Leopard as the New Vista?

ninja_assault_kitten writes "There's an interesting rant from Oliver Rist up on the PC Magazine site. He compares the catastrophe that is Vista to the recently released OS X Leopard. While clearly one is a lion and the other a cub, there do appear to be some frustrating similarities. From the article: 'A month of using Leopard with the same software I had under Tiger and the OS has dumped six times. That's six cold reboots for Oliver. Apple isn't even honest enough to admit that Leopard is crashing: The OS just grays out my desktop and pops up a dialog box telling me I've got to reboot. Like the whole thing is my fault. I even snapped a picture of it. After all, I HAD PLENTY OF CHANCES!'"

Re:Clearly you're mistaken

While yeah, there are a ton of Apple fans out there that can take a bit too much pride in their machines, the fact is that this is somewhat unusual.

I've seen tons of mac laptops with cosmetic damage, but it's pretty rare that the operating system on a new mac is unreliable.

If this report represents a widespread issue, that's significant. And partly because macs are supposed to work without any problems. And frankly, there's no excuse for them not to. It's like that Halo 3 and the XBOX 360 lawsuit... it's all Microsoft, so there's no excuse for failure.

With my thinkpad, there are parts from several vendors interoperating and dealing with windows and ubuntu and even my playstation when I stream movies on TVersity.

With a mac, it's all Apple, all the time, so the operating system programmer has far less work to do... at least in my mind. Apple has a very interesting business model that ought to be reliable and usually is, so I think this incident somewhat shows why apple fans are so cocky (I'll stick with my thinkpad).

Re:Clearly you're mistaken

I think the current releases from three OS vendors suck right now: Vista, Leopard, and Gutsy. Being a full-time Gutsy user, I'm particularly hurt by that one, but not surprised. I said several times before it was released that it was going to suck more than Feisty, and it did. Canonical was trying to get everything unstable into Gutsy so that the bugs could be worked out for the long-term release. Wireless is broken (again) for many people on the same hardware that worked since Dapper. Enabling Compiz by default was a big mistake. Firefox is less stable. MEh.

At least Canonical has a reason for it to suck though: Microsoft and Apple intended to put out decent operating systems.

For the people I know:

• Vista owners are installing XP,
• Gutsy owners are installing Feisty, and now, apparently
• Leopard owners are rolling back to Tiger.

It's a fucking banner year for the OS. I hope 2008 is better.

Re:Clearly you're mistaken

People keep on talking about thin clients... but I just don't see it happening anytime soon for a host of reasons.

Privacy - people scream at the idea of google reading their mail just to give them ads. What happens when they're storing all of their documents, photos, music, videos on someone else's server? I wouldn't be willing to do it. Nothing would convince me that employees of the company housing my data wouldn't be able to just go in there and check it out whenever they pleased. I believe Facebook is a classic example of this. Private profiles aren't private if you're an employee.

Power - I recently spoiled myself with a OC'd 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM, two 150GB Raptors in RAID 0, two 640MB 8800GTSs and a 64 bit OS to make sure I'm taking advantage of my RAM. Games look beautiful on this beast. You'd have to have a heckuva server and a ridiculous internet connection to provide both me and other people (I say other people, because if I'm the only one using it, why is there a server / thin client set-up?) the same gaming experience I can get from my machine on my own. Not every piece of software will happily work using the thin client model. There are other examples, but games are the first thing that came to mind.

Security - This is the trust issue all over again. The "paris hilton cell phone" hack comes to mind. Her phone wasn't hacked, the server that housed some of the data that she stored on her phone was hacked. Aaaand naked pictures of her ended up everywhere and every poor sucker that knew her got called until they switched numbers. That was just crap from a phone - not the entire contents of someones computer. Everyone thinks it's funny when it happens to a celebrity but how would it be if your intimate videos ended up on the net for co-workers to watch? Personal letters? Photos? Angry rants about your current boss? The list goes on... The fact is I don't think any system will ever by "hack proof" but my little box under my desk is a much smaller target than say a server housing thousands or even millions of other people's data.

I'm not trying to crap on your parade, it just seems like ever since the .com boom people have been saying it more and more and I just don't see it as being a good idea.

Re:Clearly you're mistaken

There's far more to computing than just Word. I think it's ironic that the slashdot group, being a tech savvy bunch, assume that everyone else just uses Word and their favorite web browser. There are plenty of people using power hungry applications. Have you ever rendered anything? Played around with an image the size of a poster in Photoshop with a high enough DPI for print? Mixed your own audio tracks? Made a movie? Used CAD software? Grandma aside, users are getting smarter and more and more people are using these kinds of programs. If all someone wants is just a typewriter with spell check then great, give them something that's 10 years old and be done with it. I don't think that's going to satisfy the average user though.

Woah... trusting web app employees is VERY different than trusting desktop app employees. There's a huge difference between trusting someone not to look at MY data housed on THEIR servers than there is to trust that someone didn't write some kind of back door code that allows them to see the contents of my hard drive. Firewall, virus protection, and various other monitoring tools all give me the ability to know exactly what's happening on my computer. I don't have that on their servers. I can't see if someone is trying to look at my files on their machines.
Additionally, any desktop company releasing a piece of software like that (Sony rootkit anyone!?) would immediately get slammed by the public. The evidence would be right in the code - you can't hide from that. That's much different than an employee at some data center casually browsing through everyone's files. Good luck proving they did it and good luck getting the company to admit it even if they know that they did it.

Re:Clearly you're mistaken

90% of what people do with the internet is use the internet.

Really? I find this statistic hard to believe.

Re:Clearly you're mistaken

I hope 2008 is better.

Install Hillary? I don't think so. May as well roll back to Bush.

Roll, roll, roll in the hay

Re:Clearly you're mistaken

I act as a moderator of a big german mac-board, and I've not heard of one single Leopard-user switching back to Tiger. In fact, most of the Leo-crashing-problems stem from people using older versions of "hack-the-OS" - apps like application enhancer (APE).

Leopard is stable for the majority of all its users.

Re:Clearly you're mistaken

I have three machines running Leopard and I haven't experienced any panics. Chances are good that one of the following is true:

• The article's author is using hardware drivers (or other kernel extensions) that I am not. In that case, this should be obvious from the panic backtrace and may not be Apple's fault at all. It may also be a problem specific to one model or configuration of Mac.
• The article's author had an installation failure of some sort.
• The article's author has bad RAM. (Odds are good that the installation is corrupt as a result, so it's a good idea to reinstall if this is the case.)

