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."

Comments

Early Adoption

[Gricey]

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]

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

[Khuffie]

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

Re:Early Adoption

[corvair2k1]

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

[toQDuj]

The difference is that at Microsoft, they had 7 years to fix the bugs. At Apple, they had 2.5 years.

Re:Early Adoption

[somersault]

And just where is Microsoft today that Apple hasn't been first, in real OS terms? Have you ever used an Apple? Did you try an Apple in the late 80s, and then try Windows 3.1 and go.. ewww..? Probably not..

Re:Early Adoption

[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:Early Adoption

[Khuffie]

From wikipedia: "Faced with ongoing delays and concerns about feature creep, Microsoft announced on August 27, 2004 that it was making changes. The original "Longhorn", based on the Windows XP source code, was scrapped, and Vista development started anew, building on the Windows Server 2003 codebase, and re-incorporating only the features that would be intended for an actual operating system release. "

The fact that the current code-base of Vista has been in development for 7 years is a myth. This gives Vista the same time-frame Leopard had. Yes, it was stupid of Microsoft that they ended up in such a hole that they had to scrape all their work.

Re:Early Adoption

[Just Some Guy]

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

[Sparks23]

There's often a lot of unwarranted blind "ZOMG Microsoft is evil!" or blindness to Apple's flaws due to the Reality Distortion Zone, but in this case I think the earlier posters were saying they're less concerned about issues in Leopard because they expect a 10.5.1 or 10.5.2 fairly quickly after release based on user-reported issues, where they have no such assurance of any significant Vista improvements until Vista SP1.

This isn't an 'Apple is better, Microsoft is evil,' I think, more just an observation that Microsoft will roll all their significant (non-security) updates to an operating system into one or two big updates more widely-spaced, while Apple has a history of making a lot of little point-release updates over the course of an operating system's life.

One method isn't necessarily 'better' or 'worse' (Tiger could be a headache-inducing moving target for a programmer at times, with developers surrendering and arbitrarily going 'This will only run on 10.4.3 or higher,' or 'this will only run on 10.4.8 or higher' and so on), but I think the gist of the comment is that early adopting with Apple is slightly less of a risk since there's a higher likelihood of point-releases to address issues quickly after release.

Re:Early Adoption

[Stamen]

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.

Re:Early Adoption

[aidan folkes]

There's often a lot of unwarranted blind "ZOMG Microsoft is evil!" or blindness to Apple's flaws due to the Reality Distortion Zone, but in this case I think the earlier posters were saying they're less concerned about issues in Leopard because they expect a 10.5.1 or 10.5.2 fairly quickly after release based on user-reported issues, where they have no such assurance of any significant Vista improvements until Vista SP1.

There has actually been a stream of updates for Vista that fix various issues. I know because I have Windows Update set to ask me every time!

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?

Re:Early Adoption

[Anonymous Coward]

I was curious about this, so I looked it up: how long between Apple's 10.x.0 and 10.x.1?
  - 10.0: Mar 24 - Apr 14 (22 days)
  - 10.1: Sep 25 - Nov 13 (49 days)
  - 10.2: Aug 23 - Sep 18 (26 days)
  - 10.3: Oct 24 - Nov 10 (17 days)
  - 10.4: Apr 29 - May 16 (17 days)

To compare, I looked up Microsoft's track record with SP1 here:
  - 95: Aug 24 - Dec 31 (130 days)
  - 98 ("SE"): Jun 25 - May 5 (315 days)
  - ME: no second edition (but made PC World's "Top 25 Worst Tech Products")
  - 2000: Feb 17 - Aug 15 (181 days)
  - XP: Oct 25 - Sep 9 (320 days)
  - Vista: Nov 8 - 2008Q1? (~60-180 days)

I'm a Debian user, so I appreciate being able to get fixes the day they're checked in by the developer. But if I had to pick a proprietary system, I'd sure prefer one where the .1 release followed a month later, rather than one where it followed 6-12 months later, if ever.

Re:Early Adoption

[fbjon]

blindness to Apple's flaws due to the Reality Distortion Zone Speaking of that, am I the only ohe who thought of this when reading the headline? :

Steve: Eeearlyadopterssufferfortherest of uuussss...
Apple congregation (with organ): Aaaaa- meeeeennn...

Re:Early Adoption

[Bill_the_Engineer]

On over 90% of desktops?

I remember when over 90% of the home/education was an Apple ][ or clone. So yeah, Apple was there too. ;)

Re:Early Adoption

[elrous0]

how can you sleep at night?

