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.

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.