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[Mat]

Warning: serious Mac OS X bashing!

As some of you might know I still use just Mac OS 9 for all my work. I never liked Mac OS X even if I tried it some time and I really think there are many many heavy faults done by Apple with X. Nevertherless I took the chance as a friend of mine needed a new system and tried it again. I really tried, ...
I need to share this experiances, done last weekend, with some people who might understand me. And finally I got again the proove that Mac OS 9 is a joy and a very good Operating System compared to X!

The situation is the following. An eMac with 1 GHz and 512 MB Ram. My friend likes Mac OS X a lot, but the eMac had 10.3 installed and was slow as hell. And when I write as hell I mean as hell. 5 seconds before a folder openes, often 10 seconds completely paused before you can continue typing and such behaviors. So I got a 10.4.6 DVD as I read somewhere that Tiger should speedup things a lot. I also had some G4 with 1,4 GHz upgradecard with Tiger at my Hand a few years ago, and the performance was acceptable. So I thought "let´s give it a try again" things should improve at this eMac. 10.3 was unaccceptable slow, but I consider it a beta-software anyways and Tiger as first "real" or let´s say "ready" X OS. And finally the minimum system requirements for 10.4 are 256 MB Ram and a G3, so a G4 1 GHz should have about 3 times more computing power and performe well. Well, thats what I thought, ...

So I tried to put all my prejudices away and setup a nice fast system. I installed Tiger from the external DVD as update to 10.3.9. The first impression was that things even got worse. So I started to read about optimizations of Tiger. I disabled Spotlight (that even is a security issue in my opinion), and replaced it with "Find any File" which uses the Names, Dates, Siizes stored at the HDs. Subequently I disabled Dashboard with all its unnecessary background activities. At this moment I started to wonder that these are the two "main marketing points" Apple presented as new in Tiger. I disabled exactly that two new funktions written to the DVD cover, ... at a Computer that was exactly 1 year old when Tiger first popped up. And even with the latest Version 4.11 from 2007 this machine was not even 4 years old.
Well, I went on and uninstalled the Spotlight Icon in the menue bar (as spotlight was disabled anyways), did the update to 10.4.11 (wow Apple servers are still running, ...) and started to deactivate all "effects", all the eye-candy. Later I performed a P-RAM reset, rebuilt the desktop, checked the HD, repaired the rights once again.

I even used "Monolingual" and kicked 1,7 GB of unused languages and universal (intel) code. As well I downloaded OnyX 1.8.6 and performed every possible optimization. Well the machine is now somehow usable, but it feels extremely slow and I wouldn´t accept it for every day work. It feels slower than a 6100 with Mac OS 9.1 and makes the impression to me that it is chuging along all the time.

How is that possilbe? It is completely beyond my understanding how customers could ever accept such a GUI. As well how did non-unix guys - Mac users - accept to need to go to the Terminal and start to type strange commands? I don´t get it. I do not understand why people preffered this unlogical monster over the spatial and most logical GUI in OS 8 or 9. I cannot understand how such a product is liked by anybody. An eMac G4 1GHz with 512 MB Ram is a nice and fast machine - still. But not with Mac OS X!

Well I don´t know whats up with this OS. Gladly Tenfourfox works somehow ok with NoScript installed now, and if I am in good mood, I will backup the whole stuff and perform a clean complet fresh install with reformatting the HD previously, perhaps it will help a little bit again.

But this entire experiance again showed me that X is no option at all, and that this OS is only made for selling more new Macs mainly. Reall I think they want to show users with 2 or 3 year old hardware that they need to get new one, ... The next candidate I got would be a G5 dual 2,5 GHz with 2 GB Ram that feels completel knocked out with 10.5.8. Perhaps this one will work ok with 10.4?

No guys I am healed once again for the next decade. I will use Mac OS 9 until my last G4 falls apart! :-)

Here is a good interview with John Gruber about some of the things I am critizizing about X, which I stumbled upon when dealing with X this weekend:
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/articles/interviewwithjohngruber

[Jakl]

Wow Mat - you sure are a macos9 Diehard 2!! Good to see.
I'd have probably been the same if it wasn't for the internet
and all it's colors.

