Scripting News: I'm not happy with Leopard (Scripting News)
Morven
· 2 years ago
I haven't seen any 'disappears for long periods of time' or even crashes. The only instability I've seen is once, one system process ran away and was consuming lot of CPU. This was killable in the Activity Monitor GUI and the offending process was respawned and worked OK after that. That's it in running Leopard day-in, day-out since it arrived.
Some of the user interface tweaks are plain wrong. Everyone has told Apple this; I feel that they tried a bit too hard to look different rather than better. The dock is fixable, the menubar not yet; the always-on-top help windows are probably a bad idea.
I'm not sure how you lost hard disks; haven't heard this from anyone else.
I agree on the firewall but the networking preference pane is better than the last (truly sucky) one, although it's by no menas perfect.
On the positive sign: Time Machine is so worth it; Spaces is excellent (and works flawlessly, unlike the hacks available in Tiger); at least all the windows have a consistent look now; the wireless network flakiness i always had under Tiger (and blamed on my router) is just gone in Leopard. The new finder kicks the ass of the old one, and doesn't hang up when network volumes don't respond.
Steven
· 2 years ago
I think that saying that Leopard is Windows is a big stretch. Maybe you should spend a day using Windows to freshen up, as I do most every day. I agree that Leopard has a couple of rough edges, but find them minor on my machines. I'm sure that your system is probably more complex than mine, but all 5 machines (Mini, PowerBook, MacBook, and 2 iMacs all on a network) upgraded without a hitch for me. And I must say they have all been stable and run noticeably faster.
The extremes in your comment, I think, are unwarranted.
William
· 2 years ago
Panther, Tiger, and Leopard can't be windows... Windows doesn't use UNIX SYS V R4 code. The person stating Leopard is like Windows just base their Graphical User Interface experiences. If in fact Leopard was like Vista, Apple would have a downgrade option to Tiger from Leopard. Doubt this is the case.
Andy
· 1 year ago
So you doubt that, William? Well, that's exactly what Apple Care told me to do since they couldn't come up with a fix for the keyboard issues I'm having with my brand new MacBook Pro. (And no, the "Fix" released by Apple a few days back did _not_ help.)
I am currently waiting for a 10.4.3 retail disk to be shipped. I have no idea how downgrading is supposed to work. Why not just face it: Apple screwed this one up. Big time.
heavyboots
· 2 years ago
It was pretty frustrating to see it go through the dev process. I submitted multiple GUI bugs after each build. Nothing happened... Plus, I kept praying they would realize it wasn't done baking and just bump it to Jan. or March, but nope!
My top 5 loathings: [1] Transparent menu bar--WTF? Opaque Menubar claims to fix it but I have yet to get it to work. [2] Self-healing fonts folder in the system, which attempts to put Helvetica and Helvetica Neue back in any time you remove them. This is nanny-wheels for the Apple GUI people, who decided they like Helvetica, but can't be bothered to make some way to access it if it's not in the system fonts folder like they expect. And it's at the expense of the users. Name me a single designer who doesn't need to use Helvetica--and frequently NOT Apple's dfont Helvetica. [3] Spotlight find is still an incredibly broken piece of junk. 10.3 allowed you to find for pretty much anything. It also allowed you to filter the selection using the upper-right search box. 10.4 nuked all that and 10.5 hasn't fixed it. How is it that two iterations after 10.3, I still can't change my search defaults to MY preferences? [4] Dock Stacks--They completely failed to implement hierarchical menus back into folder menus. Fan shows you like 7 items? Grid shows a max of 70. A quick click and navigate to a subfolder is now 3 or 4 clicks. Also, you can't find your bloody folder because the icon changes depending on what the contents are. Yep, that makes good GUI sense. [5] New Finder icons--Again, what were they thinking?!? These things are pitiful compared to the icons from early OS X versions! Actually, they're more hideous than pitiful, come to think of it.
