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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!'"
Apple and Microsoft display the same pattern - their products resembles beta for the first few months, and only become mature after a few years. Happened with the iPod, and all successful versions of Windows.
I never upgrade until the widespread opinion is the product is mature...
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.
Don't mind the extra X. Alex
Since starting to use it, I've had a lot of problems with it, too.
When it comes to applications, Firefox crashes for no apparent reason. I thought it might have been due to Flash, but it has crashed even on pages without any Flash. And it works fine for other Flash-based apps. This didn't happen on Tiger.
I've also had Finder just freeze at times. Again, this is something that never happened with Tiger, or even Mac OS 9 for that matter.
The few times I've used bash at the terminal, it has core dumped on me. Yes, the shell is dumping core. Something about free()'ing already-freed memory.
Maybe this has something to do with the new features of Objective-C 2.0? I heard from some friends that a lot of Apple's code was rewritten to use the new features. I don't know if this is true or not, but maybe it could explain why the stability we've come to expect from Tiger just isn't there with Leopard? I mean, so many new language features will take a long time to stabilize. So maybe they shouldn't have been used for such core functionality, if that is indeed the case?
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.
While yeah, there are a ton of Apple fans out there that can take a bit too much pride in their machines, the fact is that this is somewhat unusual.
I've seen tons of mac laptops with cosmetic damage, but it's pretty rare that the operating system on a new mac is unreliable.
If this report represents a widespread issue, that's significant. And partly because macs are supposed to work without any problems. And frankly, there's no excuse for them not to. It's like that Halo 3 and the XBOX 360 lawsuit... it's all Microsoft, so there's no excuse for failure.
With my thinkpad, there are parts from several vendors interoperating and dealing with windows and ubuntu and even my playstation when I stream movies on TVersity.
With a mac, it's all Apple, all the time, so the operating system programmer has far less work to do... at least in my mind. Apple has a very interesting business model that ought to be reliable and usually is, so I think this incident somewhat shows why apple fans are so cocky (I'll stick with my thinkpad).
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.
Given Apples current advertising campaign.
I have Leopard on several systems and know of several others running Leopard, and other than Apple-acknowledged installation issues on one system, it has been a trouble-free experience. I did not have any serious issues with 10.5.0, but I didn't have much time to run that before 10.5.1 came out.
My guess is that this PC Magazine guy is running some piece of software that's causing his system to go nuts. I have done this myself in the past. After a few crashes, I looked at the kernel log and it was a 3rd-partybeta mouse driver I had installed. I got rid of it and my system was golden.
Some of his other points are fine. I don't think the new features are particularly fantastic. I didn't think so with Tiger either. But I don't think this is an alarm-raising Vista-level catastrophe.
Brought to you by the numbers π, e, and 0x1B.
Never crashed for me either, but what do I know.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
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!
Get a web developer
Normally I don't reply to these kind of articles, as they tend to be obvious flame bait, but the whole PC Mag article seems very anecdotal. As far as my own experience is concerned, upgrading to Leopard was the easiest OS upgrade I've ever done and I've had pretty much no issues since I upgraded. I've never had the machine crash or freeze.
The only real nitpicks I have with Leopard are that the UI occasionally seems slower and some of the UI choices are baffling (the menu bar can be grody with some wallpapers, I ended up switching off the dock shelf, and the folder icons are a huge step backwards) and even those nitpicks are worth it to get a UI that is otherwise relatively clean and consistent (under Tiger I was using a UI called Uno. Before upgrading, I uninstalled it, and Tiger's UI is really grating).
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
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).
And it never cras
Some Differences as well.
Vista was Years Late Leopard was Months Late.
Vista had these problem for almost a year now. Leopard has only been out for a month
Yes Leopard isn't as Bullet proof and free of problems as Apple admits. I had a failed upgrade where I needed to erase my disk clean to get it to work. And after that I still have some minor problems... But the problems are minor and they remind me of an older version of the OS... Codename Tiger. Yes when Tiger was released it had a slew of minor glitches and bugs just like Leopard did.
When Tiger was released Apple was still using Power PC Processors, By the time Intel Systems were released and huge amounts of people were migrating to Apple Tiger was Well in the Mid Cycle where most of glitches were cleared. So most people are use to the solid Mid-Cycle OS. But Tiger had a bunch of glitches, also Panther, Jaguar. When they were in the early Pre 10.x.4 release. It happens in early releases. Similar things happen in Linux too, but the Linux Zealots minimize it just like the Apple Fan Boys do. Stating it is the problem with 3rd party software or there are super simple workaround, etc...
Also there is the issue of the greater number of Mac Users, just the fact that more people are using the OS there is more bugs that are found by users who don't know to fix them. For example I had to hard reboot my Mac this week because of some glitch with Parallels, Going to sleep in middle of a disk write on a USB disk, While asleep the USB Disk was unplugged and when it returned it didn't want to completely wakeup like the program was trying to write to the disk (this may have happened in Tiger too, I was doing something I rarely do). But what happened was the disk got corrupted so things were running poorly. So I rebooted in Single user mode and did an fsck on my disk and fix the problems. Easy for a Unix/Linux/Mac Expert. But if they are a newbie use to using windows this would cause them to reinstall the OS. Many of the people using the older versions of OS X where Well experienced with Macs, and a lot of the Newcomers in the PPC days were people converting from Linux to Macs. Today Macs have a wide base not at all prepared for handling new version bugs.
Things are not as bleak as Vista is, it is actually normal stuff. We just have forgotten it over time.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
...Ubuntu is looking better all the time. On seven machines over three years, it's crashed once on me. And I'm pretty sure that was a hardware thing.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
I've had similar experiences with Leopard and 3rd party apps. Specifically, Parallels had substantial issues (build 5160). Their latest beta (build 5570 - http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/beta) appears to have fixed issues I've had with kernel panics, related to Parallels.
