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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Apple

Leopard Early Adopters Suffer For The Rest of Us 461

Posted by Zonk from the working-the-kinks-out dept.
News.com tallies up the minor annoyances early adopters have experienced dealing with the newest version of OS X. From a change in folder design to install issues, and beyond to lack of support for Java 6, Mac users have had more to grumble about than usual in the last week. Just the same, the article notes, there have been no major problems and (compared to other OS launches) Leopard kicked off fairly well. "Let's give thanks to the early adopters, however masochistic they may be. You can do all the QA in the world before releasing an operating system, and it's not going to compare to what happens when the unwashed masses get their hands on the product. Microsoft's Windows Vista had years of developer releases, and was released to manufacturing several weeks before it went on sale to the general public. Still, compatibility problems cropped up because it's extremely difficult to anticipate what people are running, and in what combination. It's easier for Apple because it tightly controls its hardware and software, and because there are fewer potential combinations in the wild, but it's still a Herculean task."
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Leopard Early Adopters Suffer For The Rest of Us More

Leopard Early Adopters Suffer For The Rest of Us

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  • Early Adoption (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gricey ( 154787 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @08:14AM (#21210487)
    Isn't this always the case? If you jump in first, yes you get your shiny, and you put an end to the wait, but you're gonna have to live with the niggles.

    Same with the iPhone, same with Vista, hell, same with Debian testing.

    Longer wait = More Stable
    GET IT NOW = Put up with some mild issues

    M.

    • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

      by Carthag ( 643047 )
      Yes, the summary pretty much says it's always the case :)
    • same with rockbox on my sansa e280. I'm going to wait awhile, I think.

    • Re:Early Adoption (Score:5, Insightful)

      by elrous0 ( 869638 ) * on Friday November 02, 2007 @08:23AM (#21210585)
      Not always true. I just want to say that the DVD player that I bought in 1997 is still running strong. I can't say the same for three of the el-cheapo $100 players I bought later.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by eebra82 ( 907996 )
      I think that the point of the article is that Apple is getting closer to where Microsoft is today with its Windows. More complexity will result in more flaws.

      • Re:Early Adoption (Score:5, Insightful)

        by corvair2k1 ( 658439 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @09:37AM (#21211597)
        Anyone who's used Apple products for any length of time knows that the 1.0 release is going to be quite shaky. Remember 10.4.0? Yeesh. The difference between Apple and Microsoft, I think, is that Apple actually fixes it, and fixes it somewhat quickly.

      • Re:Early Adoption (Score:4, Insightful)

        by somersault ( 912633 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @10:04AM (#21211979) Homepage Journal
        And just where is Microsoft today that Apple hasn't been first, in real OS terms? Have you ever used an Apple? Did you try an Apple in the late 80s, and then try Windows 3.1 and go.. ewww..? Probably not..

    • Re:Early Adoption (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Khuffie ( 818093 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @09:16AM (#21211273) Homepage
      The only difference is, because it's Apple, people make excuses and say "oh, it's a new OS, it's natural there are bugs." When it's Microsoft, people's reaction is more akin to "M$ sucks! Windoze sucks! Burn it at the stake!". For the record, I installed Vista when it launched (in fact, I ran the beta exclusively the last few months), and didn't have any major problems aside from an incompatible codec that was fixed before the launch. I'm waiting to get my hands on Leopard to install on my MacBook (which blasphemously is running Vista almost exclusively, I still can't get used to a lack of taskbar) and see how things go.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Stamen ( 745223 )
        I'm a happy OS X user, who complains about Vista. Let's get two things straight:

        1) Apple ships buggy 1.0 stuff, this has always been true, they are kind of known for it. This isn't a good thing, and Apple is pretty lame for doing this, as there really is no excuse for it. They do, however, fix the bugs pretty quick, usually within a week to a few months.

        2) Vista has many, many problems, which are well documented. It isn't because Vista is new, I don't complain about bugs that they will obviously fix in

  • Early adoption problems for Apple. (Score:5, Funny)

    by RandoX ( 828285 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @08:16AM (#21210511)
    Clearly they're pandering to the Windows market.

  • No real problems here (Score:4, Informative)

    by Hellad ( 691810 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @08:18AM (#21210527)
    My install as relatively smooth. It did seem to stall on reboot after install so I did a force shutdown, but it restarted with no problems. Once I turned off safesleep, my system has been fast and very responsive.

  • About as good as non free can be. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Erris ( 531066 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @08:21AM (#21210563) Homepage Journal

    Bravo to the Apple people for pulling things off with nothing more than minor annoyances. They are a reminder that non free software does not have to be as rapacious as others have made it.