Okay, but it's not all bad either. Time Machine could easily be worth the price of entry for the vast majority of people out there who suck at backing up and afraid of a complex system like Retrospect (or even SuperDuper). They will finally have reasonable data backups almost all the time.
Quick look is awesome! I have used it tons and it is a habit that grows on you almost as fast as the first time you bind Expose's "Show Desktop" and "Show all Windows" to buttons 4 & 5 on your mouse. For designers, there is finally a fast way to flip through your fonts too, as Quick Look does a really cool font preview too.
Spaces is pretty nice too. As I have yet to install this on a "work" machine, I don't know how it plays out in the long run, but the organizational aspects are greatly appealing to me.
arnie
· 2 years ago
Dave I upgraded two of my main machines to Leopard last Friday. I've had the same frustrations with random crashes of programs that used to never crash. For some strange reason after booting into safe-mode and restarting everything seems to be working fine now. I have no idea why booting into safe-mode would fix anything but it worked for me. Good luck
Arnie
antonio
· 2 years ago
right on buddy - there is really only one differentiator. it either works or it doesn't - if there was a good laptop option to the mac (i.e. reliable, programmer and end-user friendly, nice design, windows-free) common-sense folks would flock away.
Yaacov
· 2 years ago
Time for Linux?
Mike
· 2 years ago
I'm not absolutely in love with Leopard yet either, although I'm liking some of the new features.
Kinda surprised that you upgraded most of your Macs to the new system, though. I upgraded my main laptop and a backup laptop, but I'm leaving my iMac in my office at Tiger for now, mainly because I want to make sure everything I *need* to do works smoothly before switching it over.
OS X isn't perfect, but every new OS has some issues - be it Windows, Linux, or OS X. Most businesses and folks who need stuff to work won't move to a new OS until a point release or two on the OS X side or a service pack on the Windows side. You've been around long enough to know that, surely.
Seth
· 2 years ago
Now I'm nervous. It just came in the mail (free with rebate) and I'm not sure whether to install it. I've heard some goos things from some people, some not so good things from others (like yourself). My life/work/existence revolve around my Mac.
Sunny
· 2 years ago
I have installed it and had zero issues. There have been some installation owes owing to third-party software such as APE but a majority of folks have had no problems. Usually with such things one needs to include a bit of perspective. Compared to the Vista transition, this seems like a non-issue.
tibor
· 2 years ago
I would maybe wait before installing it on a 'production machine', but can't say I'm unhappy with Leopard. Actually, the new networking interface (and how things work) is one of my favorite upgrades at this moment.
heavyboots
· 2 years ago
Definitely check the front page of Macintouch today. There's a bug loose in the file system that can result in data loss.
Thats a mountain out of a molehill; I work there, and I hadn't known about -cmd-drag-to-move-folders-between-volumes-deleting-original before I read his piece. There's a bug in the Finder, sure, but its not OMFGDISKCORRUPTION type stuff.
That being said, I don't use the Finder and I hate the new dock.
OK, I do use the finder for one thing - previewing lots of images with the coverflow thing is actually very nice. But as soon as I find the images I'm look for, I'm back to terminal to move them around.
Stanley Krute
· 2 years ago
I think Leopard and Vista have a lot in common, both good and bad.
c'mon, linux, hurry up and evolve past these suckers .....
-- stan
William
· 2 years ago
eh, linux isn't just ran on powerpc and ia32 or ia64 systems. Linux has degraded with the 2.6 kernel. Sure NPTL is great, and more drivers break the kernel because of lazy kernel devs and each minor release breaks more than should occur, even if Linus writes off driver releases. With sparc64 the kernel has gone to trash from 2.4 to 2.6. Also, each 2.6 release breaks something that used to work fine prior to 2.6.8.1. OSX is great as it is tuned for specific hardware, just like Solaris. The OS needs to be built to specific hardware, that's where stability comes from, and that's what every OS but windows has done. x86 is the bane of a world! People want cheap gear, they get what they pay for. The OS is the kernel plus the software built around it. The kernel itself, is not an OS.
dave
· 2 years ago
Seth, I can't tell you what to do -- but if I were you, I'd wait.