Their developers noted that Apple made substantial changes to Leopard between Release Candidate and Final. A number of other apps I had broke, though most were patched within about 1-2 weeks.
The following crash has happened three times since installing Leopard. It appears to be a Wireless driver issue, and appears to occur at random. There's an Apple thread about this (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5867190). Anyone have a clue as to what's going on? Could this be Parallels related, even though it occurs when Parallels isn't even running?
Fri Nov 23 19:14:00 2007
panic(cpu 0 caller 0x0039CD77): "m_free: freeing an already freed mbuf"@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-1228.0.2/bsd/kern/uipc_mbuf.c:2742
Backtrace, Format - Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack)
0x3422f978 : 0x12b0e1 (0x455670 0x3422f9ac 0x133238 0x0)
0x3422f9c8 : 0x39cd77 (0x48e03c 0x30141200 0x8594fe0 0x1)
0x3422fa08 : 0x39d073 (0x300cd000 0x8 0x3422fa58 0x1)
0x3422fa28 : 0x8f9b87 (0x301b1000 0x0 0x20 0x2)
0x3422fb98 : 0x8f9ec5 (0x23a782c8 0x23a7a150 0x3422fbc8 0x1a6d13)
0x3422fce8 : 0x90520b (0x23b71004 0x0 0x46 0xbf4b40)
0x3422fe68 : 0x8d584a (0x23a784c0 0x0 0x4203 0x49f76d0)
0x3422feb8 : 0x8d6f3f (0x95dc80 0x95dc84 0x49f76b0 0x135e09)
0x3422ff48 : 0x8d54b7 (0x42d4804 0x0 0x1361b0 0x19ccc1)
0x3422ff78 : 0x13e987 (0x42d4c94 0x42d4804 0x1a136f 0x58e46b0)
0x3422ffc8 : 0x19e2ec (0x0 0x0 0x1a10b5 0x49f76b0)
Backtrace terminated-invalid frame pointer 0
Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.driver.AirPort.Atheros(300.22)@0x8d4000->0x95efff
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IO80211Family(200.7)@0x8b6000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(2.4)@0x63c000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IONetworkingFamily(1.6.0)@0x64c000
BSD process name corresponding to current thread: kernel_task
Mac OS version:
9B18
Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 9.1.0: Wed Oct 31 17:46:22 PDT 2007; root:xnu-1228.0.2~1/RELEASE_I386
System model name: MacBookPro2,2 (Mac-F42187C8)
I've been using OS X since the .0 release, and this is the first time that I regret an upgrade. They made many little changes to little things that drive me crazy. Moving menu items just because they can, redesigning icons to be unreadable, adding features that are useless, etc.
I have had the feeling that Apple went a little Microsoft with Leopard.
Macbook Pro 17 (2.33 C2D) with
Vista (160GB internal)
Leopard (500GB external FW800)
3 additional external USB Drives (~ 1TB of space)
1 USB DVD burner
I've never had a crash, all of my software has worked perfectly. Of course, I did do a fresh install and selectively moved my old programs back - rather than an Upgrade. 0 problems.
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
Well, to edify you...
10.5.1 is already released.
And my opinion on the author's rant...
Many of the author's points dont make any sense in comparison to MS and Vista. SP1 isn't due out (as of now) till Q1 2008... OSX's update is already out... don't see the similarity.
He also claims that MS "mostly" admitted to XP pre-SP1 crashing a lot - but that was after SP2 was released and they announced Vista... in my opinion, years later doesn't count as "admitting" anything (especially as their "admission" was more of an advertising tool touting how Vista would fix all the issues that XP had - as they do with every release). That's like the weatherman admitting they were wrong about it going to be sunny last Sunday - when instead it poured... gee thanks, we've known that for quite a while, and it's too little too late. So, I dont see the similarity between that and Apple's stance - which is to (far more quickly) release an update - AND admit to many of the issues, up front and quickly (see http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306907 and http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61798). So, where's the similarities? MS takes years to admit many major issues, months or over a year to release a questionable SP (SP1? c'mon... the SP needed an SP - namely SP1A)... and Apple admits to and attempts to fix the issues in a couple months...
Vista Similarity 2: Needless Graphics Glitz
Hmm... may be "needless" but people like them - when done right. Vista radically changed the interface in many areas, making things more confusing - while requiring most of a user's computing power to do so. OSX refined their user interface, and added to it in ways that didnt make doing simple things more confusing... and dont use nearly as much of the CPU/resources to do so... where is the similarities? And in the case of consistency between various parts of the OS or programs, neither is perfect, but OSX is light-years ahead.
Vista Similarity 3: Pointless User Interface "Fixes"
Then there's how Microsoft screwed up Vista's UI, reorganizing things that didn't need to be reorganized--like the networking screens... Under XP you can get to those with a single right-click on the desktop. Under Vista, it's three layers down for no good reason...
...Not to be left behind, Apple has messed up its own UI, too, but Apple did it with piles of senseless graphics enhancements.
So, MS totally messed up the Vista interface, made it more complex to interact with, and made it more confusing... Apple added graphics to make it prettier (which Vista is just as guilty of). How is there a similarity between trying to make an interface prettier by totally messing it up and making it more difficult and complex - or making an interface prettier?
Vista Similarity 4: Nuked Networking
Ummm... yeah... I see that similarity... with Vista users gotta wait till Q1-2008 (maybe) for a fix (maybe - doubtfully on some issues since it is due to components of the DRM).... compared to a sercurity/networking fix already being out for OSX Leopard.
Where is the similarity? That they both had networking issues? Neither were apparently secure out of the box - but Vista (for various reasons) dragged down network performance to boot - and made network operations more difficult... while Apple quickly dealt with (and admitted to) their networking issues.
Vista Similarity 5: Bundled Apps as New Features That Suck
Ummm... at least most of the apps that come with OSX are somewhat useful and will get used... unlike what comes on a Vista machine.
But in MS's defense, much of the crapware is installed by the computer OEM - not by MS.
