[zoky]

> Although, OS X was painful for many years.

I guess it depends on how you define "many". I bought my first Mac in 1998 (the "Smurf" G3) and used MacOS 8/9 for quite a few years after that. I remember looking forward to OS X once they announced it—it was literally the coolest shit ever. Like, the ability to run Photoshop and Emacs on the same system at the same time? Wow, was that cool.

There was definitely a period where you had to dual-boot between MacOS 9 and OS X for a while, but by the time I bought my first iBook in 2002, OS X was the standard, and was way better than anything else out there. I don't think I ever booted into MacOS 9 on my iBook, except for shits and giggles.

I just don't think there was any question that OS X was leaps and bounds better than OS 9, to the point where when I had to use OS 9 for work 4-5 years later (the video editing world always lags 5-6 years behind the rest of us) I was a little bit peeved about having to used such an antiquated system that literally had no modern web browser support except for something called "iCab".

Anyway, all of this is to say… I wouldn't call 1-2 years, at the most, "many".

[kitsunesoba]

As I recall, the main issue with the earliest versions of OS X is that they were slow, somewhat unstable, and would occasionally do really weird things (like how on my summer 2000 iMac DV, OS X 10.0.x once randomly decided it wasn’t going to draw the cursor any more and had to be reinstalled before it was fixed). This led me to spend a fair amount of time booted into OS 9 with an Aqua Kaleidoscope scheme applied and SmoothType installed for that luxe OS X style text rendering.

10.1 made things a little more stable but wasn’t revolutionary.

10.2 Jaguar on the other hand… holy cow. It was so much faster and more stable on my iMac it was absurd. The speed gap was still there but nowhere near as dramatic, making it a lot more usable. This is where I went almost full time booted OS X outside of the odd random thing that didn’t play nice with Classic.

[pram]

Yup by the time Panther came out I didn’t have any problems. Having my macports env, X11, Unreal Tournament 2k4, and World of Warcraft on the same laptop felt like the high water mark of computing at the time lol

[kitsunesoba]

Running on a TiBook G4 I'm guessing? I always wanted one of those but couldn't afford it back in the day. Its design has barely aged at all, it basically defined what a modern laptop looked like, and that persists even now.

[lvl102]

To be fair, OS X was OK by 2003 but third-party softwares and especially MS Office sucked until 2007-08.

[rvense]

Well, depends. For music that era is just an explosion of great things. From 10.3 or so a Mac and a Firewire audio interface was an amazingly stable and portable package, with possibilities you could hardly have dreamed of even with a studio full of gear ten years before. The extra power that became available in the Core 2 Duo era was transformative, too, but the software was available for a good while before.