In either case, if the article's author wants to get the panics fixed, the best thing he/she can do is to post the panic logs so that people can scrutinize it and tell him/her what is wrong. Instead, he posted a rant, which tells me he is more interested in making Apple look bad than in fixing his issues. *sigh*

Re:Clearly you're mistaken

You make an excellent point. I'm a Gutsy user at the moment, and I also was expecting more. Feisty had set my expectations high. Two thoughts: First, Feisty was released in April '07. Even followed by Gutsy, that makes '07 a banner year for Linux, IMO. Second, '07 is the year of 64-bit pervasive computing. I personally hope to never purchase a 32-bit machine or OS again, and hope not to live to see the 64/128 transition. I think this transition is one reason for displeasure with the new OSes. Typical apps that use to run in 100 meg now take 150 or more, and run 10-20%slower, simply because they're 64-bit (except for mine [sourceforge.net]). And talk about disappointment, I know tons of guys who were led to believe that 64-bit machines would be 2X faster. Twice the data width means twice the throughput, right? Sales guys basically suck. Even programming language designers have been caught with their pants down... mixing 64 and 32-bit pointers sucks or is impossible in all top-ten, and most make it impossible to represent 4 billion objects with 32-bit object handles, including C++, C#, the JVM (not Java), and D.

I heard a great story about why Microsoft is forcing all future OS versions to be 64-bit only. Apparently, only the 64-bit modes of Intel/AMD CPUs are capable of enforcing DRM effectively. HD-DVD content will only be released to 64-bit versions of Windows. You gotta love the future.

Re:Clearly you're mistaken

I actually am one of those fanboys and I've gotta admit I'm very surprised by the number of issues that have come up with this release. These aren't small issues either. From the perspective of a sysadmin;

- X is hosed.
- Finder takes up large amounts of CPU at odd, mainly inconvenient times.
- It's much less graceful than 10.4, even in Tiger's early releases.
- There have been more than one borked upgrade that I've been witness to, which is brand new to me.
- First day of use I nearly lost my keychain, and it's still not 100% right.
- The new tmp layout broke a few key native OS X apps (Cyberduck, but the dev of Cyberduck was quick on the fix!)
- Weird arbitrary menu re-shuffling that seems out of the norm for Apple's usually anal layout and design philosophy (WTF is going on in the Network Prefs? It's been simple and straightforward since OS 8, and now it's like a circus).
- Longer and more frequent pauses in this release. I'm sensitive to the difference between perceptually slow and really, truly slow, and these are truly slow pauses.

There IS good of course, some of the new features I actually dismissed turn out to be awesome, like, not willing to downgrade back to 10.4 awesome, so I'm going to tough it out. But if I had to turn back time I'd wait until some time next year to order my copy.

As it is now I jumped the gun on ordering and I upgraded a bunch of clients to 10.5, to my present dismay (including my wife). Basically I bought on the good feelings I had towards 10.4.8-> and this release hasn't lived up to that standard.

So it's not that Apple is never bad, but what is new is the WAY that this is bad.

Re:Clearly you're mistaken

- X is hosed.

They moved from XFree86 to Xorg. Big change. The [e-mail] has been super-active, though, with Ben Byer from Apple putting out tons of fixes. Most stuff works now or has a workaround. You can get the latest update here: http://www.x.org/wiki/XDarwin [x.org]

Re:Clearly you're mistaken

No they didn't. Tiger shipped with X11 based on X.org 6.8, Leopard with a release based on 7.2. I've been running developer snapshots of 7.2 on Tiger for a while, but it was nice to have a properly supported one. Also, Xephyr seems to work nicely on Leopard which is a huge improvement over Xnest.

There are a number of UI regressions in Leopard, but only one issue I would consider should have been a show-stopper. If you upgrade from Tiger with File Vault enabled then the first time you log out then your home directory becomes inaccessible and you can't log back in again. See my journal for how to recover from this; I've wasted over five hours of my life fixing this since I upgraded and I consider this completely unacceptable.

Re:Clearly you're mistaken

> But if I had to turn back time I'd wait until some time next year to order my copy.

Wait a second. I thought Leopard came with a time machine?

Re:Clearly you're mistaken

As it is now I jumped the gun on ordering and I upgraded a bunch of clients to 10.5

Remind me to never come to you for any sort of consulting. This is just plain negligent.

Re:What will be interesting

is whether Apple will fix most of the issues with 10.5.1 and how long it will be until that's released as compared to Vista, and how long it will take MS to "fix" it.

http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macosx1051update.html [apple.com]

Re:What will be interesting

10.5.1 is out and it only fixed some of the issues I've had. I've found using OnyX to delete all caches (including the system cache) has helped, as in it's been 2 days since and hasn't crashed. But Leopard wasn't crashing every day or two, so only time will tell.

One thing I have noticed, the Intel systems I use crash (and have other bugs), but the PowerPC systems I have (including one at the very low end of Leopard supported systems) are stable. That was also reflected in the size of the 10.5.1 updates--the Intel update was over 150MB and the PowerPC update was about 35MB (IIRC the numbers, of course).

Re:What will be interesting

I have a PPC system on Leopard and compared to Tiger its relatively the same with few if any crashes. If anything crashed on me it was Safari beta and Safari 2 but Safari 3 is much improved. I'd also say the Finder is much better in Leopard but it still sucks with copying and moving files. I use the command line for that (not that I mind). But this is the OS X experience for most users and should be able to rely on Finder.

Spotlight seems to take longer, but I also recall disabling it on the command line as it would hang for days at first install. Tried to re-index it and then turned it off. At least, I thought I did, but it is still turned on.

Re:Leopard is buggy and Apple has few excuses

Apple's using BSOD icons for Windows network shares in Leopard makes this all the more embarrassing for Apple.

So what icons does Windows use for representing Apple filesharing protocol shares?

Re:What will be interesting

Well, I'm sure that your heart monitoring software is far more complex than an operating system that has to deal with thousands of possible computer configurations and marshall memory and files to boot. How hard can it be to write an operating system, right? I mean, those Lunix guys did it in a couple of days, and it works absolutely flawlessly!

Re:What will be interesting

$150 ever couple of years for an OS that, even on it's worst day, works better than anything MS has to offer is much better than $500+ to upgrade your machine that will almost definately require another $3000 in hardware to run it at any decent speed.

Ignoring the fact that most people would never pay $500 for an OS(take a look at the OEM vista costs, or the costs for home, or student discount, or any other number of popular ways to get it) or that I don't even know where you'd spend $3000 on hardware -- I tried to price out desktop hardware while debating buying a macbookpro and ended up with https://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/WishList/MySavedWishDetail.asp?ID=522277 [newegg.com] , $800 cheaper than the lowend macbook pro but has a quad core 2.4ghz(OCable to 3.6ghz on air), 4gigs of ram, top end video card, etc.