Maybe what I'm seeing here has something to do with my network, or electricity, or gamma rays, not sure. Let's hear what other people say.
Dileepa
· 2 years ago
Try Windows Vista with SP1 (even the beta SP1). You will be surprised at how stable it is. (You should give it a fair try though.)
Jake
· 2 years ago
Just an alternative viewpoint. My install went smoothly, and I LOVE leopard. It gets rid of most of the shitty UI crap like brushed metal and the bloated Finder sidebar, keeps a little friendliness like the Aqua controls and generally hits the right notes. I'm disappointed about the dock & transparent toolbar like everyone else, but I love the unified theme, improved Windows networking, coverflow, and ... QuickLook.
Actually, scratch that. Just QuickLook. I would buy an entire OS upgrade just for that one feature.
Dean Landolt
· 2 years ago
"I'm using Windows again, and I'm not happy about it."
Dave...man...seriously...Windows? Gutsy just came out and you're going back to Windows? Give it a shot -- you may not hate it!
sixmemos
· 2 years ago
Hm, I'm puzzled. Personally I love Leopard. Haven't had the issues you are referring to on my Macbook with Leopard installed (Archive & Install). No crashes. I *love* the new networking interface. Sorry to hear of your troubles -- anything atypical about your configuration / upgrade process?
John
· 2 years ago
Your lack of anything substantiating your problems or even outlining them show us that your just another lets jump on the bag apple bandwagon - not even a mention of what sort of machine your running it on, what software your using, how you did your install - the usual things that decent writers do -
until then....
Bruce
· 2 years ago
Yep! I'd echo all of those concerns. SOme programs will NOT open with Leopard even after a reinstall. I lost a number of emails and email addresses from my book.
Boot Camp is missing some serious instructions for ease k of use. The Apple support folks don't seem to a have a clue as to what a cordless keyboard will and will not do. i.e., try ejecting a disk from the internal drive.
je
· 2 years ago
i am playing with Ubuntu, and love the simplicity of not knowing anything about it - installing it on a 3rd machine now
jason
· 2 years ago
i'd do what i did. Make a good backup using something like superduper and give it a go for a few days. honestly i havn't had any troubles with it. been using it the same as i used tiger. i really like the way it mounts network drives and havn't had any serious problems with it.
amit shafrir
· 2 years ago
Leopard has been a nightmare for me. since i installed it - my machine has been freezing at least 5 times a day (no exaggeration) - i mean full freeze, getting the MAC messag telling me to press the on/off button....
various application keep crashing (snitter, Parallels, iTunes) , and I have just found out the i cannot print - when printing - i only get partial text printed. similarly when creating PDF files.
it is worse than windows machine I have had. many friends of mine report similar issues
just noticed - cookies on safari seem to react differently (cannot yet fully define the issue)
foom
· 2 years ago
Hm. I'm a bit annoyed by Leopard as well, but not because it doesn't work. For me, it is working flawlessly, as designed, on my Macbook. (and I just did a normal "Upgrade" install, not Archive and Install). However, a few things about it really tick me off:
1) Dock's "Stacks". That makes a nice demo, but it's an absolutely terrible UI. My Applications folder in the Dock now has an Acrobat icon (with some unnoticeable junk behind it). It's totally non-obvious that it's actually an applications folder instead of the Acrobat application. Worse, clicking on it shows the first 62 Applications alphabetically (most of them with truncated names, like "Imag...pture"). To open one of the others, I need to navigate over to the "Show...inder" icon. As far as I can tell, this UI has absolutely no redeeming features.
