Slashdot Mirror
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."
just because apt-get dist-ugprade works doesn't mean everything works well after that, especially if you have any customizations, or odd bits of hardware or applications.
If you can tell me exactly what you mean by "customizations", we might find the root of the problem. If by customizations, you mean things like non free software and by "odd" hardware you mean hardware with binary blobs, your experience is no different from mine.
My Debian upgrades have been free of both major and minor annoyances. I've lost only one piece of hardware in the last five years to a Debian upgrade that was the result of free software improvement, dma reworks. I replaced it and it probably works again now. Other than that, transitions from Woody to Sarge and then Sarge to Etch have been flawless. Even where programs change, the user data is preserved without loss and is often usable in place. For an ordinary user, it just works. Source code and compiled executables are also transferable between upgrades and distributions. Things I compile on Debian work just fine with Fedora so that rsync is all I need to keep projects working in more than one place over years of development.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
"And just where is Microsoft today that Apple hasn't been first, in real OS terms?"
On over 90% of desktops?
"But this one goes to 11!"
It's like me saying "my new car gets 1,000 miles on a gallon of gas, and yours only gets 25", and they you respond "Aha! you admitted it, yours still uses gas, just like mine, you can shut up now, it's no better"
No, it's like claiming your car gets 1,000 miles per gallon, and it turning out it only gets 25, the same as my car. The point is that the claim being made has been proven wrong.