Pointing out Leopard's deficiencies is one thing... yeah, it seems to have quite a few (though at least Apple admits to and
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
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.
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.Put identity in the browser.
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.
iBook G4 & iMac G5.
Painless.
No kernel panics.
Reboots only from installs who demanded it.
I miss classic, but I'll get over it.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I've had Vista Premium 32bit since it was released. I use Vista Business 64bit all day, every day at work. I've had Leopard since the third ADC beta release and am currently running 10.5.1.
Every time I restart Vista at least 2 of the Media Center services crash on startup. After restarting them 2-3 times each they tend to stay running until the next time I restart Vista.
After years of trying Microsoft has successfully destroyed Windows Explorer. It doesn't update directory contents regularly. It doesn't have a "up one directory" button. Seriously? It's a file manager not a web browser. Let me have a up one dir button, please. Vista networking is slow, unreliable and the smallest configuration task is hidden behind 20 levels of pretty glass bars.
Leopard on the other hand is faster and more stable than Tiger ever was. The networking picks up windows, linux and afp file shares more reliably and faster than Tiger. Spotlight is faster and seems much more responsive. The user interface does have useless new features. New features that you're free to ignore. Stacks is a waste of time. Time Machine doesn't have a tremendous amount of value to me. The dock and menu bar are translucent now. Obviously, these new features draw value away from OS X.
What draws value away from Vista is the fact that tons of software and hardware still doesn't work with Vista a year after it's release.
I'll take useless new features and system stability over bad hardware/software support and the dumbing down of user interface components.
This guy needs to post his kernel panic log. I'm curious to see what's causing so many panic events.
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.
-- The unsig...
Since that's just anecdotal evidence, here's some more. I upgraded my C2D MacBook in place to Leopard about two hours before the official release date in my time zone (thanks, FedEx). I have had a total of two kernel panics since then relating to my wireless driver, but the problem seems to have been fixed since 10.5.1. Also, Time Machine refused to work with my drive for some reason until 10.5.1. But besides those issues, it's been completely smooth. And another difference between Vista and Leopard: Leopard is actually faster on my hardware than Tiger was.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
I have a PPC system on Leopard and compared to Tiger its relatively the same with few if any crashes. If anything crashed on me it was Safari beta and Safari 2 but Safari 3 is much improved. I'd also say the Finder is much better in Leopard but it still sucks with copying and moving files. I use the command line for that (not that I mind). But this is the OS X experience for most users and should be able to rely on Finder.
Spotlight seems to take longer, but I also recall disabling it on the command line as it would hang for days at first install. Tried to re-index it and then turned it off. At least, I thought I did, but it is still turned on.
As bad as Vista's been, it's never crashed on me. 6 times in a month? Dude, get a Dell.
Oh don't give me that fix it later crap. It's a massive catastrofuck no matter how fast they patch it. Time for MY RANT! (which I can do cuz I'm a programmer.) I work at a hospital and guess what! The heart monitoring software never fails. It's perfect. No glitches, no bugs, no crashes EVER. Same with standalone solution in a box medical equipment and other complicated software that serves important purposes like keeping people alive. It all works perfectly because it has to work perfectly!
Remember back in the N64 days before patching? What the hell was a crash glitch? 99% of the games weren't capable of just locking up or writing garbage data over your whole memory card. They couldn't fix the games later so they released them so close to perfect that they were acceptable. And now today we have the original Xbox's Splinter Cell whose online play had so many glitches it was a crime against gaming. But the "just release it so we can get money now, we'll patch it later" crap is unacceptable! Programmers are getting lazy or worse yet, sabotaging programs so they're ensured work to do later fixing it. I say put in some damn effort and release software that's actually good!
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
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
Longer to index, or longer to search. Because I have to say, despite a few bugs (yes, I have had bugs), i'm staying with leopard for the blinding speed of leopard's spotlight index.
I put Leopard on my Santa Rosa MacBook Pro on day 1. Almost no real issues, zero crashes, and overall stability seems much better than it did under Tiger. Here's what I noticed as issues:
.0 release from Apple. I've been very encouraged. Granted, there are some design issues in my opinion (I don't like the new Dock, Stacks are a clever but broken idea, etc.), but those aren't bugs so much as features I don't like too much. But I think Leopard is mainly Good Stuff.
I had messed up my Keychain config many versions and computers ago, which was faithfully migrated from Mac to Mac. Leopard broke it (basically, my keychain was named for my user shortname, not "login"). I renamed the keychain, logged out and back in, and all was well.
VPN configs didn't migrate the authentication info properly because Internet Config is no longer the tool that manages the connection. Not a problem for most, but I have 23 different clients I use VPNs to connect to. Easily fixed.
I didn't use any InputManagers other than Saft/PithHelmet, so that was no biggie. And that combo works now.
When the Mac first wakes up and is scanning for a network connection, the mouse is kind of jerky. It lasts a few seconds.
All in all, I've seen remarkably few bugs for a
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I do in fact love Feisty and am not a gibbon fan.
The difference is that Ubuntu is free, of course. And compared with Vista, the next level of Ubuntu isn't as great a drag on my system (I need to use Office, so I'm screwed anyway).
I agree. 2007 had better be better. It's a great time for computing and I forsee massive changes in the operating system market. 90% of what people do with the internet is use the internet. If we start seeing internet applications that don't suck, the compatibility argument that macs and MS rely on becomes weaker. If a system can do flash, it's going to be a valid system for the marketplace.
So as the internet takes over, I see Windows becoming less and less relevant. Hell, I see the PC becoming less and less relevant. If an internet appliance can handle my applications, entertainment, and communciation, I don't need windows anymore (especially if I'm an idiot who is too challenged to run adaware).
I think we'll see iPhones and google devices and PS3 (that are more versatile) take over the living rooms, and the PCs will be left behind. Even offices are better served by internet terminals that leave documents safely on servers and out of the hands of laptop thieves.