2) Spotlight's "Show All" window from 10.4 is gone. Now, "Show all" just opens a finder search window. This is unfortunately a huge step back. Now I must choose whether I want to sort by "last opened" or "kind", where before I could conveniently group by the same categories that are even now used to group spotlight's menu results.
3) The Help viewer window floats over everything, obscuring whatever you're trying to get help on....totally stupid.
But, it's not a total lose. There's many many little fixes here and there that seem to me to make it a better OS in total. Mail.app in particular seems to be much speedier, and I like the integrated RSS reader. Safari also seems to work better than the previous version. I find "Spaces" useful, and appreciate the little detail of being able use both the "Show all spaces" "Show all windows" keys at the same time, to show all windows in all spaces. Time Machine is almost perfect for my simple backup needs. (the additional feature of backing up to a network drive would be appreciated).
aaronsw
· 2 years ago
I haven't seen any of this. No crashes since it installed; all my disks are working great (as is Time Machine), the new UI is growing on me, the networking preference interface seems much nicer, and the per-app firewall seems like a good idea to me, but I don't personally use it.
immts
· 2 years ago
I think OS itself is pretty nice once safely installed. But getting there is the most aggravating experience I've had with an Apple OS. It can and will corrupt filesystems, so use care. It will break Active Directory integration, it will mess with your networking speeds. However, despite these issues, I think they spent quite a lot of time on the actual OS, but very little on delivery of that OS to the end user.
I will say that if I had ever used the firewall, or wanted to use it in the future, I would be pissed about that too.
Stig
· 2 years ago
I have been on Mac OS X since it came out in the year 2k and I have migrated through 10.0 through 10.5 (and all increments in between), most often on day one for each new release. I bought the MacBook Pro with Intel Mac on the day it was announced, ad proceeded to buy an Intel iMac shortly thereafter. But I still also use several PPC Macs as well.
I have systematically used DiskWarrior to "condition" my computer BEFORE each upgrade (run it from the DW disk itself by starting at "C"-button pressed during start. Fix permissions, check all files, and then full start-up directory replacement (by DW).
My recent migration to Leopard 10.5 (again on day one) was flawless and painless. I can also say that having followed the evolution of MAC OS X this Leopard is the very best version so far. It is quicker and smoother, and absolutely nothing crashes. There are softwares that needs updates, and also some older versions (like Photoshop 7.0) will not any longer run. This is acceptable to me in the course of progress.
I really recommend DiskWarrior (that I have used for many, many years - it even helped saving (scavenging mode) all data from a friend's crashed HD in an iBook G4 this year). It really supports trouble free Mac computing. It is a mystery to me why Apple have not bought up this little company with their spare cash, but maybe that is exactly why this software remains so excellent.
So, Happy Leopard to you!
AlanY
· 2 years ago
I'm liking Leopard so far. I was cautious and waited a week before installing it just in case there were major issues. It's definitely faster in general even on older hardware (G4 Mac Mini) and Spotlight is both faster and *much* more usable. The entire thing has a level of polish that Tiger, as good as it was, didn't have, across a whole range of areas. The printing UI, both for previews and printer management is very improved.
My only issue was that a cheap USB to parallel cable I bought on eBay for 99 cents which was flaky on Tiger was finally just outright rejected (which is probably a good thing, I need to get a better cable). I'm also not a huge fan of the way stack icons are represented on the dock, but that's easy to work around, and I'm sure they'll offer an option to change it soon enough.
Well I sympathize with your experience and the issues you've had, there is no comparison between Leopard's quirks and Vista's quirks... Vista's issues are orders of magnitude worse.
I don't have that impression at all of Leopard, and I've used every iteration of OS X since the public beta. My installs have gone smoothly, I like the improvements in the interface and change of some controls locations. None of the apps I use were affected, all run just as they did. Firewall, I don't turn it on. I'm behind a router and it provides the best firewall of all. But even if it didn't, the tests I've run on sites like "Shields Up", find no vulnerabilities on my machine. Frankly, using a Mac, I just don't see much to be alarmed about over "security", especially compared to the competition.