On a pile of money with many beautiful women

Re:Early Adoption

[Mister Whirly]

Your memory may be a bit hazy then. Atari and Commodore were easily beating Apple in the early 80s in the home market (most likely due to pricing factors). The Atari 800 was a far superior machine with bitmapped color and sound, and the capability to use a TV as a monitor all for a lower cost.

"In 1980, Gartner reported Apple's worldwide share of the computer market at 15.8%"
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/D579148C-8563-4FFB-8E97-C2613215F98E.html

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/total-share.ars/4 - look at the chart at the bottom of the page. Apple was 3rd in sales after Commodore and Atari from 1980-84 (the years the chart covers). The chart on the next page from 84-87 also has Commodore and Atari ahead of Apple too.

While you may be closer on the education side because of Apple's educational discounts, there are a far more number of homes than there are schools. Even if they had 100% of the education market it still would have been less total market share than the others.

Re:Early Adoption

[shmlco]

Uh, huh. I have about twenty windows running in nine Spaces at the moment. On Windows that taskbar would would filled with marvelous and meaningful entries like:

Mou... Mic... Mic... Sla... Exc... Mou... Mic... Mic... Sla... Exc... Mou... Mic... Mic... Sla... Exc... Mou... Mic... Mic... Sla... Exc...

So much for not getting lost. (And yes, I know I could have a two or three line taskbar, How much screen real-estate do you want to waste?)

Re:Early Adoption

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Actually, I was referring to the very early days of Apple II. The Atari 400/800 (former 800 owner here) actually was a response to the success that Apple was having. The Apple II was introduced in 1977, the Atari 800 was introduced early 1979 and commodore vic 20 was introduced in 1980 and the C64 was introduced in 1982.

So, Apple did in fact own the home computer market once. In fact, the Apple II proved that a home computer market existed and paved the way for both the Atari and Commodore machines..

So my memory is just fine.... thanks for asking.

Re:Early Adoption

[Bert64]

That only works on a very small scale, it completely breaks down when you have a lot of windows open.
Apple are catering to different requirements. Windows users will typically run one or two programs, and divert 100% of their screen space to each program as they're using it, and then close it when they're done. Mac (and unix) users will typically run lots of apps, and leave them running in the background unless they're completely finished with them. If the apps are idle, a decent OS should be able to swap them out anyway if it needs the memory. I very much like spaces on leopard, lack of multiple workspaces was my biggest beef with OSX.

Early adoption problems for Apple.

[RandoX]

Clearly they're pandering to the Windows market.

No real problems here

[Hellad]

My install as relatively smooth. It did seem to stall on reboot after install so I did a force shutdown, but it restarted with no problems. Once I turned off safesleep, my system has been fast and very responsive.

Re:No real problems here

[troc]

my system has been fast and very responsive

you mean snappier (tm)

Re:I hope this will end to those obnoxious Mac ads

[ByOhTek]

Since when has inaccuracy stopped them from putting something in one of the Apple ads?

For that matter, it's been a long time since inaccuracy has stopped most ideas from becoming advertisements.

About as good as non free can be.

[Erris]

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

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

Re:About as good as non free can be.

[morgan_greywolf]

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

Re:About as good as non free can be.

[Blakey Rat]

At the same time, Apple is a reminder that non free will software always depend on the free software world and will always have problems.

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

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

Upgrades of Debian are always smooth and lossless.

With all apologies to Baghdad Bob:

"I can say, and I am responsible for what I am saying, that they have started to commit suicide [at their keyboards]. We will encourage them to commit more suicides quickly."

My experiences

[robosmurf]

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.

Re:My experiences

[robosmurf]

Although I agree in general, I should point out that I didn't install APE. Another program that I used (then ditched because it was too flakey) installed it. This was why I forgot that I might have it installed.

Thus, non-technical users may well have APE installed, even if they didn't explicitly install it themselves.

Hasn't Been That Bad

[kannibal_klown]

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]

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]

Spoken like a true vi user.

Re:Hasn't Been That Bad

[atezun]

Hey, you left out the grammar nazis who would point out that it is "fare", not "fair"...

Despite this, they still can't tell me what a fair fare is to take a girl out to have a fair-sized fare at the county fair.

I want answers!

Re:Hasn't Been That Bad

[Deag]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_war

Re:Hasn't Been That Bad

[iknowcss]

He is using irony. Only an emacs user could have that much insight.

Re:Hasn't Been That Bad

[imadoofus]

Don't you mean Esc-Ctrl-Shift-Meta-sarcasm?