That's why Apple is investing in their TV and Phone devices. That's why Microsoft has pours billions into their XBOXs and will start another very soon. Where is that development money coming from? OS development. Vista is not the kind of leap XP was because it would be stupid to keep investing in a model that is on the way out.
I don't think 2008 will see better OS products. But in several years, it won't matter.
Well, I'm sure that your heart monitoring software is far more complex than an operating system that has to deal with thousands of possible computer configurations and marshall memory and files to boot. How hard can it be to write an operating system, right? I mean, those Lunix guys did it in a couple of days, and it works absolutely flawlessly!
WTF is going on in the Network Prefs? It's been simple and straightforward since OS 8, and now it's like a circus.
;-)
The Network Prefs is probably one of the better enhancements. It was weird before with the rather odd shifts in interface layout occurring when you merely selected different items from the combo. Now, at least, you have all the interfaces down the left, you click on those, and you can edit each one's settings without too much button clicking.
I don't know what's going on with your machine, but I've upgraded several to Leopard with none of the odd bugs you appear to have. My pre-Leopard release of Cyberduck works fine, and continues to do so. I also use X (rarely) and that works.
Perhaps the difference is I did an upgrade rather than an archive and install on all of my machines? Anyway, no Leopard glitches here and all these machines get heavy use with lots of different apps. In fact, the only real thing that's ticking me off is that "Copy Link" in Safari now does a rich text copy rather than just a plain text URL.. and that's probably an enhancement for everyone else
I've got a Powerbook, a MacBook and a Hackintosh (965p/nvidia/pc_efi), all running leopard. I havent seen a crash yet. It's fun to sensationalize when you're having problems; but assuming that everyone else is having them too, and making comparisons to vista just makes you look like a fool. perhaps Olivers ram has gone bad or something?
TIAEAE!
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*
"Many of the author's points dont make any sense in comparison to MS and Vista. SP1 isn't due out (as of now) till Q1 2008... OSX's update is already out... don't see the similarity. "
.0.1 updates.
Um, you do realize that Microsoft has been releasing Vista fixes for months now via Windows Update, right? Fixes don't have to come as SPs or
But you're right, I don't see the similarity either. Vista has to work probably 3 orders of magnitude more configurations than OSX does, yet Leopard is still very buggy, even with 10.5.1, BTW.
And make no mistake: The author's complaints are not an isolated case.
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/update-leopard-problems-apple,review-1028.html
http://www.robhyndman.com/2007/11/14/ive-been-attacked-by-a-leopard/
http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/16/caught-in-apple-restart-hell/
http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/17/the-brand-promise-of-apple/
http://www.digg.com/apple/MacBook_MacBook_Pro_owners_suffer_keyboard_freezing_with_Leopard
And check out the Apple discussion forums (though Apple has seen fit to lock many of the threads that complain about Leopard's problems, so check out MacinTouch and AppleInsider.com forums too).
Apple's "Vista is crap" ad campaign and using BSOD icons for Windows network shares in Leopard makes this all the more embarrassing for Apple. And comedian Baratunde Thurston has publicly called out Apple on its unjustified smugness (even before Leopard was released).
Baratunde Thurston: I Hate the Smugness of Apple
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
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.
I support developers testing the limits of XP every day. On their Dell D820 laptops they will run two 1 gig VMWare Workstation dev environments off of external eSata drives via their PC Express card eSata adapter. Running simultaneously Outlook 2007, Communicator 2007(read bloated), streaming media with winamp, browsing the web(firefox), and finally using heavier microsoft intranet apps like Sharepoint. These power users easily use every bit of their 4gb of memory and fill up their 120gb internal HD's with random programs and media. they have local admin rights and know just enough to be dangerous when customizing their OS. Yet, if they have a reoccuring crash, they will instantly complain to me about it because I will offer to build a replacement laptop and let them swap out, minimizing their dev downtime. This is a very, very rare occurrence, and when it does happen it's usually bad hardware(hard drives almost always).
Furthermore, I just got a D830 for myself(one of three) and we chose to install Windows Vista x64. It tooks some time to locate all the proper drivers but I've been using it for 3 weeks now and it hasn't crashed once.
I'm no Microsoft fan by any means as I support plenty of their woefully half-baked, re-branded garbage in my company's environment. But I can' help but view these OS bashing claims of infamy as largely people who prefer alternative OS's and are frustrated by MS's dominance in the area of available apps. Windows XP and Vista are simply not that unstable.
I think the point of such comment that "anecdotes are worthless, my experience was just the opposite of yours..." is like if one person were to say "look at these two data points, there's an obvious pattern" and someone else responded "two data points are not enough to plot a curve from; and look, this data point is completely off of the curve you plotted..."
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
I used OS 9 for a few years, and while it was mostly OK, that annoying little sad Mac popped up once too often when working with Photoshop and PageMaker 7 for my liking. It's plain enough that you never used it.
Maybe it was more functional than Windows 95, but it was closer to it from a platform perspective than to Windows XP, so whatever failings XP had or has, OS 9 is still a full generation behind it. In reality it wasn't until OS X that Apple had a real operating system, much like NT4 for Microsoft. Your comparison is completely off the mark.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
I generally love Apple, but I have to agree.
Specifically, though, some applications tend to cause the system to KP, but only on Macbooks and Macbook Pros. One of the most prevalent is Azureus.
If you've been seeing panics, especially when running azureus, little snitch, or parallels, you might find the following interesting:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5665070
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1224480
The latest suggestions are that the IPv6 code in the Airport kext is at fault, which can be disabled easily (for now).
I've also had about five panics after turning the screen off. This appears to be the same panic, as covered below:
http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?p=1174408
Anyway, I'm getting really tired of it, and have started using my ubuntu desktop for primary productivity. Probably will downgrade to 10.4.11 if no effective fix comes out in the next few days.
Unfortunately, the problem is very real for macbook users.