But thats not the point I wanted to make.

The point was that you don't compare paying $150 every couple of years to any outside competition, you look at it and say is this really worth $150 compared to the version I already have? Did they actually add $150 worth of new features?

You aren't renting the OS, you're buying software. You really shouldn't pay $150 for something you already have + a few small features, unless those features are worth $150.

Re:What will be interesting

Wrong: Windows XP got two free updates Microsoft calls Service Packs. Over the past half decade, the company worked hard to deliver a major consumer update to Windows, but was unable to do so as planned in 2003. It then failed again in 2004, 2005, and 2006. It officially shipped Vista in January as Windows 6.0 for $200-500.

Apple delivered reference updates to Mac OS X in 2002, 2003, and 2005, along with a transition to Intel processors in 2006 and a port to ARM for the iPhone in 2007 and a new reference release as Leopard for Macs. That's four paid releases, which adds up to less the cost of Vista Ultimate and a de-malware checkup. In between, Apple has released over 35 free minor updates that fix issues and add significant new features (such as IP over Firewire, or file system journaling).

Ten Myths of Leopard: 2 It's Only a Service Pack! [roughlydrafted.com]
Ten Myths of Leopard: 10 Leopard is a Vista Knockoff! [roughlydrafted.com]

Vista is the most expensive consumer OS ever, but offers very little to PC users. Leopard, like every OS ever released, has issues. Tiger had issues, and new Macs running Tiger have issues. There will never be a perfect OS, and if there were, third party apps would have issues for it. But Leopard is a solid upgrade over Tiger, and fixes issues in Tiger.

The fact that Oliver Rist--a complete Microsoft shill who has minimal experience in small business selling Windows software, yet writes a column on "Windows in the Enterprise" for InfoWorld--has written a "Leopard has Vista-like problems that ever Vista doesn't have!!" should be of no surprise. The Windows Enthusiasts have all been trying to associate all of Microsoft's problems upon Apple lately.

Rist's last flamebait was an article titled "Does OS X Suck!!!?!?" where he tried to suggest the idea that Mac OS X is just FreeBSD with some custom icons painted by Apple, talked about "Apple jihaders," and tied in the hard drive failure of his MacBook as a problem with Mac OS X Tiger. Now suddenly he views Tiger as rock solid, and Leopard as something that suffers regular kernel panics? Rist even won a Zoon Award for his rant.

The August 2007 Zoon Awards for Technical Ignorance and Incompetence [roughlydrafted.com]

Leopard, like Vista, is unlikely to suffer from kernel failure unless bad hardware in involved, or problematic kernel drivers have been installed. The problems with Vista are largely related to an inefficient, version 1.0 graphics compositing engine that assumes the presence of a high power GPU; a new driver model that fails to support a lot of common hardware; a flashy new interface that sacrifices usability to look interesting; and the lack of many practical new features.

Leopard doesn't have any of those problems (aside from some that don't like the look of the Dock, which is easy to change). Leopard has some minor issues with some apps and some new kinks to work out, problems that Vista also shares. Leopard has a mature graphics compositing engine that has been refined over the last 7 years and can scale down to work on less than stellar hardware; a largely unchanged driver model; and lots of new practical features, from visual backups to virtual desktops to UI refinements, file viewers, et cetera.

Ten Myths of Leopard: 1 Graphics Must Be Slow! [roughlydrafted.com]
Ten Myths of Leopard: 8 No Hidden New Features! [roughlydrafted.com]

It is unlikely that Rist has any real understanding of what Leopard even is.

Obvious

Apple and Microsoft display the same pattern - their products resembles beta for the first few months, and only become mature after a few years. Happened with the iPod, and all successful versions of Windows.

I never upgrade until the widespread opinion is the product is mature...

Re:Obvious

Vista release: Jan. 30, 2007. Vista SP1 release date: ... uh, you can get the beta.
Leopard (10.5) release: Oct. 26, 2007. Leopard 10.5.1 release date: Nov. 15, 2007.
but don't compare Apples to ... well, whatever.

Well at least you're own advice and not comparing apples to whatever...

Apple incremental 10.5.x updates aren't even in the same ballpark as Microsoft service packs. 10.5.1 is more easily compared to Windows update or patch Tuesday when Microsoft roll out a bunch of changes. And as someone who uses Vista and Leopard (dual boot Mac Pro) I can assure you the Vista updates have been coming just as thick and fast. I have no allegiance to Bill or Steve, and I'm a reasonably satisfied customer of both their products (Vista isn't nearly bad as most people who've never even used it would have you believe), but if you want to mindlessly bash Microsoft, at least make sure you're not basing your argument on a complete fallacy.

Re:Obvious

Wow man! You're just like me! I never thought I'd find another Win98SE user out there!

Another Perspective

I am blind and use a screen reader, and I find Leopard's screen reader, Voiceover, will randomly freeze for a couple of seconds when browsing web pages. It is extremely annoying, but not as annoying as the extremely clunky keyboard interface. Hardly anything is automatically read, you have to use the shitty keyboard interface to find everything.

Like Microsoft, Apple claims their half-assed screen reader has improved. Like Microsoft, they've hardly done anything.

NOTE: I don't actually own a Mac, but I have an Apple fanboy friend who owns a Macbook with Leopard.

Re:Another Perspective

My experience I find that Most blind users prefer Linux, or other form of Unix which allows a good command line interface. I am not sure why Apple or Microsoft even really try I can only imagine a windowed interface to be extremely clumsy for a blind user. Even with speech interface.

Re:Another Perspective

They are very common, at least among blind computer users.
One of my best friends is blind since birth and he uses braille displays and has been doing so for at least 17 years (we met on FidoNet). He insists on using Windows because its braille support is supposed to be superior.

Even most fullscreen textmode applications are quite hard to use compared to most GUI apps as they update text all over the screen all the time without giving the display any indication about what text is important and what is just status information or similar.

It's amazing to watch him use Windows. He is the fastest GUI user I know! The windows just flash back and forth, I have no chance to read what's on the screen, he is just too fast. He know every shortcut by muscle memory and know things like that to get from A to B he should press alt+tab-tab-tab+ctrl+x-pgdn-down-down-right-enter and type that almost faster than the screen has time to draw the widgets.

Re:Another Perspective

I've used a few Linux GUIs, there's obviously more than 2 blind users.

Re:Another Perspective

Well, so did Microsoft. The thing is, to a blind person, it's not all about the sound of the voice.

These so-called naturall-sounding voices, well, they dont' sound natural to me. They are filled with digital artifacts, and the inflection is all wrong.

