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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!'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
This guy needs to post his kernel panic log. I'm curious to see what's causing so many panic events.
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.
Three Squirrels
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?
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.
This guy's the limit!