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."

Surprise surprise

[tomcatuk]

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

[bhima]

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.

went better than Gutsy Gibbon...

[SuperBanana]

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!

Your Mileage May Vary

[Thumper_SVX]

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 think it's backlash from the Mac-Zealots

[FatSean]

You know, the clowns who insist that the Mac 'just works' and take every chance to deride users of Windows. If someone has a windows problem, they bray "Get a Mac!" Now, all of a sudden, their sacred cow isn't working like they say it should. I think some windows users are experiencing Shaedenfreud(sp) and rubbing it in.

Why so moderate?

[Britz]

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.

Re:Early Adoption

[Stamen]

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 a service pack (although they wait too long to release the first service pack), I complain about poor engineering decisions and design issues that aren't going to go away.

Oh and lastly, you'll get use to no task bar, and no maximize, and no start menu. At first, I found it all strange and difficult, but once I got use to it, I started looking for ways of changing Windows to make it more OS X-like.

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

[0100010001010011]

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:Minor annoyances, eh?

[supun]

I think I've seen two so far, however they are rare and not persistent. The first was the chat window of Adium being lost. I could see it in Expose, but if I selected it it would disappear. I think a strangeness with Spaces and Expose. Had it once, never had it again. And the other is a graphic glitch with Cover View. I had a few icons strobing between the clear icon and the extension icon. That might be because I was looking at an NFS mounted drive.

So far I'm perfectly happy with 10.5. They gave me tabs in Terminal :). I didn't like that iTerm kept scroll-back in memory, kind of eats up memory when you have 10 tabs and a million line scrollback (yeah, I need that much).

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

[Geoff]

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:So far, so good.

[An. (Coward)]

I don't know if you're aware of this or not, or if it's an issue for you, but if you use FileVault to encrypt your home directory, you should be aware that Time Machine backs up things like your Applications directory hourly, but doesn't do the same with your home directory--that gets backed up only when you log out of your account. If you ask me, this is a big problem that seriously undermines Time Machine's usefulness, as I tend to remain logged in unless I have a good reason to log out (such as a required restart after a software upgrade). I'm really surprised Apple did something that bone-headed.

Re:Early Adoption

[Blakey Rat]

Feh, short-timer!

Remember System 7.0? People get upset about bricking an iPhone, remember bricking your entire OS because you had the audacity to drag a font out of the Fonts folder?