But the biggest disadvantage of these voices is that they break down at high speeds. The more robotic voices, although they don't at all have human intonations, have superior pronounciation, understandability, and I can understand them as high as 400 WPM. You can't do that with the human-sounding voices, if they will even let you go that high (Most have a low speed threshold).

Is Objective-C 2.0 to blame?

Since starting to use it, I've had a lot of problems with it, too.

When it comes to applications, Firefox crashes for no apparent reason. I thought it might have been due to Flash, but it has crashed even on pages without any Flash. And it works fine for other Flash-based apps. This didn't happen on Tiger.

I've also had Finder just freeze at times. Again, this is something that never happened with Tiger, or even Mac OS 9 for that matter.

The few times I've used bash at the terminal, it has core dumped on me. Yes, the shell is dumping core. Something about free()'ing already-freed memory.

Maybe this has something to do with the new features of Objective-C 2.0? I heard from some friends that a lot of Apple's code was rewritten to use the new features. I don't know if this is true or not, but maybe it could explain why the stability we've come to expect from Tiger just isn't there with Leopard? I mean, so many new language features will take a long time to stabilize. So maybe they shouldn't have been used for such core functionality, if that is indeed the case?

Not a problem here

Upgraded from Tiger - in place upgrade.

Not a single crash.

Upgraded to 10.5.1 - still all good.

But I'm just one guy - and come to think of it - so is this guy.

Re:Not a problem here

Same here. Leopard has run fine. The worst that happened was that I had to update a couple piece of software, which is to be expected.

That being said, I've seen some real doozies come through the computer shop where I work. Most can be fixed with an Archive & Install, but some are ugly ones that I still can't figure out, like one new iMac that utterly refuses to launch iWork no matter what I do.

Anecdotal evidence is worthless

I have been using Leopard since 12 hours before it was officially released. I have had two kernel panics. Both panics were my fault. (As in I explicitly loaded a kernel extension that caused the crash. Both times.)

Three or four of my friends have been using Leopard since it came out and have had no crashes at all.

My whole family's been on Leopard since it came out and has also had no crashes at all.

Clearly, LEOPARD HATES YOU!

-:sigma.SB

Is this idiot for real?

I was amused and delighted by the article (given my dislike for fanbois and Mac fanbois in general) but i stopped at the following part in the article:

XP Pro pre-SP1 crashed all the time, and Microsoft owned up to it--mostly. XP Pro post-SP2 crashed once in a while, and we sighed and kept working while Microsoft looked embarrassed and yelled at someone to work faster on SP3

Now (at work) i have 4 Linux boxes, 1 Solaris workstation and a windows XP machine that i no longer use actively (keep it around for compatibility tests). However i've used XP since it came out in 2000. It didn't crash always pre-SP1, it didn't crash frequently post XP-SP1 and after XP SP2, i've had the box be up for 180 days before i had to power it down for a memory upgrade and then the box was up for 328 days before i moved offices. I am all for Vista bashing - i am all for Mac bashing and once in a while Linux as a desktop smacking but that section above there makes him lose all credibility.

All i can tell him is L2UseAComputer, tard. Mod me down but you know there's truth in this post.

Re:Is this idiot for real?

I see. Because you had a computer running the very same operating system that this guy was running, and your computer didn't crash, then you know that there's something wrong with him personally, or he's lying, if he said his computer did crash.

When I upgrade to Leopard, if it doesn't crash, then I'll know this guy is a loser, because us 1337 Slashdot users know that there couldn't be any differences in the hardware or software or use that could cause one computer to crash and another to be stable when they're both running the same operating system.

Re:Is this idiot for real?

All operating systems crash.

Let me repeat: ALL OPERATING SYSTEMS CRASH

It all depends on what you're doing.

Got a fresh install of Windows ME that you only use to play spider solitaire, and that isn't connected to the internet?

Crash free.

Got a not so fresh install of Linux / BSD / Solaris where root has done something really stupid?

Crash prone (and possibly unrecoverable if it's REALLY stupid).

Anything in between is going to be based on what you're doing.

Install the wrong drivers / kernel modules / other software that accesses hardware and you'll make any operating system crash prone.

And since you have many Linux boxen and an crash-free windows box, it's safe to assume you're a power user.

So, you don't count!

You probably know what you're doing, and don't do anything stupid.

The real test is how often does an inexperienced user's computer crash? And, if we gave the author of this article a PC with Windows on it, would it eventually crash more or less? And, since other people don't seem to have this problem, what is causing the crashes (he might be blaming Apple for the work of a bad board for example).

as an apple user...

I concur. Leopard has SERIOUS problems. It is more than a "point upgrade"as the author states and has some nice new features and enhancements, but firewall breaks all sorts of things abd is as annoying as the Vista mother-may-I prompts giving warnings even after applications have been placed on the white list. DHCP doesn't acquire addresses properly and firewall must be disabled, airport turned off then back on for it to work again.

I've had 2 kernel panics in 2 days (I never experienced a kernel panic under tiger). I have also had the OS go unstable and Finder et al will crash randomly until restart. Final Cut Pro 6.0 crashes all the time doing things as simple moving the timeline. Spotlight crashes and reloads while doing searches sometimes.

Disk Utility can't repair disk permissions or recognizes them as incorrect when they are not (not sure which).

Java is completely screwed! No java 6 yet and javascript commands in safari do bizarre things sometimes like launching outside applications such as finder instead of doing what they are intended to do within the application!

Apple has some serious work to do if they want to keep Leopard installed on users' machines - and they had better do it fast!

Re:as an apple user...

Okay, so to address your points in order:

* Yes, Leopard *is* more than a point upgrade. It's a major upgrade. Don't get caught up on the numbering... there are BIG changes under the hood between 10.4 and 10.5. As there were between 10.4 and 10.3. A "point" upgrade is 10.4.3 to 10.4.4. I don't have any crashes with Spotlight but I haven't installed FC Studio 6 yet. Even if I did, I couldn't give it a fair shake as I'm not a video editor.

* The GUI for the Firewall is totally different than it was in Tiger. And it's really confusing. What's goofy is the Firewall GUI in Leopard is for the *application* firewall, which is completely new, and which does some stuff based on application signatures. It has no control whatsoever on the ports-based firewall, IPFW. IPFW still actually exists and be configured using ipfw rules if you're so inclined (it's straightforward, but non-trivial for those who aren't command-line fans and who don't want to learn about ports, port state, in/out, and UDP versus TCP). This change is very poorly documented. IMO you should leave the firewall GUI off for now.

