Yep. I regret to inform you all that, as of January 2025, I am a Mac user: I bought a Mac. I have betrayed the penguin.
[…]So, how did such an icon of early 2000s Apple fall into my grubby hands? Well, it all started with the Wii U. I’m not joking.
↫ Loganius
That’s one heck of an excuse to get a PowerPC G4 – needing to do Linux kvm hacking to fix a bug. While getting the PowerMac G4 they bought all set up and working properly for development purposes, someone else fixed the bug in question in the meantime. Such is the way of open source development.
Regardless, as far as classic computers go, PowerPC Macs are a great way to enter the wider hobby of retrocomputing. They’re widely available, incredibly cheap, and offer a ton of variety when it comes to supported operating systems, working with everything from classic Mac OS to Mac OS X, from Linux to the BSDs, down to more exotic awesome stuff like MorphOS. Their popularity also ensures a steady stream of replacement parts, expertise, and community support.
I have a 1.25Ghz 17″ PowerBook G4 for MorphOS, and a snow white iBook G3 for Mac OS 9.2.2, and I’ll never get rid of them.
The nice thing of retrocomputing is finding the right PC for the right OS. I got a ThinkPad 440s for Haiku. It is really impressive how stable and responsible runs Haiku there.
Haiku flies on older hardware and has become really polished an nice to use. I really like how pragmatic they are being in expanding their application support to run so much of the Open Source ecosystem. Just being apple to run Falkon or Firefox makes it so much more viable as a real OS than having to fall back on Web Positive.
Some might argue that they are creating the OS/2 problem for themselves by running foreign apps well enough that nobody writes Haiku apps using native APIs. Time will tell if that plays any differently in the Open Source era.
I have a powerbook 5.2 (last model) I multiboot between OSX Tiger with the platinum theme of course, OS9 (no gpu support for the 9700pro), MorphOS and Debian. I rarely boot anything other than morphos though, since it serves as my main music machine and the sound server in morphos sounds “to me” a lot better in quality than any windows machine or debian on the same powerbook hardware.
I have:
1. A Power Mac G4 Quicksilver 2002 on my retro-hobby desk that I got as a Birthday gift a couple of years ago, which usually runs the Mac OS 9.2.2 it came with and occasionally some version of OSX. (I have it booting off an IDE-to-SD adapter.)
2. A Mac Mini G4 I eBay’d to run the MacOS9Lives-hacked version of OS9 so I could add a mac counterpart to the fanless thin-client Win98SE and WinXP machines on my main desk’s KVM snarl.
3. A 2010 Intel iMac and 2009 Intel Polycarbonate Macbook that I got as hand-me-downs, which I dual-boot between 10.6 and 10.13. I don’t use them much, since I generally find OSX a boring, locked-down, inferior alternative to running Linux on commodity hardware, but I’m considering multi-booting the iMac into Windows XP and leaving it on stock Luna for the abomination factor.
I still need to get myself something compatible with System 7 but, as a UI/UX-design enthusiast, I really appreicate being able to play around with resource forks and “just click-and-drag the system folder to create a bootable disk” and other such things and dream of what could have been.