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!'"

Comments

Another Perspective

[Alexx K]

I am blind and use a screen reader, and I find Leopard's screen reader, Voiceover, will randomly freeze for a couple of seconds when browsing web pages. It is extremely annoying, but not as annoying as the extremely clunky keyboard interface. Hardly anything is automatically read, you have to use the shitty keyboard interface to find everything.

Like Microsoft, Apple claims their half-assed screen reader has improved. Like Microsoft, they've hardly done anything.

NOTE: I don't actually own a Mac, but I have an Apple fanboy friend who owns a Macbook with Leopard.

Re:Another Perspective

[jellomizer]

My experience I find that Most blind users prefer Linux, or other form of Unix which allows a good command line interface. I am not sure why Apple or Microsoft even really try I can only imagine a windowed interface to be extremely clumsy for a blind user. Even with speech interface.

Re:Another Perspective

[Per Wigren]

They are very common, at least among blind computer users.
One of my best friends is blind since birth and he uses braille displays and has been doing so for at least 17 years (we met on FidoNet). He insists on using Windows because its braille support is supposed to be superior.

Even most fullscreen textmode applications are quite hard to use compared to most GUI apps as they update text all over the screen all the time without giving the display any indication about what text is important and what is just status information or similar.

It's amazing to watch him use Windows. He is the fastest GUI user I know! The windows just flash back and forth, I have no chance to read what's on the screen, he is just too fast. He know every shortcut by muscle memory and know things like that to get from A to B he should press alt+tab-tab-tab+ctrl+x-pgdn-down-down-right-enter and type that almost faster than the screen has time to draw the widgets.

as an apple user...

[datapharmer]

I concur. Leopard has SERIOUS problems. It is more than a "point upgrade"as the author states and has some nice new features and enhancements, but firewall breaks all sorts of things abd is as annoying as the Vista mother-may-I prompts giving warnings even after applications have been placed on the white list. DHCP doesn't acquire addresses properly and firewall must be disabled, airport turned off then back on for it to work again.

I've had 2 kernel panics in 2 days (I never experienced a kernel panic under tiger). I have also had the OS go unstable and Finder et al will crash randomly until restart. Final Cut Pro 6.0 crashes all the time doing things as simple moving the timeline. Spotlight crashes and reloads while doing searches sometimes.

Disk Utility can't repair disk permissions or recognizes them as incorrect when they are not (not sure which).

Java is completely screwed! No java 6 yet and javascript commands in safari do bizarre things sometimes like launching outside applications such as finder instead of doing what they are intended to do within the application!

Apple has some serious work to do if they want to keep Leopard installed on users' machines - and they had better do it fast!

Re:What will be interesting

[stuff-n-things]

10.5.1 is out and it only fixed some of the issues I've had. I've found using OnyX to delete all caches (including the system cache) has helped, as in it's been 2 days since and hasn't crashed. But Leopard wasn't crashing every day or two, so only time will tell.

One thing I have noticed, the Intel systems I use crash (and have other bugs), but the PowerPC systems I have (including one at the very low end of Leopard supported systems) are stable. That was also reflected in the size of the 10.5.1 updates--the Intel update was over 150MB and the PowerPC update was about 35MB (IIRC the numbers, of course).

Re:Clearly you're mistaken

[Daengbo]

I think the current releases from three OS vendors suck right now: Vista, Leopard, and Gutsy. Being a full-time Gutsy user, I'm particularly hurt by that one, but not surprised. I said several times before it was released that it was going to suck more than Feisty, and it did. Canonical was trying to get everything unstable into Gutsy so that the bugs could be worked out for the long-term release. Wireless is broken (again) for many people on the same hardware that worked since Dapper. Enabling Compiz by default was a big mistake. Firefox is less stable. MEh.

At least Canonical has a reason for it to suck though: Microsoft and Apple intended to put out decent operating systems.

For the people I know:

• Vista owners are installing XP,
• Gutsy owners are installing Feisty, and now, apparently
• Leopard owners are rolling back to Tiger.

It's a fucking banner year for the OS. I hope 2008 is better.

Re:Clearly you're mistaken

[Simon Carr]

I actually am one of those fanboys and I've gotta admit I'm very surprised by the number of issues that have come up with this release. These aren't small issues either. From the perspective of a sysadmin;

- X is hosed.
- Finder takes up large amounts of CPU at odd, mainly inconvenient times.
- It's much less graceful than 10.4, even in Tiger's early releases.
- There have been more than one borked upgrade that I've been witness to, which is brand new to me.
- First day of use I nearly lost my keychain, and it's still not 100% right.
- The new tmp layout broke a few key native OS X apps (Cyberduck, but the dev of Cyberduck was quick on the fix!)
- Weird arbitrary menu re-shuffling that seems out of the norm for Apple's usually anal layout and design philosophy (WTF is going on in the Network Prefs? It's been simple and straightforward since OS 8, and now it's like a circus).
- Longer and more frequent pauses in this release. I'm sensitive to the difference between perceptually slow and really, truly slow, and these are truly slow pauses.

There IS good of course, some of the new features I actually dismissed turn out to be awesome, like, not willing to downgrade back to 10.4 awesome, so I'm going to tough it out. But if I had to turn back time I'd wait until some time next year to order my copy.

As it is now I jumped the gun on ordering and I upgraded a bunch of clients to 10.5, to my present dismay (including my wife). Basically I bought on the good feelings I had towards 10.4.8-> and this release hasn't lived up to that standard.

So it's not that Apple is never bad, but what is new is the WAY that this is bad.

Re:Worthless chatter

[Stevecrox]

Nice in depth review of Vista there, some corrections if you don't mind. The Cancel or Allow thing only appears when a program requires admin rights for me the only time I see this is when I'm installing a game or driver. Fraps does also require it but it does have good reason to want admin rights. I agree with the model I don't want ever application on my PC to need admin rights. Vista DRM layers are one of the great myths, they did contribute to the driver isue that Nvidia/ATi had but unless your planning on running DRM media (some of us never will) they don't effect your pc in anyway.

I like the UI differences Vista has made the only bad choice as I see it is placing the network sharing centre behind the network connections screen placing Device manager straight into the control panel was a brilliant idea and the re arrangement of the user folders helps seperate things out.

Vista is working on millions if not billions of computer configurations its biggest problems have been drivers and as far as I can tell those driver issues are slowly being phased out. Mac's are supposed to "just work" and yet there is a strong vocal group claiming the latest release is causing them major issues. Microsoft may have a good excuse for why my scanner made by a small company six years ago doesn't work on Vista x64 (actually someone pointed me at anouther driver and it now does) or the fact that Riven won't install (10 year old game.) Whats apple's excuse? They control all the hardware so there are only dozens of configurations and talking with the big companies who produce software for your platform can't be that hard. My own expearence is a little different if you have an issue with windows there will be someone else who's had it and hopefully a work around/fix. If there isn't a workaround you'll find people squatting on a companies forum moaning until there is. Linux seems to me to have split into two camps the first is highly friendly (Ubunutu camp) and they are helpfull. The second is the old school linux camp, this is made up of people who believe the command line is the only interface a person should use and will flame you if you ask why you have to go through it rather than a wizard (my favorite being make one yourself.) Its the sole reason I'll only try Ubunutu because I know I could probably get help if I needed it. Don't get me wrong many projects are getting better but they seem to be the projects tied to (or come preloaded with) Ubunutu