I've had Vista for 6 months and the OS hasn't crashed even once. I'm no Microsoft fan, but the cold hard truth is that I haven't had any crashing problems with Vista.
I haven't had any of the problems you mention (X11 runs fine, for instance), but usually I wouldn't bother replying. Except...
/me support in iChat are my two favorite unannounced features.
You don't like the new network preferences pane?
I find it hard to believe anyone would defend the Tiger preference pane, let alone prefer it compared to the Leopard one. The old one was a horribly confusing mess, driven by popup menus. Seriously, seriously ew. The new one is so much better organized, the interface is stable (as in, doesn't change), and... honestly, that and
I just bought a new machine. I'm very happy with it. I'd rather drop the Stacks, I liked having one click access to my Applications folder Finder windows. Spaces are okay -- I never need to use them with a screen this big. No grey screens or "real" panics at all. And I'm glad the machine came with Leopard. I look forward to using the Cocoa/Ruby bridge to write Cocoa applications with Ruby, and brushing up on my Objective C. I'm not currently using the Time Machine, but I will once I get a big enough external drive (or two).
That said, I wouldn't have bought Leopard if it hadn't come with the machine. At least not until an application I was actually interested in running needed it. I do expect those to show up eventually as developers start using Ruby and Python and Objective C 2.0 for development.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Privacy - people scream at the idea of google reading their mail just to give them ads. What happens when they're storing all of their documents, photos, music, videos on someone else's server? I wouldn't be willing to do it. Nothing would convince me that employees of the company housing my data wouldn't be able to just go in there and check it out whenever they pleased. I believe Facebook is a classic example of this. Private profiles aren't private if you're an employee.
Power - I recently spoiled myself with a OC'd 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM, two 150GB Raptors in RAID 0, two 640MB 8800GTSs and a 64 bit OS to make sure I'm taking advantage of my RAM. Games look beautiful on this beast. You'd have to have a heckuva server and a ridiculous internet connection to provide both me and other people (I say other people, because if I'm the only one using it, why is there a server / thin client set-up?) the same gaming experience I can get from my machine on my own. Not every piece of software will happily work using the thin client model. There are other examples, but games are the first thing that came to mind.
Security - This is the trust issue all over again. The "paris hilton cell phone" hack comes to mind. Her phone wasn't hacked, the server that housed some of the data that she stored on her phone was hacked. Aaaand naked pictures of her ended up everywhere and every poor sucker that knew her got called until they switched numbers. That was just crap from a phone - not the entire contents of someones computer. Everyone thinks it's funny when it happens to a celebrity but how would it be if your intimate videos ended up on the net for co-workers to watch? Personal letters? Photos? Angry rants about your current boss? The list goes on... The fact is I don't think any system will ever by "hack proof" but my little box under my desk is a much smaller target than say a server housing thousands or even millions of other people's data.
I'm not trying to crap on your parade, it just seems like ever since the .com boom people have been saying it more and more and I just don't see it as being a good idea.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
> But if I had to turn back time I'd wait until some time next year to order my copy.
Wait a second. I thought Leopard came with a time machine?
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
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
Safari 3 is rock solid for me too. I launched it immediately after upgrading to Leopard and
I'm not running Unsanity and I don't use Logitech mice. I have a USB MS Intellimouse that worked fine in Tiger and now randomly jumps all over the screen without warning. The 10.5.1 update helped this, but now the touchpad is iffy. During a presentation today the damn thing went into spasms of fading to a blue screen and then blanking out before returning to the slideshow, repeatedly, for no apparent reason. This is on an upgraded MacBook Pro. Try doing illustration work when you have zero control over your mouse pointer. That's a big problem for me. The crap thing is that the hardware works fine in BootCamp, which means that Apple's Windows touchpad drivers are now better than their OS X ones.
My coworker just bought a new MacBook with Tiger pre-installed. Nothing crazy added. Trying to set up BootCamp for her was a huge pain. Easy as pie in Tiger, but Leopard made things really difficult. Took three attempts to get the Windows partition formatted correctly, and now it works but she cannot choose to boot from that partition using the Option key - the system fails to recognize the partition exists until after booting into Leopard. She has to wait for it to fully load the OS, then choose her preferred startup disk in Preferences and reboot if she wants to run Windows. As a new Mac user who needs Windows for a lot of work-related tasks, she is understandably upset. I cannot understand why the BootCamp beta works better than the final release.
As for the networking, you should have heard me swearing bloody murder at my Mac last week while trying to back up files to my home Windows system. The computers sit three feet away from each other hooked to the same router, but it took fifteen minutes, complete disabling of the firewall and a reboot of the Mac to get it to admit that my Windows box existed. That's an improvement? NTFS read-write would have been an improvement, but the current state is not.
The inclusion of an up-to-date Apache build and PHP 5 is an improvement. Adding pointless eye candy, breaking hardware that used to work properly, borking networking, and screwing up BootCamp is not an improvement. The "vocal minority" are vocal because the things that broke are crucial to the work we try to do on our computers.
This guys only problem (that he really rails about) is a kernel panic caused by Azureus (and some Apple bug in the networking stack. This is terrible, yes, but it's a single (bad) bug that he's seeing. He just doesn't know what's causing it so he attributes it to the general bugginess of Leopard. I kow this because this is the problem I had, and have spent onsiderable time chasing the Apple discussion forums and my friends to nail it down. Google 'Leopard Azureus Kernel Panic' for more info. It's a serious and really annoying bug for sure, but it's **one** bug. Leopard != Vista.
This sig has been deprecated.
Oh, and also,
Results 1 - 10 of about 404,000 for Win32 compatibility layer in OS X. (0.12 seconds)
The very first hit suggests So it might be not be easy, but the fact that there was found what appears to be a windows binary loader in leopard lends at least some credence to the theory. Since this theory is not unique to the poster, he isn't "obviously making shit up".