    At the same time, Apple is a reminder that non free will software always depend on the free software world and will always have problems. Upgrades of Debian are always smooth and lossless.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by morgan_greywolf ( 835522 )

      Upgrades of Debian are always smooth and lossless.
      How, exactly, did you say that with a straight face? Sorry, I've done Debian upgrades, and they're not always that smooth ... just because apt-get dist-ugprade works doesn't mean everything works well after that, especially if you have any customizations, or odd bits of hardware or applications.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Blakey Rat ( 99501 )
      At the same time, Apple is a reminder that non free will software always depend on the free software world and will always have problems.

      Non-free-will software? What is that, software you're forced to use while some jack-booted thug holds a gun to your forehead? I don't think we have any non-free-will software in the US.

      More seriously, I have no clue what this is supposed to mean. Non-free software will always depend on free software? Explain DOS, Mac OS Classic, OS/2, Netware, etc. (Actually Netware probab

  • My experiences (Score:5, Informative)

    by robosmurf ( 33876 ) * on Friday November 02, 2007 @08:21AM (#21210569)
    I've installed Leopard on both my PowerPC Macs (yes, I got the family edition).

    One install went very smoothly (though Leopard does run slowly at first due to Spotlight indexing everything again).

    The other install ran into two separate problems. Firstly, I got the Blue Screen freeze (solution - reboot to single user mode and delete APE). Secondly, the Finder would hang on launch (solution - bring up a terminal and remove the divx support library).

    Both of these I resolved fairly quickly with a google search, but the solution each time would be worrying to a non-technical user.

  • Hasn't Been That Bad (Score:5, Funny)

    by kannibal_klown ( 531544 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @08:22AM (#21210573)
    I guess I'm one of the lucky few. It hasn't been bad at all for me. Install went well, everything I needed to install right away worked, etc. There are a few apps I'm holding off on installing because I hear they aren't Leopard-ready, but they're not that critical.

    Honestly, you can't expect any new commercial OS version to be flawless.

    But let the flame wars commence.
    • Anti-Mac zealots will point-and-laugh, though they usually fair just as poorly.
    • Mac-Zealots will beat their chests and defend their platform to the point of pig-headed-ness.
    • Linux-Zealots will talk down to everyone else, stating that using a non-open OS is a war crime or some nonsense.
    Why can't people be more moderate?

    • Re:Hasn't Been That Bad (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mattgreen ( 701203 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @08:44AM (#21210835)

      Why can't people be more moderate?
      Because people at this site attach exaggerated importance to the choice of one's operating system when it really doesn't matter. Additionally, extremist viewpoints are rewarded with mod points, so there's little point in being moderate, because you won't get attention. Since there are so many voices, recognition becomes a coveted thing.

      That said, intelligence and dogmatism (about technology) usually don't run hand-in-hand. Technology is about solving problems, not getting into pissing matches about your preferred technology. Unfortunately, few people seem to be able to see beyond themselves.
    • Hey, you left out the grammar nazis who would point out that it is "fare", not "fair"...

    • Why so moderate? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Britz ( 170620 )
      Leopard has some huge issues. In addition to the mentioned problems the firewall is a gaping hole. Microsoft would have been torn apart. Even a Linux distro would have had to endure some flaming. But with Leopard they get praise, because they threw a half baked OS on the market? They obviously pulled to many resources away for the 0phone.
  • Well, firstly, aren't early adopters 'suffering for the rest of us' in pretty much all things that are new?
    Early upgraders are the ones who face incompatibility first. And someone's got to be first anyway.
    And the second thing, maybe apple will be a little more gentle with their 'biased' ads? (Not that they aren't funny... :) but, as we can see, apple is not that perfect after all)

    • Re:A few things (Score:5, Funny)

      by east coast ( 590680 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @08:48AM (#21210881)
      Well, firstly, aren't early adopters 'suffering for the rest of us' in pretty much all things that are new?

      But you don't understand... since it's an Apple product the early adopters who are suffering are cool for it instead of just being jackass morons like those who are early adopters of other technology.

      It's an Apple thing, you wouldn't understand.

  • Little do they know (Score:5, Funny)

    by sircastor ( 1051070 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @08:23AM (#21210591)
    Steve is going to drop the price next month. It'll be $200 less than the original price, so... -$71

  • News.com tallies up the minor annoyances early adopters have experienced dealing with the newest version of OS X.
    Had this been a windows release, I'm fairly certain that these would have been called "major GUI design flaws" and "critical systems bugs/security issues."
    • Well, when there isn't much you can afford to lose.. every little bug is critical.... if Vista had offered some serious new value to users, it would have gotten off a lot easier on the small things. WinFS anyone?