[MacTron]

I'm fully agree with you. Os X is a mixed bag, inheriting some of the worst things of UNIX systems like the chaotic filesystem hierarchy and command line interface. Lost the best of NEXT STEP like display Postscript, copied the unuseful windows folders from MS Windows and lost the whole charm, easy of use of Mac Os 9. In brief.
Thankfully still is better than MS Windows ... LOL
Even Though I couldn't resist to post my opinion about this, My favorite approach is to point the great things of the Mac Os 9, better than to criticize other platforms:

Mac Os 9  Will never die... OS dies only when no one uses it

Traditional Mac OS will simply never truly "die", because there's no other OS out there that posesses the same strong points as Mac OS has: ease of use and maintain, (non-intrusive) GUI, design, expandability, flexibility, freedom, speed.

Traditional Mac OS is nicer and easier to work with than any other operating system ever made. It is more inspiring for creative people than any other operating system ever made.

It is a superior system in many ways, and not just because we're making due with old hardware or because we ourselves are too old to learn new tricks. Yes, it's dead to Apple, and it's 8 years old, but it still has life left in it as far as I and many others are concerned.

Paul McLauren

[Mat]

Wow Mat - you sure are a macos9 Diehard 2!! Good to see.

Somehow that was obvious. But I am truely wondering. Did nobody else have the feeling that it is unusable slow? I posted the whole story so that you can check if I did something wrong or missed something in "optimizing" - for the first time - Tiger, …

Even Though I couldn't resist to post my opinion about this, My favorite approach is to point the great things of the Mac Os 9, better than to criticize other platforms:

Well my posting wasn´t thought as simple Anti-X-Thread. I really tried to give X another chance, and do not understand whats going on with this quite fast computer.
So my questions were not rhetorical. I didn´t want you and others to simply bash X here for all the faults we know.

But your idea of "positive marketing" is also not bad

And very well said from McLauren!

[nanopico]

OS X vs OS 9 on the same machine, OS X will definitely feel slower.
One of the things i that OS X has preemptive multitasking.  This means that programs, processes and services get interrupted, suspended, a new or existing task is loaded and then run until it's interrupted by the OS.  The advantage of that kind of system is that more things can appear to be running at the same time without the problem of a single application taking all system resources. Also application crashes can be detected much sooner before important resources are trashed (though this is not always the case).  OS 9 on the other hand is the exact opposite.  When an application is run, it runs and runs until it releases control.  This means that applications are much more in control than the OS is.  You have less task switching (which is actually not the fastest of processes).  So Preemptive is more stable (though I know of enough exceptions to that to question that logic) but slower, Cooperative multitasking is faster, but more prone to misbehaving apps crashing the system.  (Also unprotected memory effects stability, but not so much speed).

This is not the only reason it's slower, but it does have a significant impact.

[Mat]

Hey nanopico, you are right with your explenation that it feels slower compared to cooperative multitasking. But that is no explenation that it somehow blocks the machine! There is no real reason why it takes 5 seconds until a folder openes for example. I know Operating Systems - graphical oriented - at 8 MHz machines (eight, yes) feeling totally snappy.

You could sum up my question - why I wrote the entire story - with; "is it really true? Is Tiger always that slow on 1 year old machines, or did I something bad or forgot something?"

If it is usual (and I have read a lot crazy things this weekend, for example about recent Spotlight which often blocks the entire recent Mac for 3 hours, and similar) I am wondering why there was no huge movement telling Apple that they have to change it.

[nanopico]

Yes it is that slow.
My experience with OS X is that if the machine is older than the version of OS X you are running, then have fun (even if it's only a month older). What I always found was that if there was a minor version (10.4.10 to 10.4.11) update and it's the last update for that series then it will be slower just to try to get you to upgrade to the next version (10.5 in this example).

[GaryN]

Hmmm… OK, despite the voice screaming in the back of my mind telling me I'm poking at a hornet's nest, I have some comments:

The situation is the following. An eMac with 1 GHz and 512 MB Ram. My friend likes Mac OS X a lot, but the eMac had 10.3 installed and was slow as hell. And when I write as hell I mean as hell. 5 seconds before a folder openes, often 10 seconds completely paused before you can continue typing and such behaviors.

I've read your posts for some time now, and I've always found you to be pretty intelligent and insightful, so how can you even think for a second that these are normal behaviors and that there just might be something out-of-the-ordinary going on with your machine? I went through the Mac OS > OSX evolution too, and never once had an issue such as that.  I suspect that the majority of Mac users at the time also had better experiences with their systems as well. If I'm wrong, just post a couple of the many, many scathing reviews that surely must have been printed then.

