 https://superuser.com/a/212717 There were hacks for absolutely everything. Simpler times...
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Me too.. The old expose was way better. I also loved the virtual desktops in a grid. When they moved them into a row and changed the way multi-screen worked it completely lost its usefulness for me. Before that I always used a 3x3 grid. It was one of the many ways macOS evolved against the grain for me. Other major regressions: LaunchPad (cool for iPad users I guess but completely ridiculous on a 24" screen - Even Microsoft moved back from this). The incessant power saving tricks imposed that are all but impossible to switch off (I use mainly desktops so I care about performance, not battery). Notarisation, every app calling home to Apple every time it's run.. Wtf. Then there was Apple "Server" which became more of a joke with every release (the Leopard version was the last real one). But really what it told me was that I hate an OS where every year some people sit around a table and decide what I should want changed, and offer no way to choose. In other words: I hate opinionated software. I recently moved to KDE and wow, it's so amazing to have all the things I missed back. And also a more useful expose-style function again though the relative window sizing is unfortunately something it doesn't do.
- Klonoar 5y ago
  IIRC there was a hack to make it work on PPC machines, no? Or there was a hack to backport certain things from Snow Leopard onto Leopard PPC...
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    There are hacks to get Snow Leopard on PPC, but they're a recent development. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/snow-leopard-on-unsupported-ppc-machines.2232031/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/snow-leopard-on-unsuppo... It is real Snow Leopard with a Snow Leopard kernel, but a lot of components are copied over from Leopard, and there are still a lot of issues. I'm not clear as to whether or not anyone has gotten graphics acceleration working, for example—it certainly doesn't work on most models.
    - Klonoar 5y ago
      Ahhh got it, thanks for the insight!

My favorite thing about Tiger was that at the end of its life cycle it was incredibly stable.

by angio 5y ago

My favorite thing about Tiger was that at the end of its life cycle it was incredibly stable.

Which is pretty incredible, since Tiger was the first public version of OSX to have distros for both PPC and Intel! Tiger was solid - Leopard was where it was at. Snow Leopard may be my favourite, but as I can’t run it on any of my PPC systems I have no excuse to run it anymore.

kergonath 5y ago
It was in the middle of the 64bit transition, as well.
- lostgame 5y ago
  I actually still use a quad core G5 with 16GB(!) of RAM, and 2x1TB SSDs for some audio production work in Logic 9. 64-bit started for me back when the G5 came out, and today that G5 screams, easily feeling as responsive as my girlfriend’s M1 MacBook Air most of the time. It’s almost unbelievable how the G5 performs like it’s got bloody Sonic the Hedgehog trapped in there on a hamster wheel generator. My Intel machines never came close, and a lot of it seemed to have to do with major bloat as the OS moved along. Probably also bloat in Logic. My G5 can handle the hell of a lot more effects and VSTs with about 50% the impact they have on my Intel machines. It’s surreal. I also find it absolutely pathetic and astounding that up until this year (16 inch MBP excluded) the maximum RAM a MacBook could have was the equivalent of a computer I got in 2005. 15 years later I still couldn’t get even 32GB RAM in a MacBook. And it was soldered so it couldn’t be upgraded. Shameful.
  - kergonath 5y ago
    The 8 DIMM slots don’t fit in a laptop anyway ;) Seriously though, the 16GB limit was mostly due to the Intel parts not supporting more LP-DDR. But yeah these things were beasts. The dual-CPU and then the dual dual-core were seriously impressive. I really wanted one at the time but could not justify it. I finally got one for €100 2 years ago, now it sits next to a G4 Cube. Both are some exceptional pieces of engineering.
gurkendoktor 5y ago
I actually liked Exposé a lot more in Tiger and Leopard than in Snow Leopard, where all windows were resized to a grid, and you lost relative window sizes as a visual cue. Thankfully, there was a hack to get Leopard Exposé in Snow Leopard, by overwriting a binary with one from a beta! https://superuser.com/a/212717 https://superuser.com/a/212717 There were hacks for absolutely everything. Simpler times...
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Me too.. The old expose was way better. I also loved the virtual desktops in a grid. When they moved them into a row and changed the way multi-screen worked it completely lost its usefulness for me. Before that I always used a 3x3 grid. It was one of the many ways macOS evolved against the grain for me. Other major regressions: LaunchPad (cool for iPad users I guess but completely ridiculous on a 24" screen - Even Microsoft moved back from this). The incessant power saving tricks imposed that are all but impossible to switch off (I use mainly desktops so I care about performance, not battery). Notarisation, every app calling home to Apple every time it's run.. Wtf. Then there was Apple "Server" which became more of a joke with every release (the Leopard version was the last real one). But really what it told me was that I hate an OS where every year some people sit around a table and decide what I should want changed, and offer no way to choose. In other words: I hate opinionated software. I recently moved to KDE and wow, it's so amazing to have all the things I missed back. And also a more useful expose-style function again though the relative window sizing is unfortunately something it doesn't do.
Klonoar 5y ago
IIRC there was a hack to make it work on PPC machines, no? Or there was a hack to backport certain things from Snow Leopard onto Leopard PPC...
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  There are hacks to get Snow Leopard on PPC, but they're a recent development. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/snow-leopard-on-unsupported-ppc-machines.2232031/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/snow-leopard-on-unsuppo... It is real Snow Leopard with a Snow Leopard kernel, but a lot of components are copied over from Leopard, and there are still a lot of issues. I'm not clear as to whether or not anyone has gotten graphics acceleration working, for example—it certainly doesn't work on most models.
  - Klonoar 5y ago
    Ahhh got it, thanks for the insight!