* Disk Utilitiy can and does repair permissions. There are a couple applications and things it's not fixing right now, but this is a very small percentage (probably 0.5%) of things. And it's really not much to worry about. The silly thing is that Mac users have come to see "Repair Permissions" as a magic bullet and it's really not. It doesn't fix all that many things, but this is a case of religion (or voodoo).

* Java isn't screwed, but true you're limited to Java 5 (er, 1.5) for now. How many things do you do which are actually Java 6 only commands? Most apps I use still use 1.3 and *maybe* 1.4.

Sure, there are bugs. Sure, it's not perfect. But it's 10.5.1. These things take some time, as the betas are tested by tens of thousands, and the GMs are used by millions (soon enough, tens of millions). They'll get fixed, but if you aren't prepared for a couple inconveniences it's ill advised to upgrade to an OS in the first few days or even weeks of its release. It's called "the bleeding edge" for a reason.

Also perhaps you didn't install 10.4.0. It had similar issues.

One man's opinion

Normally I don't reply to these kind of articles, as they tend to be obvious flame bait, but the whole PC Mag article seems very anecdotal. As far as my own experience is concerned, upgrading to Leopard was the easiest OS upgrade I've ever done and I've had pretty much no issues since I upgraded. I've never had the machine crash or freeze.

The only real nitpicks I have with Leopard are that the UI occasionally seems slower and some of the UI choices are baffling (the menu bar can be grody with some wallpapers, I ended up switching off the dock shelf, and the folder icons are a huge step backwards) and even those nitpicks are worth it to get a UI that is otherwise relatively clean and consistent (under Tiger I was using a UI called Uno. Before upgrading, I uninstalled it, and Tiger's UI is really grating).

I'm using Leopard right now

And it never cras

Time will cure all wounds

Some Differences as well.
Vista was Years Late Leopard was Months Late.
Vista had these problem for almost a year now. Leopard has only been out for a month

Yes Leopard isn't as Bullet proof and free of problems as Apple admits. I had a failed upgrade where I needed to erase my disk clean to get it to work. And after that I still have some minor problems... But the problems are minor and they remind me of an older version of the OS... Codename Tiger. Yes when Tiger was released it had a slew of minor glitches and bugs just like Leopard did.

When Tiger was released Apple was still using Power PC Processors, By the time Intel Systems were released and huge amounts of people were migrating to Apple Tiger was Well in the Mid Cycle where most of glitches were cleared. So most people are use to the solid Mid-Cycle OS. But Tiger had a bunch of glitches, also Panther, Jaguar. When they were in the early Pre 10.x.4 release. It happens in early releases. Similar things happen in Linux too, but the Linux Zealots minimize it just like the Apple Fan Boys do. Stating it is the problem with 3rd party software or there are super simple workaround, etc...

Also there is the issue of the greater number of Mac Users, just the fact that more people are using the OS there is more bugs that are found by users who don't know to fix them. For example I had to hard reboot my Mac this week because of some glitch with Parallels, Going to sleep in middle of a disk write on a USB disk, While asleep the USB Disk was unplugged and when it returned it didn't want to completely wakeup like the program was trying to write to the disk (this may have happened in Tiger too, I was doing something I rarely do). But what happened was the disk got corrupted so things were running poorly. So I rebooted in Single user mode and did an fsck on my disk and fix the problems. Easy for a Unix/Linux/Mac Expert. But if they are a newbie use to using windows this would cause them to reinstall the OS. Many of the people using the older versions of OS X where Well experienced with Macs, and a lot of the Newcomers in the PPC days were people converting from Linux to Macs. Today Macs have a wide base not at all prepared for handling new version bugs.

Things are not as bleak as Vista is, it is actually normal stuff. We just have forgotten it over time.

All I can say is...

...Ubuntu is looking better all the time. On seven machines over three years, it's crashed once on me. And I'm pretty sure that was a hardware thing.

they hosed the interface

I've been using OS X since the .0 release, and this is the first time that I regret an upgrade. They made many little changes to little things that drive me crazy. Moving menu items just because they can, redesigning icons to be unreadable, adding features that are useless, etc.

I have had the feeling that Apple went a little Microsoft with Leopard.

Am I that rare? Leopard user with 0 problems

Macbook Pro 17 (2.33 C2D) with
Vista (160GB internal)
Leopard (500GB external FW800)
3 additional external USB Drives (~ 1TB of space)
1 USB DVD burner

I've never had a crash, all of my software has worked perfectly. Of course, I did do a fresh install and selectively moved my old programs back - rather than an Upgrade. 0 problems.

This article is more than a bit flawed.

In my experience nearly everybody who complains about Leopard being unstable is running some sort of unsanity app (or the logitech drivers). Nobody else really has a problem.

As for the rest of his article, it seems pretty bullshit to me.

Vista Similarity #1: He claims that it's unstable. Most people disagree, a small but extremely vocal group agrees.

Vista Similarity #2: He whines about graphics overload, but then references things that work on even ancient low-end Macs with shitty graphic cards, and claims that everybody is showing them off. I don't think they are.

Vista Similarity #3: He tries to draw equivalence between putting basic network settings three menus deep and Apple deciding that if the dock is on the bottom, that it should have a subtle reflection. Then he complains Apple's new "Cover Flow" is good enough for him, and thus Quick Look was unnecessary. Perhaps he could try not using it, then. To each their own, y'know.

Vista Similarity #4: He claims that Leopard drops packets and loses connections. I have a bunch of Leopard machines on both wired and wireless networks and have seen absolutely no evidence that this is true. He also claims that SMB shares come and go. Again, I'm on networks with SMB shares and have seen absolutely no evidence that this is true.

Vista Similarity #5: He tries to claim that time machine is awful, because it does file-level, not block-level incrementals, it doesn't work on network shares by default, and it defaults to backing up the whole system. Time Machine could use improvement, but it's useful and it will get a *lot* of people backing up their machines for the first time in forever.

Honestly, #5 is the only complaint that has any air of authenticity to me (I've had similar complaints), but it's not like it's a horrific detriment.

There are two options here:
Option 1) This is Ziff-Davis MSFT flamebait.
Option 2) The author of the piece is an idiotic fuck who screwed up his install.

My money is on Both.

Quicktime 7.3

I don't know about Tiger (haven't upgraded yet) but the recent Quicktime 7.3 update is a pile of crap.

I'm not a power user, and I really just use Quicktime for porn, but it definitely took a major step backwards in this release: the select/copy/paste functionality has been removed from most movie types. Also the A/V controls (brightness, contrast) no longer work on many formats. These were things that _worked_ in 7.2 and have been _disabled_ in 7.3. I don't know what they're trying to do, but it seems like they're trying to make Quicktime completely useless. Those little features were the only reason I used Quicktime at all (instead of VLC, for example).