  • So What (Score:3, Informative)

    by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Friday November 02, 2007 @08:29AM (#21210657) Homepage

    That's what happens. I installed Leopard on day 1. And I'm happy.

    The only issue I've run into that is of any importance is that junk mail filtering on Mail seems to have stopped working for me. I don't know if it won't kick in until it has seen X number of messages or such, but it's starting to annoy me. The setting are all right. It is supposed to listen to the headers my ISP sends (SpamAssassin, which worked before). But nothing gets moved into Junk if I don't do it manually. Starting to bug me.

    It's a tiny bug considering all they did. By and large, I'm happy. The only other thing I'd like is to be able to live-resize disks with a DOS partition format (instead of Mac). You can't do that.

    • I don't know if this is the same issue, but my Tiger mail chokes if I get more than 10-20 junk mails at a time. I find that if I make sure the junk mail folder is selected as I do my first mail retrieval of the morning, it's far more likely to filter them all correctly. Though they are still marked as Junk, they just go to the Inbox - if they're not getting marked as junk, you probably just need to keep training it.
    • I've found the filters to be fine so far. Perhaps something is wrong with your Mail?

  • The good outweighs the bad (Score:5, Informative)

    by virgil_disgr4ce ( 909068 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @08:37AM (#21210741) Homepage
    I got Leopard with a new MacBook Pro; previously I have been using Tiger since it came out. I've come to the current conclusion that of all the changes in Leopard, the good ultimately outweighs the bad. A huge chunk of this is due to massively improved networking in Finder -- the "Shared" section in the left-hand list makes networking with my several other machines (windows, linux or otherwise) so much easier, faster, and logical. For whatever it's worth, this is one case where coming closer to windows was an improvement. However, this particular one, like its implementation in Windows, still suffers from the problem of DNS updating -- it doesn't appear to cache entries, and there's no way that I can find to force it to update (note: I'm a bit of a newb on that stuff, so I might be misunderstanding it).

    My friends and I were both worried we'd have to actually go back to Tiger, but I've adapted quite quickly to the changes and find the overall experience dramatically improved. The speed increases are downright monumental; using spotlight is actually a viable idea now!

    --Ted

    • Re:The good outweighs the bad (Score:5, Informative)

      by tf23 ( 27474 ) * <tf23 AT lottadot DOT com> on Friday November 02, 2007 @09:29AM (#21211463) Homepage Journal

      [...]still suffers from the problem of DNS updating -- it doesn't appear to cache entries, and there's no way that I can find to force it to update
      [...]
      Try this:

      dscacheutil -flushcache
      In 10.4 it was

      lookupd -flushcache

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Tony Hoyle ( 11698 )
      They haven't made the networking a whole lot better than 10.4 - it's presented better, and now you can occasionally see a list of machines (only windows machines, and not all of them, but at least it's a list.. plus for some bizarre reason the list doesn't include osx machines) but they still haven't figured out login - you still have to enter a username/password for every single network share and store it in your keyring even though you're logged into the active directory (smbclient -k works so it's merely

  • So far, so good. (Score:5, Informative)

    by tgibbs ( 83782 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @08:42AM (#21210797)
    I've installed Leopard on one of my Macs so far. I even did an upgrade install instead of the far safer "Archive & Install," which creates a new, pristine System Folder. I was amazed at how smoothly it went. It's pretty much gone as expected. Low level utilities and system customizations mostly don't work (although I had some pleasant surprises--Default Folder X seems to work OK) or have minor glitches). Applications generally work fine. The only major failure I've seen at this point is Photoshop 7, which now crashes on launch. On the other hand, some minor bugs seem to have evaporated.

    Overall, I'm happy that I installed it. I am particularly pleased with Time Machine, which is far more convenient and intuitive than my current backup system, not to mention the additional safety of having hourly backups. I'm also beginning to use the built-in virtual desktop feature. I'd say that these two features are worth the price of admission

    I'm not crazy about the esthetics. They certainly are no improvement, but they are not terrible. I'm giving the glitzy new Dock a chance--I've even put it down at the bottom of the screen for a while to see if I'll warm to it (I'm used to making it very small and stashing it over on the right). I have my doubts about the value of the feature that pops up icons of the files associated with a Dock item. I think I preferred the old list method, but I never used that much. I'm using the Finder again a bit, although I still prefer Path Finder for most actions.

    Overall, I'd say it was a successful roll-out.

  • Fixed the Headline (Score:5, Funny)

    by Udo Schmitz ( 738216 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @08:43AM (#21210825) Journal
    Early Adopters Suffer For The Rest of Us

    There, that's better

  • Surprise surprise (Score:2, Interesting)

    by tomcatuk ( 999578 )
    So Apple are able to write software that runs reasonably well on hardware they design and control - hurrah! I hardly see how this is in anyway comparable to what Microsoft is doing when it attempts (albeit badly with Vista as the obvious example) to write code that will run on an almost infinite variety of machines they don't have any part of the design of.