Of course there are problems pushing earlier machines to run later software. For the last 30 years, we have been in an unprecedented, incredibly rapid evolution of all thing electronic and especially all things personal computing.  Apple has been no better or worse that the rest of the industry in leapfrogging hardware over software over hardware and so on. Granted, the occasionally uncalled-for deprecation of last week's stuff has been, well, RUDE, but hey, S. Jobs was a rude dude - ask anybody who knew him.  The speed of development in personal computers has been mind-boggling to say the least, though and some less-than-100%-compatible software + hardware combinations along the way should NOT surprise you.

Perhaps you are simply comparing apples and oranges here. Comparing the long-evolved Mac OS with the young-and-growing OSX during the transition instead of say, OS9 with 10.10 or such. Installing OSX and then disabling as many of its new features as possible to "speed it up" seems pointless to say the least - like trading in your car and then ripping out the interior and accessories on the new one because it's not as fast as your old one and that's all that matters to you.

Given that in just a few years of refinement, enough to get to 10.4 or 10.5 and G4's and G5s, I think it's clear that it all came together pretty darn well. Spotlight and Time Machine work very well indeed, and multi-processor and 64-bit support speak for themselves.

I, for one, do not miss the joy of multiple restarts looking for extension conflicts, the (admittedly cute) little bomb signaling yet another crash served up with one of those vague, could-be-anything error messages thanks to "cooperative" (hardly) multitasking, and a dozen other aggravating things about the old OS that were very much a problem then. When that was all there was for all things computing, granted it was still at least a real OS (as opposed to a shell called "Windows" running over MS-DOS) but there were a lot of things that were just a pain in the ass. Interchangeable files that weren't, Installers that didn't, the Chooser that wouldn't, disk utilities that just made things worse etc. etc. Then the hardware: unaffordable  Laserwriters, giant CRTs, suitcase-sized hard drives…

I use and love OS9 DAW-ware and I even still use Canvas, but that's only because that's pretty much ALL that I use it for and it was still pretty problem-prone until macos9lives came online. I used to have a G3 desktop with a 500Mhz Sonnet card that ran 10.2 and 10.3 + OS 8.6 and 9.0 really well, but I never tried to push it past that. My current MDD runs 10.5 and 9.2 perfectly now. My folders pop open just the way they should, it "feels" fast in either OS, I've worked out all of the little quirks and everything plays well together. Oh, and I almost never, never have to "go to the Terminal and type strange commands". Realistic expectations are my only "secret".  Perhaps you should recognize that a 1Ghz eMac (the "e" is for "educational" as in cheap-as-possible) is at its design limit running 10.4 and invest in a Quicksilver or better since they're still available and really cheap.

Just my opinion…

[Mat]

Hmmm… OK, despite the voice screaming in the back of my mind telling me I'm poking at a hornet's nest, I have some comments:

;-))
That might happen. But even if we have different opinions, we should all be able to respect each other.

I've read your posts for some time now, and I've always found you to be pretty intelligent and insightful,

Oh, thanks for the kind words, I am happy that it is possible to be recognised like I intended to, even in a foreign language and with just written content.

so how can you even think for a second that these are normal behaviors and that there just might be something out-of-the-ordinary going on with your machine?

The problem is, I always had such bad experiances with X! Really, there was never ever anything positive. It was always when I had to deal with X a kind of "downgrade" or huge step back in usability, speed, freedom, … to me it sounds you made totally different experiances.
And as It was my first experiance with X for a long time, I wanted to get some feedback.

Perhaps you should recognize that a 1Ghz eMac (the "e" is for "educational" as in cheap-as-possible) is at its design limit running 10.4 and invest in a Quicksilver or better since they're still available and really cheap.

No Gary, thats not true. Tiger states to have a G3 and 256MB as minimum requrements. So that eMac is definitely NOT the limit and should performe quite well!

And your last paragraph shows what – in my opinion – the industry like us to think. That an 1Ghz G4 machine is totally unusabele and outdated. And that is simply not true. And it cannot be true for an Operating System that came out one year after the hardware.