Poking around online to try and find a downgrade path, I found that a lot of Final Cut users were totally screwed by this update as well. And the downgrade path is to reinstall the OS from scratch and selectively update around Quicktime 7.3.

Meh... Apple is doing a lot of things right. And they're doing a lot of things wrong. I'd like to see them understand which is which, and hold on to the right things and work on improving the wrong things. Is that really too much to ask?

Bugs and such I understand, but who the hell thinks it's a good idea to disable existing functionality?

Cheers.

Leopard since release day. No crashes.

iBook G4 & iMac G5.
Painless.
No kernel panics.
Reboots only from installs who demanded it.
I miss classic, but I'll get over it.

panic.log

This guy needs to post his kernel panic log. I'm curious to see what's causing so many panic events.

Anecdotes

Since that's just anecdotal evidence, here's some more. I upgraded my C2D MacBook in place to Leopard about two hours before the official release date in my time zone (thanks, FedEx). I have had a total of two kernel panics since then relating to my wireless driver, but the problem seems to have been fixed since 10.5.1. Also, Time Machine refused to work with my drive for some reason until 10.5.1. But besides those issues, it's been completely smooth. And another difference between Vista and Leopard: Leopard is actually faster on my hardware than Tiger was.

Vista's been a pain, but it's never crashed on me

As bad as Vista's been, it's never crashed on me. 6 times in a month? Dude, get a Dell.

Worthless chatter

One thing I'll say for Windows users - if you say you have a problem, someone will always pop up and say "Yeah, me too, and this is how to fix it."

Linux geeks still tend too much to attack the newcomer, or shout "Read the friggin' man pages!" Still as a community they are maturing and learning to help people rather than flame them.

Make a complaint about an Apple product though and you run headlong into a wall of denial a mile high, with everyone either claiming that your problem does not exist, that you're an idiot when you point out some of the more bizarre UI choices Apple makes, or most frighteningly, arguing that any deficiency, no matter how severe, is somehow actually a wonderful feature.

I think that Apple users are doing themselves a disservice by not holding Apple to a higher standard. By pretending that hardware or software issues don't exist, and by attempting to shut down those who raise legitimate complaints, they allow Apple far too much latitude to do the same.

This will of course be modded as troll or flamebait by the first fanboy who reads it.

Re:Worthless chatter

Nice in depth review of Vista there, some corrections if you don't mind. The Cancel or Allow thing only appears when a program requires admin rights for me the only time I see this is when I'm installing a game or driver. Fraps does also require it but it does have good reason to want admin rights. I agree with the model I don't want ever application on my PC to need admin rights. Vista DRM layers are one of the great myths, they did contribute to the driver isue that Nvidia/ATi had but unless your planning on running DRM media (some of us never will) they don't effect your pc in anyway.

I like the UI differences Vista has made the only bad choice as I see it is placing the network sharing centre behind the network connections screen placing Device manager straight into the control panel was a brilliant idea and the re arrangement of the user folders helps seperate things out.

Vista is working on millions if not billions of computer configurations its biggest problems have been drivers and as far as I can tell those driver issues are slowly being phased out. Mac's are supposed to "just work" and yet there is a strong vocal group claiming the latest release is causing them major issues. Microsoft may have a good excuse for why my scanner made by a small company six years ago doesn't work on Vista x64 (actually someone pointed me at anouther driver and it now does) or the fact that Riven won't install (10 year old game.) Whats apple's excuse? They control all the hardware so there are only dozens of configurations and talking with the big companies who produce software for your platform can't be that hard. My own expearence is a little different if you have an issue with windows there will be someone else who's had it and hopefully a work around/fix. If there isn't a workaround you'll find people squatting on a companies forum moaning until there is. Linux seems to me to have split into two camps the first is highly friendly (Ubunutu camp) and they are helpfull. The second is the old school linux camp, this is made up of people who believe the command line is the only interface a person should use and will flame you if you ask why you have to go through it rather than a wizard (my favorite being make one yourself.) Its the sole reason I'll only try Ubunutu because I know I could probably get help if I needed it. Don't get me wrong many projects are getting better but they seem to be the projects tied to (or come preloaded with) Ubunutu

Complete opposite for me

I put Leopard on my Santa Rosa MacBook Pro on day 1. Almost no real issues, zero crashes, and overall stability seems much better than it did under Tiger. Here's what I noticed as issues:

I had messed up my Keychain config many versions and computers ago, which was faithfully migrated from Mac to Mac. Leopard broke it (basically, my keychain was named for my user shortname, not "login"). I renamed the keychain, logged out and back in, and all was well.

VPN configs didn't migrate the authentication info properly because Internet Config is no longer the tool that manages the connection. Not a problem for most, but I have 23 different clients I use VPNs to connect to. Easily fixed.

I didn't use any InputManagers other than Saft/PithHelmet, so that was no biggie. And that combo works now.

When the Mac first wakes up and is scanning for a network connection, the mouse is kind of jerky. It lasts a few seconds.

All in all, I've seen remarkably few bugs for a .0 release from Apple. I've been very encouraged. Granted, there are some design issues in my opinion (I don't like the new Dock, Stacks are a clever but broken idea, etc.), but those aren't bugs so much as features I don't like too much. But I think Leopard is mainly Good Stuff.

no problems here

I've got a Powerbook, a MacBook and a Hackintosh (965p/nvidia/pc_efi), all running leopard. I havent seen a crash yet. It's fun to sensationalize when you're having problems; but assuming that everyone else is having them too, and making comparisons to vista just makes you look like a fool. perhaps Olivers ram has gone bad or something?

Potential Dump Fix

I've been getting dumps too. You can view the dump logs at /Library/Logs/PanicReporter/ Mine kept happening with "current thread: LCCDaemon" which I found out was logitech (my wireless keyboard) I updated to their most recent version and haven't dumped yet *crosses fingers*

I think I know the fix

I used to have the exact same problem. Ever since I applied this fix [apple.com] to X11 for the Gimp.app problems, I haven't had any more crashes.

His experiences are unusually bad

Within my overall employer, there are over 4,000 Mac users (a minority still, but growing), and within my particular business unit, almost the entire engineering division is Mac, and the few that aren't are mostly FreeBSD. A few Linux users and even fewer Windows users. In fact, the guy in the cube next to me, who just refreshed to a Mac, may have been the last one. Among those 4,000 people, quite a few have upgraded to Leopard already, and I've seen their discussions of various issues on our very high-traffic internal Mac mailing list.