Little do they know

[sircastor]

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

Re:Little do they know

[varmittang]

But I got the family pack for $199, so do I only get $1 back. =(

Minor annoyances, eh?

[EveryNickIsTaken]

News.com tallies up the minor annoyances early adopters have experienced dealing with the newest version of OS X. Had this been a windows release, I'm fairly certain that these would have been called "major GUI design flaws" and "critical systems bugs/security issues."

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).

So What

[MBCook]

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

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

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

The good outweighs the bad

[virgil_disgr4ce]

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]

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

dscacheutil -flushcache

In 10.4 it was

lookupd -flushcache

Re:The good outweighs the bad

[Tony Hoyle]

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

They also haven't got WINS working yet - as in 10.4 there's a place to enter the server IP (not the name, oddly) but it still only uses broadcast to find the machine so can't find the machines in the other subnet even though the wins server (and all the windows and linux boxes) have no issues finding them.

So far, so good.

[tgibbs]

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.

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.

Fixed the Headline

[Udo Schmitz]

Early Adopters Suffer For The Rest of Us

There, that's better

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.

Re:Java complainers

[FranTaylor]

Dude, I work with Java all the time. Some vendors are having a tough enough time supporting Java 5. Java is very important, but it takes development effort to do a good port, and Apple has been very busy lately. Face it, there are not a lot of Java 6 apps. If you really have to run one, get a Linux box, or run one in VMware.

Like I said, it's in Fedora 8, which is shipping any day now. If OSX actually had dedicated java developers, they'd be all over this, and they'd have their JDK just about ready, too. You don't have to be a developer to help out with a port. If you can run java programs and fill out good bug reports, then you can be a big help. If OSX supposedly has so many dedicated users, they should be able to pull this off in a snap! If RedHat can do it...

Re:A few things

[east coast]

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.

Filevault problems

[mikael_j]

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

Installed for 5 days

[fermion]

Computer does not seem slower, but it does not seem faster. No major problems other than a problem at shutdown. Less that a gig or ram, 1 gig processor. Spaces works pretty fast.

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

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

Re:Installed for 5 days

[XnavxeMiyyep]

You can switch the dock back to its old appearance with this information.

I have yet to try it though, as I don't have Leopard.

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

[TheRaven64]

I installed Leopard on the release day, and it's not without problems. First, the good:

• The kernel no longer sucks. XNU is actually a pretty nice kernel now. When the open source release is done, I might even consider running OpenDarwin on some systems (Launchd is pretty nice too, and the new security frameworks are pretty shiny). This is the first OS X system that my mmap torture test failed to kill.
• The new unified look is definitely an improvement.
• Spotlight actually works. In Tiger it was a complete waste of space and resource.
• RAM usage is way down (or, rather, the new VM subsystem handles swapping a lot better). Leopard works okay in 512MB of RAM on an Intel system. Tiger felt a bit cramped in 1GB.
• Terminal.app is much improved. Bye bye iTerm.
• Preview is much improved. I can now ditch PDFPen (buggiest piece of crap I've ever had to use) and may AppleScript hack to reopen windows when I update a PDF from LaTeX.

Some of the bad:

• The menu bar is hideous unless you set your desktop background colour to black. If anyone happens to meet the UI designer who thought a transparent menu bar was a good idea, please slap them once for every Leopard user (two million slaps and counting...)
• The new look doesn't work with Aqua widgets. Third party apps will all need updating to use the newer widgets.
• I got a kernel panic which wiped out my home directory after about a day of use. Might have been a hardware issue (CPU failed to respond to IPI was the error). Made me very glad I keep regular backups...
• Time Machine doesn't work properly with File Vault. It only performs backups when you log out (and how often do laptop owners do that? Once a month?) and you don't get any of the nice revision control stuff: you can do a full restore by booting from the install CD, but that's it. This forces laptop users to make a choice between security and safety for their data. Good call Apple.
• Spaces is really buggy. Switching spaces sometimes restacks your windows (you can see why it happens, but it's still wrong). There is a race condition in the NSWorkspace code that causes new windows to sometimes open in the wrong space. No ability to pin windows, rather than apps, to all desktops.

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

[King_TJ]

A few comments:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[TheRaven64]

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

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

Vista Sucks?

[Zebra_X]

http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20071030122926454

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

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

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

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

Better hope your hardware partners update their drivers!

Re:Vista Sucks?