  • 3rd Party hardware (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bhima ( 46039 ) <Bhima,Pandava&gmail,com> on Friday November 02, 2007 @08:44AM (#21210837) Journal
    All of my Leopard update problems stem from 3rd party hardware.

    Highpoint apparently will not be updating their drivers for the PCI-X RAID cards and using the Mac OS 10.4 drivers allows for accessing your drives in some sort of freaky read-only state. This caused a cascade of bizarre problems, culminating in my iTunes database and my iPod being corrupted. I suppose this comes from the actual MP3s residing on a read only partition (which claimed to be read write). So I guess I'll be buying a new RAID card soon and you can bet it won't be a highpoint product.

    I've got a few other issues but nothing I can point back to Apple and complain about.

    My biggest complaint is that I want to buy a new MacPro and they haven't updated them in quite some time.

  • Filevault problems (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mikael_j ( 106439 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @08:49AM (#21210895)

    I installed Leopard this morning, at first everything seemed to work but then I made the mistake of running software update and then rebooting resulting in Leopard complaining about my Filevault partition being corrupted.

    After about an hour of screwing around I had managed to get access to my files by making a .sparseimage file out of the Filevault file, deleting my account and then recreating the account and granting it admin rights, all of this through single-user mode with apple's wonky terminal apps, but hey. At least it works now! :)

    I found a pretty big thread about this on Apple's support forums so it seems I'm not the only one with this problem.

    /Mikael

  • Just the same, the article notes, there have been no major problems and (compared to other OS launches) Leopard kicked off fairly well.

    I don't know about that. I haven't gotten my copy of Leopard yet. The people who I know who have had things go fairly smoothly. But so have the people who upgraded to Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon -- just minor problems. IIRC, Debian had a release a little while ago and there were no major problems with that either. I don't recall any major problems with Panther, Leopard, Edgy, o

    • Re:Other OS releases (Score:5, Informative)

      by ubernostrum ( 219442 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @08:59AM (#21211027) Homepage

      (Oh, and anyone who used the Unsanity APE and didn't remove it before upgrading really ought to know better. The similarity of "haxies" to "hacks" isn't just marketing. Nor is the company name)

      From what I've seen on the issue, it appears that Logitech installed an ancient version of APE as part of one of their driver bundles, and so there were a fair number of people with said ancient APE lying around on their drives without their ever realizing it.

  • Installed for 5 days (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fermion ( 181285 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @08:50AM (#21210907) Homepage Journal
    Computer does not seem slower, but it does not seem faster. No major problems other than a problem at shutdown. Less that a gig or ram, 1 gig processor. Spaces works pretty fast.

    The only GUI issue I have is that it is no longer easy to tell if an application is open from the images on the dock. Perhaps switch back to the old look and feel.

    As far as developer problems, and resulting application problems, so of this simply stems from the compromise apple has made. Apple has always treated developers like paid professionals and user like, well, paying customers. This may not be right choice, but it gives users a much better overall system. One implication of this is that the Applications are often not ready as soon as the OS is. OTOH, as any sysadmin knows, one does install a brand new OS on production machines. That is why I am phasing in the installation. I can see what works and what does not, and if the OS is ready. I may or may not install the OS on my main machines for several weeks.

  • My name is Raven, and I'm an early adopter (Score:5, Informative)

    by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @08:53AM (#21210943) Journal
    I installed Leopard on the release day, and it's not without problems. First, the good:
    • The kernel no longer sucks. XNU is actually a pretty nice kernel now. When the open source release is done, I might even consider running OpenDarwin on some systems (Launchd is pretty nice too, and the new security frameworks are pretty shiny). This is the first OS X system that my mmap torture test failed to kill.
    • The new unified look is definitely an improvement.
    • Spotlight actually works. In Tiger it was a complete waste of space and resource.
    • RAM usage is way down (or, rather, the new VM subsystem handles swapping a lot better). Leopard works okay in 512MB of RAM on an Intel system. Tiger felt a bit cramped in 1GB.
    • Terminal.app is much improved. Bye bye iTerm.
    • Preview is much improved. I can now ditch PDFPen (buggiest piece of crap I've ever had to use) and may AppleScript hack to reopen windows when I update a PDF from LaTeX.
    Some of the bad:
    • The menu bar is hideous unless you set your desktop background colour to black. If anyone happens to meet the UI designer who thought a transparent menu bar was a good idea, please slap them once for every Leopard user (two million slaps and counting...)
    • The new look doesn't work with Aqua widgets. Third party apps will all need updating to use the newer widgets.
    • I got a kernel panic which wiped out my home directory after about a day of use. Might have been a hardware issue (CPU failed to respond to IPI was the error). Made me very glad I keep regular backups...
    • Time Machine doesn't work properly with File Vault. It only performs backups when you log out (and how often do laptop owners do that? Once a month?) and you don't get any of the nice revision control stuff: you can do a full restore by booting from the install CD, but that's it. This forces laptop users to make a choice between security and safety for their data. Good call Apple.
    • Spaces is really buggy. Switching spaces sometimes restacks your windows (you can see why it happens, but it's still wrong). There is a race condition in the NSWorkspace code that causes new windows to sometimes open in the wrong space. No ability to pin windows, rather than apps, to all desktops.