While I think it's laughable to call it a failure at all, especially a failure on the order of Vista, Leopard, as released, does have a number of disappointments for me. I expect them to be automatically fixed in a software update before long, which is far less painful than a massive SP2 or whatever. Here's what I've found:
Some application incompatibility; most Softphones I've tried won't connect to their server. X-Lite won't, and after pointing the finger to Apple (and somewhat rightfully so), have grudgingly stated they will come out with an update for it. But what magical thing could they be using on a TCP/IP stack that would suddenly break??? Something weird must have changed at quite a low level. (The free SJPhone, which works with Vonage, does seem to be one of the rare ones that does work, which will do for now.)
While Spotlight does offer more features and flexibility now, it does come with a performance penalty. I seem to get reindexing and indexing more often than before, slowing down the system.
General system performance seems more sluggish, and boot times a fair bit higher than Tiger. Things like Expose' seemed a little jerkier than in Tiger. (Although this seems a bit better lately, perhaps 10.5.1 update helped this.)
I had one program (Azureus) that wrote to syslog with a bunch of exceptions; Leopard now keeps its syslog in a database (/var/log/asl.db). When this file got large due to Azureus, syslogd suddenly started taking up 99% of the CPU, dragging down the system. It took awhile to chase this one down, having to remove asl.db and kill syslogd (so it auto-restarted). That's a pretty sloppy hole for a consumer OS, in my opinion. (Although one could partially blame Azurues/Java for dumping excessive amount of exceptions to syslog in the first place.)
I've seen my first OSX crashes with Leopard, as well. The were all centered around plugging/unplugging USB devices; in this case, a dying/dead USB MP3 player. Yes, the player was not responding well (bad ram), but it's no excuse for the USB driver bringing down the system. I haven't seen this repeated, so maybe it was isolated to that one bad device, or maybe the 10.5.1 update fixed it.
I have seen one or two occasions where the system just got so sluggish and unresponsive that I had to reboot. Rebooting to make the system run better was unheard of in Tiger.
Adobe Professional's PDF virtual printer thingy doesn't work in Leopard. Adobe has acknowledged this, and promised an update early in the new year. Ugh. Thankfully OS X's print dialog has a save-to-pdf option, which will do for now, although I find it's not quite as good generated PDF content as Acrobat printer produces. (Sometimes, hauling things into Acrobat, then optimizing/saving them, works out okay.)
iWork's "Pages" consistently crashed whenever I tried to edit a table (unless I kept the mouse *extremely* still after clicking in the table, d'oh). An auto update a couple of weeks after Leopard's release seems to have fixed this one nicely, though.
There were a couple of low-levelish kernel extensions that no longer worked for me, but that's not terribly surprising in a major upgrade, and they were nothing core to my work, just curiosities.
Mounting Windows shares seems to be a bit less reliable than before. Some times it won't connect, and once or twice I had to reboot because finder was wedged trying to mount a share, and I couldn't even relaunch Finder. Not great. But things seem to be working better lately (maybe 10.5.1 helped that).
All that being said, I was amazed at how smooth the update from Tiger went; coming from the Windows world, I expected a reinstall to be the only feasible upgrade option. The upgrade to Leopard, however, went off without a hitch. (I did extensive backups, and a test install on an external drive, being so paranoid of losing my stuff in the upgrade, but it wasn't needed, it seems.) Almost everything worked, except for the bits mentioned above. Parallels was one app
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
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.
My guess is this guy still has the awful Unsanity Application Enhancer installed. This piece of s**tware has proven itself to be a cause of so many troubles over the year (including the 'blue screen' problem that oaccure after Leopard upgrades).. I can't understand why people still use it.
It's not that Apple is infallible, but comparing Leopard to Vista is a bit much.
I noticed that even with Tiger (even thaugh Tiger didn't crash, there I had slowdowns, app-evel issues etc). OS X/PPC just runs better than OS X/Intel.
You've got something here. I'll swear my 2 year old iBook G4 (1.something GHz) running Tiger just feels smoother than my Macbook Pro (Intel dual core2). Going by the numbers this shouldn't be the case, but boot times, application launch times and general "smoothness" makes me prefer the iBook ...
One thing that does make a big difference is RAM. 2GB RAM is the minimum I'd
consider for any Mac, particularly if you use the "switch user" feature.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
I hope 2008 is better.
Install Hillary? I don't think so. May as well roll back to Bush.
Roll, roll, roll in the hay
What?
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.
The only real issue I have, using a white 24" iMac, is I get periodic freezing of the whole system - no spinning rainbox CD either... its just locked. Bizarre as it sounds, its the UI that is locked. By that I mean I was just fine on Skype - just could not do anything with the keyboard or programs, the mouse moved but could not activate anything.
Still the whole upgrade has been mostly ho hum. As in, for a hundred bucks I would have expected something really outstanding here (and no time machine isn't)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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
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!
About Linux on laptops: I've recently installed Linux (openSUSE) on a bunch of them, and there is no single piece of hardware that doesn't work, apart from suspending to RAM on our HP nx9030s (we also have some other brands and types, and they work flawlessly). Linux has the reputation, yes, but I think that reputation is outdated. In particular, 3D acceleration on these HPs (Intel video) is infinitely better than anything close on Windows.
(I've also had FreeBSD on some of those machines. Worked OK too, but no wireless networking joy nor 3D goodness)
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
Get rid of compiz, put metacity back in. Run XFCE rather than Gnome and you have a light usable desktop...
The Window List works as expected, the behavior in Gnome is a bit odd. Wireless does work though NetworkManager is not as reliable as init. Lets see, the only complaint I have with XFCE is that I can't change the amount of text available on desktop icons, long file names are truncated to about 20 chars. Oh and I can't be bothered figuring out how to get an OpenOffice icon for odt files.
Oh and cool feature. The pager remembers where applications were running when you log back in. That's a killer feature Gnome doesn't get right.
