This honestly wouldn't be a challenge for me. It isn't -- I own a few x64 machines, but for the last several months 75% of my non-mobile computing has been done on PowerPC Macs from the 2000s. And I honestly haven't even had much difficulty with it; I guess my demands may be light, but they've handled what I've thrown at them with aplomb. As such, this won't really be a success report.
My main computer right now is this iBook G4 1.42GHz with maxed out RAM running Sorbet Leopard. I would like to try Linux, but that will have to wait for the SSD mod. Alongside it are an iBook G3 900MHz and a Power Mac G4 450MHz that I mostly use for Mac OS 9.
I'm not sure how to format this post, so I'll just sort of describe the sorts of things I can do with each.
iBook G4 --
This laptop is really powerful as a Web machine. I don't use social media, so thankfully I don't have to deal with that. But, I do use forums, YouTube, and Discord, and all three are handled with grace by this laptop. Not a single dropped frame on YouTube, Discord is very responsive, and forums all load in just fine.
Looking up, gaming isn't too terribly hard. While many recent games are obviously off limits, the games that are here are all excellent; Quake III, Jazz 2, and Halo come to mind, as does SimCity 4. I haven't tried the latter two, but the former two run pretty great at high settings, with Jazz 2 getting very high framerates even on my G3. The only consideration is that both games may be better served by running on a tower hooked up to a CRT; besides the lower input latency, they can be (and in Jazz 2's case, will -- it maxes out at 640x480) run in lower resolution and still look nice and crisp. The laptop LCD, with its fixed pixels, needs to do scaling which blurs everything and doesn't look especially good. Don't get me wrong -- a little blurring is fine, it just acts as anti-aliasing (like a composite signal on a shadow-mask CRT), but too much is ugly.
For music, besides YouTube (via TenFiveTube), iTunes works fine. Internet Radio still works flawlessly without any drops or skips while both Leopard WebKit and LibreOffice are open, and sounds pretty good.
Word processing is a freebie. I'm considering not even going into detail -- you can do word processing on a Commodore 64. But I'll quickly go over it -- your main options are LibreOffice and Microsoft Office. Personally, I don't think there's a reason to go with Microsoft Office over LibreOffice besides for the more classically Macintosh user interface of the latter. It's not something I'm too bothered over, so I'll take newer file format compatibility and more compact layout.
Plus, there's no copy protection to try to bypass.
I haven't tried video editing, but I have made a song or two with MilkyTracker, and it's been perfectly fine for that too. Garageband is something I've wanted to get into, but just haven't for whatever reason.
To be honest, you'd probably be shocked at how much of the Internet nowadays is just an unoptimized, bloated version of offline apps that existed 15 years ago.
iBook G3 --
I can't really say too much about the iBook G3 900MHz. It's the pinnacle of a PowerPC G3 Mac, and that doesn't give me much to work off of -- it can almost do much of the same work the iBook G4 can, but not quite. It's very, very fast in the context of the G3, to the point it's not especially """retro""", for those who like the word. It blazes in Mac OS 9, to be sure; with a Radeon 7500 GPU, a 900MHz G3, and a 100MHz bus, it's one of the fastest machines you can use Mac OS 9 on and that's the context I mainly use it for these days, since Tiger isn't really that great on it.
So instead, I'll mention here that I made a post about the 14" iBook form factor and it should be just under this post.
Power Mac G4, "Oddball" --
This is probably my favorite computer. It's definitely not as useful for Internet tasks as either iBook, but it's my first-love Mac desktop (the iBook G3 being my first Mac ever). It was also a great deal at $30; it was listed as a G3 but I could tell it was a G4 from the photo. Still, it's a very nice desktop and surprisingly handy for only 450MHz; a Pentium III at that speed wouldn't be nearly as useful.
It's a strange machine; no serial decoder can identify it correctly and you'd never see its original specs on EveryMac, but it can run any OS from 8.6 to Sorbet Leopard, so it's especially versatile among my machines. Using the same method to boot it on a Lombard, I might even be able to boot 8.1 on it if I really wished.
It looks amazing -- both the computer itself and the display, a Dell E773s CRT. It's actually really cheap for a CRT, but it's worlds better than any of my flat-panel Macs, and gets decent refresh rates (117 at 640x480, 95 at 800x600, 85 at 1024x768). Definitely, of the three, the most suitable for playing Mac OS 9 video games.
However, I'd say it's not amazing at X. I've given it 2GB RAM to chew on and a Radeon 9800 Pro, but neither are enough to make Finder stop chugging, let alone any apps running on top. Web browsers especially -- though they're not unstable. They run fine, if you're patient. Leopard is necessary for stuff like YouTube on it (which isn't especially good, it's a bit of a slideshow, though it does work) though.
It's sort of my playground for Mac OS 9 -- it has Kaleidoscope, Codewarrior, and various other software that my iBook G3 doesn't even if the latter is more suited for them. Virtual PC for Windows software running Microsoft Whistler. Photoshop 5. It's just more fun to use, in my opinion. I love the form factor of the iBook, but I like desktops even better, with their discrete mouses, larger keyboards, and 20"+ displays.
I miss it already -- I'm on the road and haven't been able to use it, but I'll give it a good amount of use when I'm next able. I have to beat Quake on Nightmare still.
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