    • Re:My name is Raven, and I'm an early adopter (Score:4, Informative)

      by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @09:45AM (#21211713) Journal
      A few comments:

      First and foremost, if you haven't seen it already, check out the mod someone did to the dock to make it "rainbow glass". (The rainbow effect might not be your thing, but you can use slight variations of what they did to change it to any color of "tinted glass" you like, making it much easier to see.)

      http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/showthread.php?p=516253&posted=1 [mac-forums.com]

      If you want a non-transparent top menu bar, see here:

      http://www.manytricks.com/blog/?id=10 [manytricks.com]

      I agree on Time Machine.... It's very cool, overall, but needs a little more work. (For example, Apple's solution to incompatibilities with their Aperture application is to exclude Aperture's photo database from your backups. Great... so if I'm a pro photographer, Time Machine can't even back up the most important data on my whole system for me?) It also needs a fix (supposedly coming soon) to allow using a shared disk off an Apple Airport Extreme router.

    • Re:My name is Raven, and I'm an early adopter (Score:4, Interesting)

      by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @10:19AM (#21212213)
      You can't Command-Click URLs in Terminal anymore. As long as I can remember (OS 8 days) if you Command-Double clicked on a URL it opened the URL. I used this all the time in Ircle and definitely use it all the time now with irssi and pork. For some reason this doesn't work in the "new" terminal.

      Spotlight is so much faster now finding applications that it's replaced QuickSilver.

    • Re:My name is Raven, and I'm an early adopter (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Geoff ( 968 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @10:52AM (#21212837) Homepage

      RAM usage is way down (or, rather, the new VM subsystem handles swapping a lot better). Leopard works okay in 512MB of RAM on an Intel system. Tiger felt a bit cramped in 1GB.

      This is interesting. Are you saying that overall memory usage is actually down in Leopard, or just that paging isn't as huge a penalty? I'm curious because it kills me when my Tiger system with 1.5GB starts paging. This alone could be enough reason to jump on the Leopard train.

      • Re:My name is Raven, and I'm an early adopter (Score:5, Informative)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @11:06AM (#21213099) Journal
        The VM subsystem has been seriously overhauled. I think the biggest improvement is that the page fault handler is now either preemptible or just very fast (I haven't looked at the code to find out which). In Tiger, nothing (including context switches to apps that are not swapping) happens while a page fault is being handled. This makes the system's performance degrade very suddenly when you run out of RAM. Since page faults were so expensive to handle (probably due to Mach overhead, since the VM subsystem was down in the Mach layer) any program that used mmap was insanely slow (an order of magnitude slower than using POSIX aio, while the two are about the same speed on FreeBSD).

        I wrote a simple program that mmaps a 2GB file and scans through quickly modifying each page in turn in a tight loop. This means that you are basically reading in and then writing out 2GB of data via the page fault handler. On Tiger, the entire system would freeze if you tried this. On Leopard, it slowed down a bit, but was still useable. This test program grew to use about 1.45GB of my 2GB of RAM, but even with only 512MB left for other programs (and I was running about a dozen of them) and constant page faults from this process the system was still useable. There was a little lag, but it was not anywhere near as bad as I've seen Tiger get.

  • Vista Sucks? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Zebra_X ( 13249 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @08:56AM (#21210985)
    http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20071030122926454 [macfixit.com]

    This list of problems is almost as staggering as Vistas issues. What's most interesting is that a number *Applications* don't work with Leopard.

    At least Microsoft values backward compatibilty. Arguably Vista's internals changed significantly more than Leopard yet MS managed to maintain almost complete backward compatibility with old programs.

    I mean, Photoshop 7 doesn't work with Leopard!?

    Of course, what little hardware Mac has available is also having issues according to that list.