It just works, gets out of the way and seems to be saving me about 100Mb on RAM overall.
Deleted
You and I are outnumbered by people like our aunts, their friends, brothers, mothers our friends who find computers to be a form of black magic. I am quite happy for them to use a thin client. In fact, I encourage it.
Ultimately it'll happen, you'll see it more and more as bandwidth increases.
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Sure. Let me just put that reminder in Leopard's iCal and, wait, what's this? Hmm, I think there's some sort of probl
I gave up on Ubuntu when an upgrade to Fiesty Fawn completely hosed my install (audio, x11, pam and acpi all broken to some degree). The comments from coworkers regarding Gutsy Gibbon don't convince me they've fixed their QA processes. For example: "I would make a snarky comment about linux, but ubuntu is less stable than xp on this laptop." and "Note to self: Never ever ever ever install Ubuntu ever again."
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
While I agree that there's no reason for a base install of Leopard on an Apple machine to exhibit problems... The average user will also install a lot of non-apple software on their machine and possibly try to connect some non-apple peripherals.
None of the machines running leopard in the apple store seemed to be crashing, and there were 50+ machines on display.
Of the 3 leopard machines i have, only one has crashed, and it's happened once. This was due to plugging in a blackberry. When i upgraded the system from Tiger, i had installed "pocket mac for blackberry" which includes a kernel driver for the device, and this caused leopard to crash. Reinstalling pocketmac cleared up the problems and it's worked since.
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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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i received my Family Pack of Leopard the day it was released. I installed it on a cross-state drive that evening on my Macbook, and when i got back home, installed it on my iMac G5, my PowerMac G4, and (even though i don't live with her, i don't think apple will mind, since she is FAMILY) my mother's iMac G4. none of them exhibited any major problems.
all of the minor quirks i found were fixed in 10.5.1, and all the problems with Final Cut Pro 6 were fixed with 6.0.2. i haven't had it crash, pause, hang up, whatever. The only issue i found is with the VPN connection to my work, i believe it changed some settings there. but other than that, it's been a pleasure to use.
all of the installs were upgrades except my macbook, which i did an Archive and Install. the fact that it works SO WELL from one version of the OS on one DVD across all the machines... G4, G5, intel core duo... and that it works well even on the G4s, is pretty impressive.
My personal preference, and it is a strong one, is that I will not touch console games... when I have used them, I have found the controller to be difficult to understand, slow to respond, lacking in fine-control, and in all other ways lacking. In addition, I get dramatically better resolution on my monitor than on my TV, and I happen to enjoy it more.
In other words... not every person thinks that an xbox or PS3 is a viable solution.
Ok, I have a dual 1.25 ghz G4 (1.5 gb ram) and I had some rather upsetting behavior when I first got the thing. Main thing was that the whole system would just stop, totally frozen from about 1-2 minutes. I also saw my first Kernel Panic in over 2 years 10 minutes after a clean install. Another issue was when Firefox would beachball, it would beachball any other application that had a text box in it at the same time, which was enormously frustrating. Then there was the whole moving could lose files thing. I was very glad I had backed my stuff up to DVD before the upgrade.
But 10.5.1 fixed all of those problems and I've only had a few small nagging ones or annoyances (I really hate stacks and wish I could turn it off for one). Now my system actually seems FASTER than when I had Tiger. The finder in particular is a lot snappier and my machine, while still not as noticably snappy as a new Intel based mac, is still snappy enough friends of mine have refused to believe the machine is 5 years old until I proved it to them. Then they were quite impressed!
The remaining problems I have seem to be application related. Some things like MT newswatcher lock up after I post, or freeze in inconvenient places. I had a copy of some open source software that was screwing up this way (I had downloaded the binary) but when I pulled down the source and recompiled it, it worked just fine, so I suspect that a lot of application problems are because the developers have not yet recompiled using the latest XCode for Leopard. While you shouldn't see that kind of incompatibility often in my opinion, given the radical changes Apple made to the OS and pulling out all vestiges of Classic, I can see maybe why some carbon apps in particular might need a recompiling to keep them from having issues.
I am sure there are more bugs to be squashed, but I think Apple will get them in time. 10.5.1 came pretty fast on the heels of the release and 10.5.2 is probably going to hit next month and kill the next batch and maybe the one after. By about 10.5.3 or so, I suspect things will be back more or less to the stability we had with Tiger. So give Apple a break, there was a lot of rewiring going on in Leopard, way more than you can see just by looking at the eye candy and Time Machine. It will take a bit of time to get everything perfectly smooth again.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
I can't stand console games. I don't play games I can't take apart & modify.
There is a war going on for your mind.
I know many home users who browse the web and write email, do they care that their emails are travelling via someone else's servers? Not really, because they do that already.
True, though I think there's still a difference between emails, and every private document you have, including personal/private material that they wouldn't email.
Also, one hopes that in most cases email is not kept around - yes we can't guarantee it, but this is likely if only because of the costs of doing so.
Consider the opposition to suggested Government laws about requiring ISPs to store email, or Google's "your email is never deleted".
If your concerned about privacy, don't use internet/telephony service provided by someone else, or at the very least encrypt all your communications. The trouble with this is, you'l have a very limited subset of people you can talk with!
I only have to tell the person I want to send encrypted info to download PGP or whatever, and thankfully the people I want to talk with aren't complete muppets, and can manage to do that.
Also, this is another argument about why email is different - people take the risk of using email despite privacy concerns, because there isn't much choice if you want to talk to people. But it doesn't then follow that you should put all of your information online, when in that case, private alternatives do exist.
First off, I've owned a shitload of Apple hardware over the years. I'm not a fanboy, definitely an early adopter and I appreciate their industrial design, which is why I don't buy vanilla boxes anymore.
