Leopard Early Adopters Suffer For The Rest of Us

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."

Early Adoption

[incubus^ (154787)]

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:Early Adoption

[elrous0 (869638)]

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:Early Adoption

[corvair2k1 (658439)]

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

[Just Some Guy (3352)]

What I have a problem with is when it's Microsoft, everyone is up in arms about how M$ sucks, and when it's Apple everyone's like "it's okay. it's a 1.0 release. they'll fix it."

That's because there's a wide historical gap in what kind of bugs are there and how they're fixed. MS has long been criticized for basic design flaws that may or may not be fixed when a service pack rolls out a year or so later. Apple tends to have bugs along the lines of "Mail.app's spam filter gives false negatives in this corner case because we accidentally used an int instead of a float in this function", and most of them are usually fixed when a service pack rolls out a few weeks later.

Re:Early Adoption

[Stamen (745223)]

Regarding maximize, I think it has a lot to do with your resolution as well. If you have a high resolution monitor, maximizing often produces a little tiny bit of content with 80% whitespace. When I'm using my laptop disconnected from my monitor, I tend to max out my screens as well, but not with my monitor. OS X's zoom feature (green dot) is designed to make the window just big enough to hold all of its contents, but no more.

Maximize works well in Windows, because you have the taskbar, which if you think about it acts as an upside-down set of tabs. So basically you have 1 large screen of tabs that you flip through with the taskbar. Also Windows (at least XP and below) doesn't highlight the foreground window real well, so if you have a bunch of windows opened and showing, it's really hard to tell which one is the front most window.

Since OS X doesn't have the taskbar, it does a good job of highlighing the z-order of the windows, and it has stuff like Expose, having floating windows, rather than maximized windows, works really well. I always use a desktop manager like Spaces or VirtuaDesktops so I layout my windows and switch "spaces", rather than minimizing.

It's just a different way of approaching the problem.

OS X also uses drag and drop a whole lot more than Windows, so that necessitates having windows next to each other rather than on top of each other. Someone in Windows will always go to the right-click first, and old Mac user will try drag and drop first; which also explains why a right-click wasn't very important to Macs for a long time.

It's interesting to look back at Photoshop, which started out exclusively on the Mac. Older versions were very Mac-like, with many small floating windows. But once they came out with a Windows version and that became the dominant OS for their software, they started to make it more Windows like, without the floating windows. This happened to Macromedia's stuff too.

Early adoption problems for Apple.

[RandoX (828285)]

Clearly they're pandering to the Windows market.

My experiences

[robosmurf (33876)]

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.

Third party drivers.

[pavon (30274)]

Agreed. Unfortunately if that poor soul installed Logitech drivers, or other third party software they might have APE installed without even knowing it.

Hasn't Been That Bad

[kannibal_klown (531544)]

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

[mattgreen (701203)]

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.

Re:Hasn't Been That Bad

[gardyloo (512791)]

Spoken like a true vi user.

Little do they know

[sircastor (1051070)]

Steve is going to drop the price next month. It'll be $200 less than the original price, so... -$71

The good outweighs the bad

[virgil_disgr4ce (909068)]

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

[tf23 (27474)]

[...]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

So far, so good.

[tgibbs (83782)]

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

[Udo Schmitz (738216)]

Early Adopters Suffer For The Rest of Us

There, that's better

3rd Party hardware

[bhima (46039)]

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

[mikael_j (106439)]

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

My name is Raven, and I'm an early adopter

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

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.

X11 Server is totally broken

[GrumpyOldMan (140072)]

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

[mzs (595629)]

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.

Your Mileage May Vary

[Thumper_SVX (239525)]

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

Directory Services

[duffbeer703 (177751)]

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.

Re:A few things

[east coast (590680)]

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.

Re:Other OS releases

[ubernostrum (219442)]

(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.