    Better hope your hardware partners update their drivers!
    • The very first line in the MacFixIt article is:
      Leopard: Incompatible third-party software and hardware

      Both Leopard and Vista suffer from 3rd party problems. But I'd submit that there was a significant list of problems within Vista without adding any 3rd party software, particularly in some of the security-related stuff (including that annoying security prompter, which triggered so many times as to result in a 'social engineering failure' to be useful...)

      dave

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by linuxgurugamer ( 917289 )
      Backwards compatibility? Vista? Those two don't belong in the same sentence. Almost every publisher had to modify their apps in order to make it work properly with Vista. Hardware manufacturers had to modify their drivers, and now, over a year after the Vista release, there are still enough problems with Vista that many people are still choosing XP instead of Vista.

      I run Vista, XP, and now OS X. I'm waiting for my upgrade to arrive, and don't expect too many problems. I only have Vista because some of

  • X11 Server is totally broken (Score:5, Informative)

    by GrumpyOldMan ( 140072 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @09:00AM (#21211035)
    The X11 server shipped with Leopard is utterly broken for people who make heavy use of X (broken dual monitor support, no full screen mode, X11 Applications custom menu times do not work, X may not launch because it depends on launchd tricks, etc). If you upgrade to Leopard, do NOT install X11. If you've already upgraded, and X doesn't work correctly, there are instructions online to downgrade to Tiger's X11: http://lists.apple.com/archives/x11-users/2007/Nov/msg00005.html [apple.com]

    • Re:X11 Server is totally broken (Score:5, Informative)

      by mzs ( 595629 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @10:00AM (#21211921)
      It is going in the right direction though. The goal is to have X11.app open source and a part of the most recent X from X.org. In fact the git repository is available and Ben Byer from apple (also an X maintainer) has been adding patches to fix many of the bugs basically daily. In fact yesterday or this morning William Mortensen submitted a patch to fix yet another bug and Ben added it to git. This really is a refreshing change to how things were for X11 land on apple before.

      The mailing list is providing links to binaries to download and use instead. The list of fixed items stands at this currently (from the mailing list emails):

      * X11 windows do not come to the front
      * Yellow / invisible cursor on Intel platform
      * Unable to drag windows between screens
      * X11 apps don't "honor" the menu bar (meaning you can drag them underneath)
      * Badly-formatted .xinitrc warning message
      * Customized Apps menu items with arguments did not work
      * Modifier keys (shift, control, etc) would get stuck if you switch away from X11 while holding down the key. ?If you still see this problem with anything other than Spaces (which is an entirely more complicated problem), please let me know.
      * "Fake mouse button" fix ?-- Option-click should now emulate the middle mouse button, while Command-click should emulate the right mouse button
      * stability fixes (added -DROOTLESS_WORKAROUND and fixed overflow bug with QueryFontReply)

      Basically with these patched X11.app is again usable in Leopard unless you use Spaces. He asked help from the community to see places where the offset bug may be because he will soon have a meeting with those devs. Rarely have we had such an amazing opportunity to have this connection with the engineers inside Apple. Also Ben wrote an email today saying basically that he had spent a month trying to get full screen X working and he needs help from the community.

      Personally I am glad we finally we are in a position to determine when and how we will have a modern and useful X server on Mac OS X.
  • I know one person who had the blue screen problem however. I've heard it's related to 3rd party software that is incompatible with Leopard.

    That said, I have to say that Leopard is a LOT of fun and I"m personally very pleased with the upgrade.

    I like the changes to the email client the most, followed by the new backup system which is intuitive and beyond easy to use and setup. There so much new stuff.. iChat is still inferior to Adium though in my books. SMB support is noticeably improved and easier to use.

  • went better than Gutsy Gibbon... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @09:03AM (#21211089)

    Most of Leopard's problems are traced back to bad 3rd party software that uses undocumented hooks.

    Every Ubuntu user I know (~6 people) has had issues with the Gutsy upgrade; more than half of them "resolved" the issue by wiping the machine. Given that Ubuntu's development process is far more "open" and there was no "third party" software involved (none were using third party binary drivers), what's the excuse?

    I've seen CUPS break so badly that it constantly "stops" all the printers. Monitor resolutions and scan rates that were completely wrong and required hand-editing Xorg's config file, when the old config had worked just fine. One machine had an ethernet port completely disappear- and it was the one the ethernet cable was plugged into! Most were machines in use by programmer types, who didn't go mucking about save what was available via the GUI, because they don't know linux well enough. I can't blame the user in these cases.

    Even with the previous release, when I upgraded a very simple server, there were problems with device-mapper pegging the machine until I spent half an hour screwing around with it, and finally found a post and bug in the ubuntu bugtracker. Of course, the bug had been known for months, and do you think anyone bothered to release a fix? Nope!