Duncan
· 2 years ago
Dave I've installed Leopard on two machines and aside from a minor issue with Time Machine (you shouldn't try to open Time Machine until it has made a backup) it's been 100% stable. Sure, there's a few 3rd party apps that needed updating to work under Leopard, but that's usually true of any OS update. I would have thought you would have welcomed some of the changes, particularly the network ones. Every time turn my Mac Pro on and find that every computer and NAS on my home network has automounted is another day I thank Apple for Leopard.
Dave, could it be hardware related? Perhaps you're not using the latest Mactels? I'm guessing on that, but it has to be something given my own experience has been close to flawless.
Jason
· 2 years ago
Um. I'm not having any big problems with Leopard. It runs a lot faster than Tiger on my Mac (Mac Pro 2.6), I like the new features of Mail, I set Time Machine up on a spare 750gb disk with no problems, I like the new version of iCal, I like the Spaces feature, I like the Downloads Stack, I really really like the Quick Look/cover flow for navigating documents. I haven't tried new iChat yet. I like the Web Clips in Safari.
Overall except for a minor glitch in networking when I installed, I've had zero problems (knock on wood). I'm sorry you're having problems, but I'm very, very happy with Leopard.
If you want to go back to shitty Windows, that's your problem, Dave!
Jason
Colin
· 2 years ago
Dave, the Seagate FreeAgent pro's come formated FAT32. Did you use disk utility to reformat the drive to "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)"? You might be able to stick those old drives on your PC and fix them if you left them in FAT32 format.
sebastian
· 2 years ago
I was pretty amazed by the fact that there is a blue screen of death in Leopard, and that it seems to appear quite often. I hope get my hands on a Leopard-powered computer as soon as possible so that I can tell you what I think of the user interface. (I like it from what I saw on screen shots, but I haven't used it yet.)
JK Lassitter
· 2 years ago
I was NOT pleased to discover that my favorite floating transparent desktop clock with day and month was no longer available as an option. WTF! And Netinfo Manager, which I found profoundly useful from time to time since my NeXT days, has been removed completely. Where is that functionality? WTF! And those stupid fan folders on the Dock -- for folders containly only 10 items -- are nearly useless compared with the wonderful HIERARCHICAL folders that one could create in Tiger's Dock. WTF! And my HP printer no longer works. WTF! And why would one need Spaces with a 24" desktop? And just what are those other 296 so-called improvements, or are they all just marketing BS?
On the plus side, Windows XP Professional works wonderfully under Boot Camp. It's like a whole new OS: stable, beautiful and very fast. And it's even configurable to look like classic Windows, if one so chooses. APPLE HAS APPARENTLY FORGOTTEN THE IMPORTANT USER INTERFACE RULE THAT OLD FEATURES SHOULD REMAIN AS NON-DEFAULT OPTIONS WHEN NEW (AND SOMETIMES VERY FLAKY AND AWKWARD) FEATURES ARE INTRODUCED. How can businesses take the Mac OS seriously when such dramatic unwanted changes are made? Hey Apple, wake up!
Paul
· 2 years ago
This is a hodge-podge of fair and unfair complaints.
Lost data is always serious, should not happen, sometime does with a newly released OS.
Is this endemic? On my pretty much spec machine (added some third-party RAM) I have had some minor issues but overall feel like useability and performance are improved. Many (probably most) others are reporting the same.
Is Leopard unpleasant to use? Some of it is annoying gloss, some of it is significant improvement. Spotlight actually works, which is a big deal for me.
Windows-like? Not for me. Not at all.
Is networking broken? Some things are better, some things are slower, other things are just different. But then, I don't have a very complicated network.