Certainly, there have been some issues, but nobody has reported the level of crashes that he's been seeing. I think his unfortunate experience is an edge case.

That many crashes is, IMO, not really acceptable, especially for a *nix-based OS, but I don't think the Vista comparison is very apt. For starters, in TFA he says their own reviewer recommends not upgrading to 10.5.1. Pretty much everyone who already installed Leopard where I work has upgraded to the latest release, and the reports I hear are that it has made all problems better. Instead of listening to his reviewer, he should update.

If you're getting the idea that I'm still on Tiger, you're right. I know better than to install a .0 release of a new major version of an OS until it's been well flogged in the real world and a bunch of updates are out :-) Although, my colleagues who are on Leopard are happy with it, though. I haven't heard anyone say they wish they hadn't done it. My important Linux systems are still on Kubuntu Feisty, too, just in case. Gutsy seems very stable on the test machines, though.

The second point on which the Vista comparison fails is that unlike Vista, Leopard offers a number of compelling features that make people want to upgrade. Vista has been out a lot longer than Leopard, but I'd be very surprised if Leopard doesn't already have a higher percentage of upgraders than Vista has. XP Users seem to be sitting tight, for the most part. Among Tiger users, it's not a question of upgrading or not, but of how soon. The reason most XP users are not upgrading is they see no compelling reason to do so. Most of what Vista added is eye candy, and it has some downsides in the form of annoying security dialogs and a lot more DRM than XP has.

Third, unlike Vista, Leopard didn't have to shed its most compelling features in order to ship. Vista was supposed to come with wonderful new technologies like WinFS, which was not only dropped from Vista, but has been completely dropped as a standalone product. A rumor went around that XFS would be the Leopard file system; that turned out to be just a rumor. And it is available in Leopard, it's just not the default file system. All the really cool stuff that was supposed to be in Vista mostly isn't. There are those who say the security model is better (and maybe it is, although those annoying dialogs are worse than useless), but what people mainly see in Vista is eye candy. Eye candy that takes a lot more horsepower to really make use of. Even there, Vista fails it compared to Leopard (or even Tiger) in terms of looks.

And that's without even getting started on functionality, reliability, ease of use, and consistency. For all of its .0 release faults, Leopard is still ahead of Vista, there, too.

Finally, what may be the biggest difference of all between Vista and Leopard: a year from now, Leopard will have achieved significant adoption in the Mac user base. I'll go out on a limb and say that a year from its release, Leopard will not only have a greater percentage of the Mac user base than Vista has of the Windows user base when it reaches 1 year of general public release on Jan. 30 2008, but that one year from its release, Leopard will have a greater percentage of the Mac market than Vista has of the Windows market at *two* years from its release.

That last may sound like a fanboy statement, but it's really not. It's just recognition of the facts that Mac users, unlike X

Azureus

This guys only problem (that he really rails about) is a kernel panic caused by Azureus (and some Apple bug in the networking stack. This is terrible, yes, but it's a single (bad) bug that he's seeing. He just doesn't know what's causing it so he attributes it to the general bugginess of Leopard. I kow this because this is the problem I had, and have spent onsiderable time chasing the Apple discussion forums and my friends to nail it down. Google 'Leopard Azureus Kernel Panic' for more info. It's a serious and really annoying bug for sure, but it's **one** bug. Leopard != Vista.

My Leopard Experiences...

While I think it's laughable to call it a failure at all, especially a failure on the order of Vista, Leopard, as released, does have a number of disappointments for me. I expect them to be automatically fixed in a software update before long, which is far less painful than a massive SP2 or whatever. Here's what I've found:

Some application incompatibility; most Softphones I've tried won't connect to their server. X-Lite won't, and after pointing the finger to Apple (and somewhat rightfully so), have grudgingly stated they will come out with an update for it. But what magical thing could they be using on a TCP/IP stack that would suddenly break??? Something weird must have changed at quite a low level. (The free SJPhone, which works with Vonage, does seem to be one of the rare ones that does work, which will do for now.)

While Spotlight does offer more features and flexibility now, it does come with a performance penalty. I seem to get reindexing and indexing more often than before, slowing down the system.

General system performance seems more sluggish, and boot times a fair bit higher than Tiger. Things like Expose' seemed a little jerkier than in Tiger. (Although this seems a bit better lately, perhaps 10.5.1 update helped this.)

I had one program (Azureus) that wrote to syslog with a bunch of exceptions; Leopard now keeps its syslog in a database (/var/log/asl.db). When this file got large due to Azureus, syslogd suddenly started taking up 99% of the CPU, dragging down the system. It took awhile to chase this one down, having to remove asl.db and kill syslogd (so it auto-restarted). That's a pretty sloppy hole for a consumer OS, in my opinion. (Although one could partially blame Azurues/Java for dumping excessive amount of exceptions to syslog in the first place.)

I've seen my first OSX crashes with Leopard, as well. The were all centered around plugging/unplugging USB devices; in this case, a dying/dead USB MP3 player. Yes, the player was not responding well (bad ram), but it's no excuse for the USB driver bringing down the system. I haven't seen this repeated, so maybe it was isolated to that one bad device, or maybe the 10.5.1 update fixed it.

I have seen one or two occasions where the system just got so sluggish and unresponsive that I had to reboot. Rebooting to make the system run better was unheard of in Tiger.

Adobe Professional's PDF virtual printer thingy doesn't work in Leopard. Adobe has acknowledged this, and promised an update early in the new year. Ugh. Thankfully OS X's print dialog has a save-to-pdf option, which will do for now, although I find it's not quite as good generated PDF content as Acrobat printer produces. (Sometimes, hauling things into Acrobat, then optimizing/saving them, works out okay.)

iWork's "Pages" consistently crashed whenever I tried to edit a table (unless I kept the mouse *extremely* still after clicking in the table, d'oh). An auto update a couple of weeks after Leopard's release seems to have fixed this one nicely, though.

There were a couple of low-levelish kernel extensions that no longer worked for me, but that's not terribly surprising in a major upgrade, and they were nothing core to my work, just curiosities.

Mounting Windows shares seems to be a bit less reliable than before. Some times it won't connect, and once or twice I had to reboot because finder was wedged trying to mount a share, and I couldn't even relaunch Finder. Not great. But things seem to be working better lately (maybe 10.5.1 helped that).

All that being said, I was amazed at how smooth the update from Tiger went; coming from the Windows world, I expected a reinstall to be the only feasible upgrade option. The upgrade to Leopard, however, went off without a hitch. (I did extensive backups, and a test install on an external drive, being so paranoid of losing my stuff in the upgrade, but it wasn't needed, it seems.) Almost everything worked, except for the bits mentioned above. Parallels was one app I thought might not make it without an update, but it still works like a dream.