  • For anything. I will go out and get 10.5 this weekend and raise a glass to all those who had it installed six minutes after it released. Thank you, my unpaid beta testers, for making my weekend easier!
  • So far all of my applications work just fine. I backed up my home folder, applications that don't come with OS X, and a couple other things, then popped in the Leopard disk and did an upgrade. No boot problems, no app problems. Nothing but goodness so far. :D I guess I am the exception. I use mostly free or opensource apps. I don't have a lot of expensive commercial software on it other than Carrara 3D (and the free Daz Studio). Neo Office works just fine. Etc....

  • Your Mileage May Vary (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Thumper_SVX ( 239525 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @09:06AM (#21211139) Homepage
    I waited over the weekend to upgrade my Macbook Pro (first gen 15") to Leopard. And you know what? I'm happy I did it.

    I did the upgrade on Monday night after using Carbon Copy Cloner to take a snapshot of my machine. And yes, to Windows folks that was a bootable image; I could reboot to my external USB drive if I wanted and CCC my machine back again... but I didn't have to.

    So how did the upgrade process itself go? I inserted the Leopard DVD, clicked the icon to upgrade, waited for the reboot, clicked once and walked away to watch Mythbusters with my kids. By the time I came back upstairs to my laptop, I had a Leopard logon screen.

    So I logged on to "survey the damage". You know what? I was impressed. Here are my first impressions:

    1. 3rd Party Applications: The Missing Sync is broken. I knew that and expected that since they are notorious for lacking behind Apple updates. No worries, I don't really NEED it... sure it's nice, but it's not a requirement. Parallels worked, but networking was broken. A quick reinstall fixed that. Yahoo Messenger was busted out of the box, but I had Version 3 Beta 1... upgraded to the latest and voila, we're chatting with friends. My ancient copy of Photoshop 7 gave it up for the team. Even a reinstall wouldn't fix it. No problem, I have Aperture as well and rarely use Photoshop any more. Uninstalled, no worries. So out of all my apps, I had one casualty and a few "non-life threatening injuries". That's much better than my Vista experience.

    2. Apple Applications: My first launch of Mail resulted in a "database upgrade" follwed by an immediate failure and Mail disappeared without so much as an error message. I launched it again and it's been fine since. I might delete my account and re-sync it... I love IMAP. Address Book and iCal are both greatly improved (as is Mail) and are actually useful tools now instead of toys. I see huge improvements here. Finder is significantly better, and though I do find the "embossed icons" to be a step backward in readability, the general improvements vastly improve the experience. Besides, I have faith this will be fixed either with a patch or a third-party hack. Everything else I've not really played with much.

    3. General Usability: Wow. That's all I can say. The improvements over even the latest Tiger release are impressive. Although synthetic benchmarks show a very slight speed decrease on this platform, the general "feel" of the OS is significantly improved. Application launch times, app switching and generally USING the operating system make it feel like the system's actually been significantly improved. It's noticeable, and I have not really noticed any speed decreases at all apart from still seeming slow when I have my XP VM running in Parallels (rarely). At the end of the day, I get the impression that Leopard is faster, even if that's not backed up by the benchmarks. If the operating itself feels better, who cares what the benchmarks say anyway?

    4. Other Notes: Wake from sleep is significantly improved. It used to be that I would open the lid of my laptop and I'd end up waiting for up to 15 seconds for a logon prompt. Now, the prompt is there within moments of me opening the lid. This significantly improves usefulness for me. Also, I thought that the "Coverflow" browsing would be a toy I'd bore of quickly. Quite the opposite... I've found it incredibly useful for going through busy and full folders so I can locate documents incredibly quickly. A+ on that feature!

    5. The Bad: So far as I said, the only things I'll take issue with are the icons (embossed instead of clear icons) and a few things that I think need a little more work. The Stacks function... yuck. I don't like Stacks... I thought I would find it useful but it's just ugly. Not impressed, but I removed the default Documents and Application stacks from my dock... I'll use Quicksilver TYVM. Also, I've had one "grey curtains" failure (Mac owners know what I'm talking about) just a day after installation, but nothing since. It could well ha

  • I upgraded an iMac at work and, after ensuring that the VPN client is compatible, a MacBook at home. The iMac at home stays on 10.4 until I have a Leopard-compatible SuperDuper. Time Machine looks cool and all, but I really like having a bootable backup.

    In my case, OSXPlanet [osxplanet.com], GeekTool [tynsoe.org], MenuShade [nullriver.com], and Butler [manytricks.com] have various levels of breakage. In the case of Butler, I'm trying out Spotlight as an application launcher (much faster than in 10.4), and I'm looking into System Events with AppleScript for keyboard

  • MacOS releases 1.1 in 1984 and 2.0 in 1985 were extremely stable, considering they had no memory management to speak of and only rudimentary multitasking.