Has the firewall "moved and lost features"? Um, no. That's not what the article says, anyway. It's a different firewall, with a different interface, that does what firewalls do but appears to have some issues. They say "appears" because their main concern is that it's an undocumented firewall that Apple made themselves, a "black box," something that security people hate for all sorts of good reasons. As they point out, though, ipfw is still there if you want it.
Juan_in_Nippon
· 2 years ago
You now might want to give Ubuntu 7.10 a wing on some Intel hardware kicking around the house... perhaps an old PC with XP installed. A new Debian partition can be auto-installed using the 7.10 installer ! Two OSes are always better than one.
derek
· 2 years ago
I had lots of problems UNTIL I did a format & clean install. Now it's faster than Tiger was, and just as stable. Worth a try.
kosso
· 2 years ago
I've had no problems yet (knock wood, etc) - I have it on both MacBook Pros - one running Leopard, the other in WindowsXP. Also my fiancee's MBP is running fine with just Leopard - so far.
We're yet to see the dreaded BSOD.
I like using both operating systems - OSX and WindowsXP, depending on what I need doing,. Also for testing out webdesign on both platforms.
That's why I love the Apple Intel boxes - I can choose my OS. Nice ;)
Mark Benson
· 2 years ago
OK, Dave, I hold a lot of respect for you as a sensible and honest critic of software, but I think you may be having a 'bad egg flinch' here perhaps (i.e. your single experience is bad, thus you think it's all bad). I installed it on my Mac Pro on release day and immediately settled in like a hand in a glove. Moreover it's solid, reliable and, well just like I would expect a Mac to be... BUT it does have some bugs (that file copy one is a real video nasty), it's not 100% right and 10.5.1 can't come soon enough, even though I'm really happy with it.
"It's that unpleasant to use."
It feels no better or worse than Tiger to me. The major issues for me are matters of aesthetics. The translucent menubar is annoying, I turned the 3D dock off 10 mins into using it the first time. It doesn't get in my way though, and these niggles are more than countered by the addition of handy stuff like Spaces.
"Systems that didn't used to crash now crash regularly."
They do? Oh. I haven't seen any of this. Moreover the 'Finder locks up when a network share wanders off the network' thing is no-more which made me rejoice vocally. Oh and Safari doesn't have nearly the number of pregnant pauses it used to. Everything feels *faster* to me, and stability issues are not something I have come across.
"On one system three hard disks were rendered unusable, and I lost a couple of full days restoring them (luckily I had good backups)."
Ouch, I'd be interested to know what hardware you had this issue on. From the vibe I'm getting older PowerPC hardware (G4s and older G5s) are causing the most issues. My G4 iMac (literally only a music jukebox) has gone back to 10.4 for the moment becuase it won't come out of sleep right. I don't count that though because it's not supposed to run Leopard anyway ;)
"The user interface is quirky."
All user interfaces ave quirks. They'd all be the same if they didn't. As I set out above, there are parts that bug me slightly but the Dock is easily fixed and the menubar is going to get fixed one way or another by user pressure, or hackers (maybe the latter, followed by the former).
"The new networking interface is a big step backward."
Networking as in the pref pane, it's tidier and clearer IMHO. I went back to 10.4 and used it there and though 'god damn this sucks' last night.
Networking as in the Finder works... which is more than it used to! It works well too for my money.
"The firewall moved and lost features!"
They put it under 'Security' which wasn't really all that dumb-ass, but yeh it needs looking at, I am on the verge of installing Little Snitch to see if it still works in Leopard. I agree with this point at least :)
"That's simply never done, you don't charge customers to remove features, esp security features."
I don't feel robbed, honestly....
"I think Apple doesn't understand how many people depend seriously on their Macs."
I'm sure they do. The problem is that if you go to the extent of ironing out every single bug the software is in gestation for a decade. Also they do extensive testing but no lab can test every single scenario on every single machine. Also a lot of people that had installer issues used APE, which IMHO is a dirty hack and I don't use it myself.
