There's a CHILLING New OS X For PowerPC Macs!

Today we're exploring a brand "new" version of OSX released for PowerPC Macs - the unofficial 10.5.9 Sorbet Leopard! Combining parts of 10.5 and the unreleased 10.6 PowerPC Beta, and throwing in a bunch of interesting quirks and features, Sorbet promises Tiger-level compatibility and speed, with Leopard-level compatibility.

Does it live up to this promise? If I try it on my G4 upgraded Pismo, will it literally explode?! Let's find out!

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#Macintosh #PowerPC #OSX

[amirpourghoureiyan]

Had no idea people were still modding OSX, shows that there's still a lot of love for the PPC days.

[alectrona]

I think Leopard does not include graphics acceleration for the ATI Rage cards, which causes the graphics to run very slowly. I think you can hack the tiger kext files into both 10.5 versions and you could get better results. I think I may have done this at some point.

[zacil]

This is amazing! I used my old PowerMac G5 as a daily driver until 2016, and I struggled a lot with finding PPC-compatible software on OldApps and other repositories. I moved on from Leopard and tried several PPC Linux distributions, but I gave up on the machine not long after. I'm installing Sorbet on my old machine as a testament to how durable Apple made its products back in the day.

[toasTrn]

For me, Classic is the reason to still use Tiger on anything. If/when Classic gets ported to Sorbet Leopard, I'll consider it seriously. But thanks for the review!

[alextirrellRI]

As always, Spotlight indexing is one of the major drains to Leopard, and is one thing that is disabled by default in Sorbet. It's possible Leopard on the external drive was indexing the Tiger/Sorbet partitions, making your benchmarks worse than it would be if it were not indexing. Might be worth looking into.

[AlfOfAllTrades]

My home server is a PMG5 1.8GHz, 8GB of RAM, running 10.5.8. I am most definitely going to test out Sorbet on it. It has been working flawlessly for years and years, but surely I can eek out a little bit more perfornance... It was a game changer when I moved 10.5.8 on to an SSD though. Holy smokes, that made a huge difference performancewise.

[loismustdie]

I would love to see something like this for older intel macs that are unable to run Big Sur or are underperforming with Big Sur. A hybrid open source distro of intel macOS could help machines that are currently suffering from Planned Obsolescence and Apple’s total disregard for their impact on the environment by obsoleting Mac’s.

[tompov]

I think tiger on the Cinema Display is gorgeous because the plastic inside and out marries the design of the hardware and software like nothing else. However, on the metal MacBooks and especially the unibody ones (even the modern ones) look the best with leopard. Leopard and snow leopard are the most gorgeous macOS imo.

[fsfs]

Best OS X: Do you want Classic and better compatibility with older OS X apps and/or support for older hardware (especially G3s)? Use Tiger. Do you want the newest version with the latest software support? Use Leopard. Easy choice. I don't really have a preference except that I mostly only use Tiger primarily because I have older apps that don't like Leopard and I don't think I have any (PPC) apps that want Leopard anyway (though Leopard's better for internet apps especially with the demise of TenFourFox). I'll have to give this a try though.

[Eyetrauma]

When you mentioned how this offered greater compatibility and how Classic support was one of the things that kept people on Tiger I thought you were going to demonstrate that they got Classic support going in this new distro. Based on the video and a quick look at the forum post, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

[Geardos]

Will have to try this, was not impressed by leopard speed on my powerbook and went back to tiger, I'll give this a go though and see how it stacks up. Interesting project.

[dialupdave]

I had no idea people customized mac os. Learn something new every day, forget 2 things every day too.

[MistahMatzah]

Every time you say "quirks and features" I expect Doug Demuro to bust in like Kool-Aid Man.

[brokenelectronics]

I've always been in the "if it can run Leopard decently at all, run Leopard" camp. Most of G4 machines which I use frequently, have been upgraded enough to do so. What I think I'm going to try is to install it on the eSata external drive on the G5 Quad, just to run some comparison tests.

[ww]

This is the video I have been waiting for!

I installed Sorbet on my Pismo G4 550. I initially had an issue installing it due to running older firmware (I posted about it on the LEM Facebook page). Once I updated it to the latest version, Sorbet installed without any issue. It works very similar to how you demonstrated here. I made sure to run the tuneup after I installed it and followed all the recommendations for a smoother experience. It works really well with my wifi card and I have a Bluetooth/ USB 2.0 card on it's way from China (same one reviewed by Hurtkay). If I had to use this machine as a daily machine, I honestly could. Obviously with some drawbacks.

I also have a PowerBook Ti 867. I ran Sorbet on there from an external FireWire drive. I am either going to make a partition for Sorbet on the Ti or maybe wipe the drive and start fresh. It has a 128GB SSD. Same as my Pismo.

Three drawbacks I've noticed so far:

1. I cannot watch DVD's on the Pismo in Sorbet. There is probably a workaround, but it is past my abilities to figure it out. The problem is likely that 10.5 doesn't recognize the encoder.

2. There is no search functionality, even in the Finder. I guess that is related to Spotlight which is disabled by default in Sorbet. Spotlight is too much of a resource hog for my Pismo so I will leave it disabled.

3. One minor issue is Sorbet doesn't seem to work with the battery indicator. Not that it really matters since the batteries in my PowerBooks are pretty much useless.

[electronraygun]

I just dug out my nearly 20 year old Mac mini and installed Sorbet Leopard! I installed an SSD using a SATA to IDE adapter. The thermal paste had turned into a rock hard resin. When trying to remove the heatsink I knocked 2 tiny capacitors off the board and had to solder new ones on. The DVD drive was seized and required lots of cleaning and greasing. But after all that! IT WORKS GREAT! The Sierra theme looks fantastic and it's really super quick! I'm sure I will find some uses for it, even if it's just as a basic media player. It's nice to have it working again after 12 years sitting unloved 😸

[steveg]

Will be neat to see this run on a G5 one day.

[Elflavio]

Thanks for sharing! I would have never known there were still ways to breath life into old Macs again like this.

[MarcoGPUtuber]

That has to be the best sorbet I've ever seen!

[stevef]

This really is a super interesting video! I may have to give Sorbet a go on my MDD.

Interestingly enough, my dual-core 2.3GHz G5 scores slightly higher in Geekbench under Leopard (2368, vs 2349 in Tiger). There's really no noticeable performance difference between the two.

However, on the dual 1.25GHz MDD, Tiger definitely wins, with a score of 1157 (vs 1083 in Leopard). Not only that, but Leopard takes around _twice_ as long to get going on this machine. I'm thinking the MDD may be a prime candidate for a delicious helping of some Sorbet!