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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!'"
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
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
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.
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.
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).
Don't mind the extra X. Alex
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.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
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 used to have the exact same problem. Ever since I applied this fix to X11 for the Gimp.app problems, I haven't had any more crashes.
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.
.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.
.0 release faults, Leopard is still ahead of Vista, there, too.
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
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
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
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!
Ten Myths of Leopard: 10 Leopard is a Vista Knockoff!
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
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!
Ten Myths of Leopard: 8 No Hidden New Features!
It is unlikely that Rist has any real understanding of what Leopard even is.
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). 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.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
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.
this sig is useless
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 , $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.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
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.
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