[linuxgurugamer]

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

I run Vista, XP, and now OS X. I'm waiting for my upgrade to arrive, and don't expect too many problems. I only have Vista because some of my customers have it (against my advice), and those customers tend to have more service calls than the others.

Re:Other OS releases

[ubernostrum]

(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.

X11 Server is totally broken

[GrumpyOldMan]

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

Re:X11 Server is totally broken

[mzs]

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.

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

Re:Java complainers

[Anonymous Coward]

Java is very important, but it takes development effort to do a good port, and Apple has been very busy lately. Good job, iApologist.

Microsoft screws Java: they're LAZY and EVIL and BOYCOTT BOYCOTT BOYCOTT.
Apple screws Java: they're very busy.

Two very very stable early MacOS releases

[davidwr]

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

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

If you want stable and secure, run a proven-stable-and-secure OS like OpenBSD and run it as an appliance rather than a general-purpose PC. The fewer things you have going on, the less chance two things will interact badly and cause problems. You can achieve similar stability with most OSes if they are not on a network and only run a small, well-tested set of applications.

Re:Other OS releases

[russotto]

Hmm. How do you hit a company with a rolled-up newspaper? Bad Logitech! Bad!

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.

Very smooth. Snappy.

[jpellino]

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

Pay closer attention

[porcupine8]

The insanely long and detailed ArsTechnica review (slashdotted a few days ago) is based entirely on using Leopard on G5s.

Re:I'm waiting for more reports...

[e4g4]

I've seen it running just fine on several PPC machines - my iBook G4 (1.25 GB RAM, 1.07 GHz), a pbook G4, a flower pot imac, an out of spec ibook g4 (700MHz) and (amazingly) a g4 cube. I've had no problems with any of my apps (except KisMAC, which has been having some problems related to it being declared illegal in Germany, the place where it was "born"), and only noticed some minor annoyances with spaces and bringing the correct window to the foreground on a switch.

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:Why so moderate?

[Dragonfly]

I've yet to hear someone defend the problematic firewall.

OK, here you go! Start with this surprisingly level-headed thread over in the ArsTechnica forums. The c't article seems to have been written by people with a limited understanding of nmap and an axe to grind. The bottom line is the functionality Leopard firewall is no different from the one in Tiger, except that it adds a third setting which allows exceptions for ports to be added on-the-fly as applications request them. I do agree that the firewall should come enabled by default, but at least OS X has a very small number of open ports out-of-the-box, which mitigates the issue. But regardless, the hysteria over Leopard's firewall is unwarranted.

Third party drivers.

[pavon]

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

Re:Java complainers

[ColdWetDog]

Far too much stuff to compile, needs several GB of free space.

I sure the hell would get a job with a company that can afford computers built in the current century. Who worries about a few GB of free space these days.

Or are you guys doing java development on Palm's or somebody's watch?

Re:where software comes from

[Blakey Rat]

That's a pretty shaky foundation to say that "all OSes depend on..." equates to "all OSes borrow a couple ideas from..."

I really don't care, I just have to call out BS claims when I see them.

Directory Services

[duffbeer703]

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:Other OS releases

[MsGeek]

You don't need to install the Logitech drivers to make your Logitech mouse work. The Marble Mouse is my pointing device of choice, and I have NEVER installed their drivers. Right click works, trackball scroll works, and that's with Mac OS X internal support. So the stupid little internal buttons don't work. BFD. I don't miss them.

Re:Java complainers

[Dragonfly]

Apple has not "screwed" Java. Java5 works on Leopard, and for that matter, no one is holding a gun to Mac-using Java developers' heads forcing them to upgrade.

Historically, Java releases on OS X have not been aligned exactly with updates to the OS as this timeline shows. Yeah, it would be great if Apple would announce an estimated release date for Java6 on Leopard, but it would have been the wrong decision to delay Leopard in order to get Java6 finished for inclusion.

Leopard won't play with non-Mac cups print servers

[caseih]

The first thing we noticed about leopard was that printing no longer worked for us. Somehow Apple had managed to break things when you tried to use a non-Apple CUPs print server. The solution, fortunately, is found at http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5705091&tstart=0 . However that's a real pain for a lot of Mac users, especially ones not used to the unix command line.

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

Finder hang after install, and a solution

[Slur]

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

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

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

The Translation widget is much better!

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

The new Network prefpane is just about perfect.

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

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

Time Machine: Haven't tried it yet.

Tabs in Terminal!

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

GrowlMail isn't working... *snif*

PubSub wants my keychain password again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rounded corners on menus are pretty nice looking.

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