    Of course, there was a lot less going on in a typical Mac than most machines today.

    If you want stable and secure, run a proven-stable-and-secure OS like OpenBSD and run it as an appliance rather than a general-purpose PC. The fewer things you have going on, the less chance two things will interact badly and cause problems. You can achieve similar stabili

  • Very smooth. Snappy. (Score:3, Informative)

    by jpellino ( 202698 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @09:21AM (#21211335)
    I keep my iBook 1.33 bog-standard and here's what I've found:
    It lies about the install time - my quoted 1.5 hrs turned into actual 35 min (no languages, no printers no dev tools).
    Zero install issues.
    The unified UI is a standout feature.
    Coverflow+Quicklook together are a standout feature.
    Data detectors - wonderful. iCal is now a serious calendaring app. We're almost back to Newton functionality ;-)
    Spaces is a standout feature. Almost makes Expose needless.
    I get FrontRow and PhotoBooth.
    Classique c'est mort, but we knew that.
    Spotlight indexing is the same as any previous install, the app is far better.
    The Dock and Menubar look great with the space-y "defaultdesktop" pic - light desktops not so much, I can see where there are issues.

  • Directory Services (Score:5, Informative)

    by duffbeer703 ( 177751 ) * on Friday November 02, 2007 @10:30AM (#21212441)
    Integration with Active Directory and some LDAP directories is completely broken. It's really disapointing that features that worked great in 10.4 are broken in 10.5.

  • Leopard won't play with non-Mac cups print servers (Score:5, Informative)

    by caseih ( 160668 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @11:38AM (#21213593)
    The first thing we noticed about leopard was that printing no longer worked for us. Somehow Apple had managed to break things when you tried to use a non-Apple CUPs print server. The solution, fortunately, is found at http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5705091&tstart=0 [apple.com] . However that's a real pain for a lot of Mac users, especially ones not used to the unix command line.

    Another problem is that it's now a lot less obvious how to connect Leopard to an LDAP server other than OS X's OpenDirectory or ActiveDirectory, which are the only two options that appear in the Directory Utility app. Rather than doing things the obvious way, you have to use the services tab, click on LDAPv3, then edit, and then add your server and specify the server type. Definitely a step backwards, kind of like how Vista's wireless setup got a lot harder over XP.

  • Finder hang after install, and a solution (Score:3, Informative)

    by Slur ( 61510 ) on Friday November 02, 2007 @11:42AM (#21213653) Homepage Journal
    After I installed Leopard I logged in to my account and the Finder wouldn't load. In fact, no applications would launch. I searched the net and discovered I was not alone. Eventually I found the answer in one of Apple's Discussion Forums. The solution is to move or rename the folder /Library/Application Support/DivXNetworks and reboot. You can do this in single-user mode or boot from another system disk. In my case I booted from Jaguar on an external drive and moved the folder to /Users/Shared.

    Since I got that out of the way the system has been running amazingly well.

    Spotlight is so much faster, and I like the way it shows "All Results" as a Finder search. Much better.

    The Translation widget is much better!

    Spaces is nice, but I want more: Named spaces and per-space desktop backgrounds, to name two wishes.

    The new Network prefpane is just about perfect.

    The new Finder is much, much better. And QuickLook is already indispensable.

    The new Safari is excellent - and so fast! Oddly the Next Window shortcut (Command-`) is gone. Doesn't seem to work properly in the Finder either, hmm...

    Time Machine: Haven't tried it yet.

    Tabs in Terminal!

    Font rendering seems to be improved throughout the system. Much sharper. And automatic font activation... it's about time!

    GrowlMail isn't working... *snif*

    PubSub wants my keychain password again.

    iChat screen sharing is great! I tried it over Bonjour at home. Very nice. However, it took two tries before my requests would pop up on the target machine.

    Stacks aren't very pretty. I don't like the concatenated file names. I'm glad Apple added a ~/Downloads folder though.

    Icon previews in the Finder aren't very useful. What good is a 16x16 PDF preview in column view? I'd rather see the application document icons most of the time so I know which app opens them.

    Cover Flow is cool, but too touchy with my scroll wheel. Some kind of acceleration algorithm - like mouse motion - would help here. I'm not sure how much I'll be using Cover Flow view.

    Where do I set the default View Options for columns, icons, list...? Finder views are still somewhat confusing, but then most of the time I just keep two column-view Finder windows open and work with those. Not often do I double-click a folder on the desktop or elsewhere to open it up to its own view.

    Still no native support for AVI files. No QuickLook for AVIs.

    Rounded corners on menus are pretty nice looking.

    Overall I find the system faster and much improved. I look forward to playing with XCode 3 next!

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