However, I'm pretty pissed with Leopard. Two things that unbelievably piss me off on my $3k+ MacBook Pro:
1. The fucking wireless STILL cannot find my Airport Express after waking from sleep. This is shit I'd expect from Linux circa 2003 (which did used to happen to me). Word on the street is that the wireless driver crashes and in order to find my base station, which is usually no more than 8' away from me, I have to turn off Airport and then back on again. Totally lame and unacceptable.
2. My keyboard freezes. The only way to unfreeze it is either to reboot or close the lid and sleep. This is beyond lame and total bullshit. Makes me wanna throw my laptop out the window.
Oh and I hate Spaces. Complete garbage and of course it doesn't conform to how I WANT to work, I have to conform to it - lame. I'm trying to compile/fix DesktopManager to no avail. Sigh. In my opinion, this is where X ruled.
Oh and when I upgraded my Mini media comp, the upgrade crashed, wouldn't allow me to re-install (it kept the little spinner going forever) and the only way I could get back on track was to pull the hard drive and then reboot form the cd. My friends MBP (used to be my 1st gen MBP) crashes on him almost every day after Leopard updating.
I was an avid Linux user for over 10 years and WindowMaker was my deal. But I hate Gnome and its cartoon-like interface (and the fact that it's being invaded by C# turns me off even more). I hate compiling my kernel, apps, etc like I used to with Gentoo. I do miss REAL window activation follows mouse. I do use Linux on all my servers tho cuz 'it just works' and f-ing works well. Every year I try the Linux desktop again and every year I delete that VM.
Windows, never. Besides cartoon-ish interface, everything is backwards and forces me to work in ways worse than OS X. Their command prompt sux (even Vista) and I spend a good portion of my day with terms open.
So, yay, I have a full 64-bit OS without having to buy the explicitly named 64-bit version. And some nice eye candy which I do appreciate. But I call bullshit on Apple (even after being a user for 6+ years now). If the Airport issue and the keyboard thing weren't there, then I wouldn't have much to complain about - besides Spaces. These may seem 'minor' offenses, but they're definitely a chink in Apple's armor as far as I'm concerned. Apple will probably fix these things faster than M$ would, but they're gonna heap a ton of denial and arrogance on the whole process as well.
Bullish Machine Tzar
Generally problems with remembering wireless networks and the passwords that go with them are solved by going in and removing all of the "Preferred" networks from Sys Preferences > Network, then connecting to the networks again and clicking the "remember this network". I've seen problems like that since Jaguar, and that particular fix has always worked for me.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
Some people do it in order to run a fan-less system so there is less noise.
I only have one machine running leopard but my experience has been much the same as yours. I haven't had any crashes, kernel panics or dropped network connections. I had an issue with a torrent client that stopped working due to incompatibility with leopard. I'm not sure if they have fixed it because I started using a different (and better) client.
I found this to be as smooth an upgrade as any I have ever run and I have had no issues with my new install. I'm sure leopard isn't perfect, nothing is, but its not some huge pile of crashes.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Woah... trusting web app employees is VERY different than trusting desktop app employees. There's a huge difference between trusting someone not to look at MY data housed on THEIR servers than there is to trust that someone didn't write some kind of back door code that allows them to see the contents of my hard drive. Firewall, virus protection, and various other monitoring tools all give me the ability to know exactly what's happening on my computer. I don't have that on their servers. I can't see if someone is trying to look at my files on their machines.
Additionally, any desktop company releasing a piece of software like that (Sony rootkit anyone!?) would immediately get slammed by the public. The evidence would be right in the code - you can't hide from that. That's much different than an employee at some data center casually browsing through everyone's files. Good luck proving they did it and good luck getting the company to admit it even if they know that they did it.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
I have three machines running Leopard and I haven't experienced any panics. Chances are good that one of the following is true:
In either case, if the article's author wants to get the panics fixed, the best thing he/she can do is to post the panic logs so that people can scrutinize it and tell him/her what is wrong. Instead, he posted a rant, which tells me he is more interested in making Apple look bad than in fixing his issues. *sigh*
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I own 3 Macs, 1 Powerbook, 1 Macbook,1 intel Mac Mini. I have not and definitely won't be installing OS-We-Gave-The-Graphic-Designers-Free-Reign-X on any of my machines. I own and make my money from, amongst other things, Adobe CS3 apps and Java. Both do not work completely or properly with OSX 10.5. Adobe will be bringing out an upgrade for Acrobat sometime in 2008 (yay), and Apple might honestly, never actually update Java to 1.6 on OS X. There is an open source JDK 1.6 available now, from scratch to RC1 faster than Apple took to withdraw their horribly broken 1.6 RC. And this is what is making me seriously think of moving to Linux and Windows.
I like OSX, since it's (was, at least in 10.4) very robust. But Apple has one big problem on their hands that goes hand in hand with Steve Jobs and his ego: Whatever SJ thinks is cool and perfect (and trendy for n00bs) goes in (Leopard comes with Ruby on Rails, yay), whatever he thinks is no longer cool (even though literally millions of coders make their money with Java on the server and especially on handies, Google mail, maps and calendar all run just fine in Java on my 2 year old Sony-Ericsson) goes out. This leaves many people frustrated as hell, since it makes work like sitting on a violently rocking boat which might overturn at any time.
On top of this, Apple, in a very Microsoft-like move, killed off a perfectly working Bootcamp on OSX 10.4, forcing all the thousands of poor morons who have Windows in dual boot on their machines upgrade to Vistard and make Apple some extra cash. In addition, installing Windows on Vistard 10.5 Bootcamp is tricky, because if you delete the Vistard created partition and create your own with the Windows installer, the 10.5 Bootcamp no longer sees it. This wasn't the case with the Bootcamp in 10.4, so it must be a Steve Jobs doing a Steve Ballmer like thing and fucking over users to try and lock them in.
I'm personally quite glad that Linux is finally getting good to go. I'm beginning to think that Adobe could port its software to Linux and that they might even make enogh sales from people who are just too pissed off with the Redmond and Cupertino robber barons and their fanciful whims.