So overall, the existing functionality seems to have suffered somewhat, and there's a couple of things that could be showstoppers for the average consumer (like the syslogd cleanup I had to do). But I expect the auto-update point releases to fix those, and in general, there's nothing that impacts my work or play negatively, nor anything that would turn me off Mac's and OS X.

And I do love the new features. Time Machine is a dream, and encourages regular (and easily accessible) incremental backups, a great thing for sure. The increased functionality in Spotlight (more search types, boolean operators, finder integration) is very helpful for finding stuff. I love the new pop-out folders in the Dock, I wish they'd take the layering/nesting functionality even further. The quick-view feature is great, as well as cover-flow. Safari's got some interesting new features, I'm almost considering using it over Opera, my current favorite. The multiple desktop Spaces feature is done nicely, and is handy (I've got to get in the habit of taking advantage of it more often).

For me, Time Machine and Spotlight improvements more than offset the annoyances I've encoutered. Ensuring I have my stuff backed up regularly is great peace of mind. But I think the average consumer may want to hold off for a few more point releases.

Comparing the above to Vista, makes the original post's suggestion seem a bit ludicrous to me. I've used Vista on my son's shiny new laptop, and it's a royal pain to do anything (if I've confirmed something once, don't make me confirm it three other times for other reasons, dammit!). We had terrible problems with application compatibility. It crashes now and then. It's a royal dog, performancewise.

Prior to that, I even upgraded one of my XP machines to Vista. Afterwards, my only thoughts were "ummmm, *why* did I do this?" There wasn't a single good compelling reason, and it was just too frustrating, so I went back to XP.

Yes, there are some bumps in the early versions of Leopard. But seriously, there's just no comparing Leopard with Vista.

Bumpy at first, but good after first patch

Ok, I have a dual 1.25 ghz G4 (1.5 gb ram) and I had some rather upsetting behavior when I first got the thing. Main thing was that the whole system would just stop, totally frozen from about 1-2 minutes. I also saw my first Kernel Panic in over 2 years 10 minutes after a clean install. Another issue was when Firefox would beachball, it would beachball any other application that had a text box in it at the same time, which was enormously frustrating. Then there was the whole moving could lose files thing. I was very glad I had backed my stuff up to DVD before the upgrade.

But 10.5.1 fixed all of those problems and I've only had a few small nagging ones or annoyances (I really hate stacks and wish I could turn it off for one). Now my system actually seems FASTER than when I had Tiger. The finder in particular is a lot snappier and my machine, while still not as noticably snappy as a new Intel based mac, is still snappy enough friends of mine have refused to believe the machine is 5 years old until I proved it to them. Then they were quite impressed!

The remaining problems I have seem to be application related. Some things like MT newswatcher lock up after I post, or freeze in inconvenient places. I had a copy of some open source software that was screwing up this way (I had downloaded the binary) but when I pulled down the source and recompiled it, it worked just fine, so I suspect that a lot of application problems are because the developers have not yet recompiled using the latest XCode for Leopard. While you shouldn't see that kind of incompatibility often in my opinion, given the radical changes Apple made to the OS and pulling out all vestiges of Classic, I can see maybe why some carbon apps in particular might need a recompiling to keep them from having issues.

I am sure there are more bugs to be squashed, but I think Apple will get them in time. 10.5.1 came pretty fast on the heels of the release and 10.5.2 is probably going to hit next month and kill the next batch and maybe the one after. By about 10.5.3 or so, I suspect things will be back more or less to the stability we had with Tiger. So give Apple a break, there was a lot of rewiring going on in Leopard, way more than you can see just by looking at the eye candy and Time Machine. It will take a bit of time to get everything perfectly smooth again.

Vistard can kiss my shiny Java ass...

I own 3 Macs, 1 Powerbook, 1 Macbook,1 intel Mac Mini. I have not and definitely won't be installing OS-We-Gave-The-Graphic-Designers-Free-Reign-X on any of my machines. I own and make my money from, amongst other things, Adobe CS3 apps and Java. Both do not work completely or properly with OSX 10.5. Adobe will be bringing out an upgrade for Acrobat sometime in 2008 (yay), and Apple might honestly, never actually update Java to 1.6 on OS X. There is an open source JDK 1.6 available now, from scratch to RC1 faster than Apple took to withdraw their horribly broken 1.6 RC. And this is what is making me seriously think of moving to Linux and Windows.

I like OSX, since it's (was, at least in 10.4) very robust. But Apple has one big problem on their hands that goes hand in hand with Steve Jobs and his ego: Whatever SJ thinks is cool and perfect (and trendy for n00bs) goes in (Leopard comes with Ruby on Rails, yay), whatever he thinks is no longer cool (even though literally millions of coders make their money with Java on the server and especially on handies, Google mail, maps and calendar all run just fine in Java on my 2 year old Sony-Ericsson) goes out. This leaves many people frustrated as hell, since it makes work like sitting on a violently rocking boat which might overturn at any time.

On top of this, Apple, in a very Microsoft-like move, killed off a perfectly working Bootcamp on OSX 10.4, forcing all the thousands of poor morons who have Windows in dual boot on their machines upgrade to Vistard and make Apple some extra cash. In addition, installing Windows on Vistard 10.5 Bootcamp is tricky, because if you delete the Vistard created partition and create your own with the Windows installer, the 10.5 Bootcamp no longer sees it. This wasn't the case with the Bootcamp in 10.4, so it must be a Steve Jobs doing a Steve Ballmer like thing and fucking over users to try and lock them in.

I'm personally quite glad that Linux is finally getting good to go. I'm beginning to think that Adobe could port its software to Linux and that they might even make enogh sales from people who are just too pissed off with the Redmond and Cupertino robber barons and their fanciful whims.

Re:Problem with his computer.

To all of the things you mentioned, the key word is yet. If Leopard is going to do as poorly as Vista (I don't use Macs, I can make no value judgement of it one way or the other), it's had nowhere near as long to build up an image of suck in people's minds. You're being unreasonable in saying that Leopard's lack of backlash proves a damn thing... there hasn't been enough time for any sort of real backlash to build up.

For the record, as long as I'm at it, I can just as easily say that people's Vista problems are specific to their machines, because I use Vista, and it runs like a dream. Stable, runs all my apps/games (except KOTOR) properly... nothing more to ask, really. And no, it doesn't run slower than Windows XP. There are other very satisfied Vista users, they've even posted on slashdot. So clearly, the people who are having problems are just having issues with their specific computers.