Tell me about MorphOS

[commodorejohn]

I'd recommend giving OS9 a shot on that G3, if you're not that fond of OSX. Classic Mac OS has its own issues, but it's much less resource-intensive, more flexible (OS8-9 don't have quite the amazing third-party system-extension ecosystem that System 7 did, but there's still some interesting things you can do with them,) and seems to me to be more of a coherent, unified system than OSX, which despite its technical merits is basically a Mac-like UI and a custom library selection grafted onto BSD.

[commodorejohn]

I cant believe this guy's advice is to run OS9 on your g3 LMAO.

Well it's not like you can run MorphOS on it, unless they dropped their "G4 and up" policy, and OS9 is certainly a better fit for G3 and lower hardware than OSX. 'Sides, who knows? He might like it.

[commodorejohn]

Oh, it's a beige G3? (I figured it was a Blue & White.) Even more reason not to run OSX on it. As for other OSes, there's OS8, which isn't quite as featureful as OS9 but is a good bit lighter and speedier (particularly if you only have < 128MB RAM in it.) Other than that, it's pretty much various Linux/BSD distros; AFAIK the PowerPC BeOS versions never supported G3 or newer Macs.

As for the Quicksilver, here's a tip: if you get an 8x AGP Radeon 9600-9800 intended for a G5 (see here for compatible models; you might also be able to re-flash a PC equivalent, but the Mac ones aren't too difficult to come by,) and you do a simple hack to work around an issue with Apple's proprietary ADC video cards, that's about the most powerful video card you can get in a G4. Serious MorphOS users could better tell you what you'd gain from that, but it seemed to get along with MorphOS when I booted it on my G4.

[commodorejohn]

Also, those Apple Radeons originally intended for G4 towers will require NO modifications or flashing to work in my Quicksilver.

True, but (provided that MOS can get a significant benefit from the GPU) I'd highly recommend hacking a 9600 or 9800. The hack isn't difficult to perform, and the difference between the 9000 and these is pretty vast, performance-wise. (Had to knock Halo down to 640x480 and medium settings to get a really decent framerate on my G4 with the 9000, whereas it runs well at high settings in 1280x1024 on my 9600.)

[commodorejohn]

Their is no such thing.
G3 Pegasos 1s should work.
And the Efika's processor is sub-G3.

As I've been told, those are exceptions because it was already done, but they've said that they don't think G3 Macs are worth the bother...

[commodorejohn]

What software would be any good for os9 right now?

Largely depends on what you want to do. A lot of classic Mac games will run on OS9 (most System 7-era software and a fair bit of System 6-era software is pretty forward-compatible,) so there's a lot of gaming options. There's also a very solid base of productivity software; Photoshop 7 (my image-editing mainstay) and Illustrator 9, Flash 5, Aldus Freehand, the list goes on...Macintosh Garden is a great resource for this. There's even a modern-ish browser in the form of Classilla.

Really, if you can live without YouTube, you could pretty much do anything else you please on OS9.

[commodorejohn]

Yes, but why would you want to?

Why would you want to do half the things we do in this community?