One of the things I am resisting to, for 13 years now, is the planned obsolescence, even if it was not called so back than. The "Upgrade Trademill" we all know. There is no need for it, I am missing very few things, just some user applications and file formats, but nothing from the OS in reality.

And finally it is not my computer. I cannot tell another person "get a new machine". The idea was to speed up things at that existing computer ;)

[IIO]

I disabled Spotlight [...] Subsequently I disabled Dashboard with all its unnecessary background activities.

that is totally right to do these things, and if you do that, your 10.4.11 should run in a usable manner on anything from quicksilver 733 or G4 DA and above (my personal opinion)

for macs with slow graphics cards and big screens (that would not even include your emac) you can also try to optimize 2d scrolling by turning the drop shadows off, either by

Code: [Select]

com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true


or by third party utils with frontend such as "shadow killer".

the main issue with the finder is - in my opinion - renaming documents by hand. the font stuff in the 10.4 finder totally sucks, i do not need to explain why, you all used it.

[DieHard]

the 10.4 finder totally sucks

Please amend the list to include the 10.9,10.10 finders also... so damn buggy... while 10.7 & 10.8 are only half as buggy with their own unique flaws... 10.6 is still the favorite, but many, like NI have killed it off

[Mat]

Thanks IIO for the tip. When I visit my friend next time, I will see if OnyX hasn´t done that "shadows off" already.

Anything else I could do? Is is just that ugly PDF disply stuff that makes things so incredible slow or are there further tons of servers and serices runnign in the background that I could switch off, beside Spotlight and Dashboard?

[GaryN]

No Gary, thats not true. Tiger states to have a G3 and 256MB as minimum requrements. So that eMac is definitely NOT the limit and should performe quite well!

No, the emac is not the minimum required. However, the rest of your statement that it should perform quite well is your opinion and does not necessarily reflect reality. I happen to agree with you 100%. It should perform well. Maybe we should go back to:

"5 seconds before a folder openes, often 10 seconds completely paused before you can continue typing and such behaviors."

I gotta tell you, assuming you're not exaggerating, that is completely abnormal behavior for your setup, period! If I'm wrong, somebody please chime in and tell me why. From what you describe (and that is of course, all I have to go on) I think your machine is telling you it's sick and needs attention. Maybe, just maybe your "history" with OSX is causing you to make assumptions that are not entirely subjective. You expect performance to be poor, so you just chalk it up to the Cruddy OS when there just may be a malfunction that you won't find because you're not looking for one.

I don't know what the hell is wrong with your setup. If I could magically diagnose stuff like this over the internet I'd be making money at it! I can tell you though, my G3 Desktop ran both Jaguar and later, Tiger at a piddling 500Mhz and it never, never performed anywhere near as slowly and poorly as you describe your eMac to be working.

Again, just my opinion but it sure sounds like you have an undiagnosed problem there.

[Mat]

I´ve been at my friends eMac again yesterday:

you can also try to optimize 2d scrolling by turning the drop shadows off, either by

Code: [Select]

com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true


And get "command not found" when typing this to the Terminal. Should it work with 10.4.11 for sure?

[Protools5LEGuy]

shadowkiller http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/6428/shadowkiller-x works since panther to leopard. It was a need when I had Rage 128 on anything but OS9.

It is an app that once clicked, all shadows dessapear, and if you click again they come. I have it on startup items.

[DieHard]

OK... I apologize to all, but I removed the last few posts where the thread go "Off-Topic".

We have a couple of issues here...

1) The eMac has always been a bit of a dog (64k L1 and 256L2 cache), much less that it's PowerMac G4 counterparts; but that would still NOT be why you are experiencing issues so extreme in Tiger. You need to run a diagnostic on your friend's eMac since I have seen Cache fail all-together and produce the results  you are describing (so step 1 is a diagnostic on the MB/CPU); as Gary mentioned, there may be an underlying hardware issue (bad cache would be one)

2) 512MB is definitely a little low.... the system will benefit greatly if you can get it up to 768 MB or 1 GB; depending on what you have in your startup, 512MB may not be enough for good performance, but the "low RAM" would not cause the "Horror" show you are describing

[cyberish]

http://ppcarchive.dyniform.net

cool stuff going on there…

[DieHard]

http://ppcarchive.dyniform.net

cool stuff going on there…

Excellent find (especially the updates)
Please give some details and post this in our PPC OS X zone... if will help many there