I'm not gonna play the part of the apologist, in your case it's obviously not worked out, and it's Apple's fault. That's bad news, and I can sympathise with your angst. Remember 2 things though - it's an initial release, and I know you understand how the unforeseen can catch out initial releases - you're a programmer after all :) Also it's clear a lot of people have got a positive lift and a good experience from it - so your circumstances are not universal. I still understand why *you* are not happy with it though, but be assured it's not all bad, even if it looks that way...
Tommo_UK
· 2 years ago
Did you change your name from Whiner to Winer?
maique
· 2 years ago
i'm also enjoying my leopard very much. no blue screen of death for me, also no crashes on applications, no data loss, no issues, no problems.
i did a simple upgrade (even though i kept reading the 'please-please-backup-everything' posts everywhere). i dove in and upgraded my 12'' g4 powerbook.
only thing i did was unistall the APE prefpane, since it looked like it was really causing some havoc.
it now runs smoothly, beautifully (as soon as i killed the 3d dock), faster and, for the first time in it's long life, cooler. the fans aren't always on when i'm running a couple of apps. this is an amazing thing as far as i'm concerned.
i was a bit worried because my little mac is on the lower end of the required specs, but i'm so glad i spent this money on leopard you wouldn't believe.
DevExpert
· 2 years ago
I can tell you that in my opinion they rushed this release to the market and did not adequately test it. How do I draw this conclusion? I bought the brand new 20" iMac with Tiger week ago. It is completely clean brand new out of factory machine. Nothing installed, nothing customized.
I tried to upgrade it to Leopard. Leopard installed, but you could not log in. It does not accept your user name and password, and KB article on Apple web site supposedly related to this does not help. BTW it instructs users to fix crap through command line in single user mode...
I wiped machine clean and installed Tiger from discs provided just to test my hypothesis. Tiger works, I can log in. Upgrade to Leopard, no way to login after upgrade.
The only way to install Leopard is to do Archive and Install and you lose your apps and stuff, OR WIPE and install.
Now, this tells me that they did not test this basic install scenario. I mean upgrade of CLEAN Tiger does not work properly... How basic you can get?
I am software developer. Every software dev worth its salt knows to test edge and default config cases. Always! Newbies don't know this, but learn with years. Who the hell was working on testing the Leopard???
Justin Wilson
· 2 years ago
The same was said about Vista when it first came out. The early adopters of any OS are bound to have issues. If you depend on your mac, then upgrading to the latest greatest is not the way to go. Wait until they have released some patches and the like. It's great to have the latest greatest, but you pay a price in terms of bugs, etc. Just like buying a 1st generation Apple hardware product. They get the stuff out there, and then re-work it some and have revb, revc, etc. Look at the 1st generation imacs. The reva's are plain junk compared to the rest. The people who had to have them kinda got messed over. The ones who waited actually got a pretty nice machine.
I do agree the firewall is not very good compared to 10.4.
Dana Gardner
· 2 years ago
I'm afraid Dave is right. I'm still trying to get all my data back off the external drive on the one Mac I went to Leopard with. There was the blue screen, the FileVault issues, the Backup incompatibiIy issues, the poor telephone support (I knew more than they did). I have ended up going back to Tiger on that machine. This has eroded my confidence in Apple, for sure. What was the rush to get this out with so many issues?
Lee Bryant
· 2 years ago
I love it - clean install - no problems and some wonderful features.
I assume you will throw your rattle out of the pram and switch back next time Windows craps out on you?
jason
· 2 years ago
Leopard is working fine for me and its a real improvement over Tiger. Stop complaining about things such as the firewall. So what if it's turned off! Switch it back on again.
Stop being a Winer and enjoy Windows.
John Whiteside
· 2 years ago
From what I've read, there are some issues, but most people aren't having these problems. (It's been flawless since I installed it.) Have you seen something to suggest that problems are widespread, or is this based on a sample size of 2?
Wayne
· 2 years ago
I had a glitch doing the install, but total stability since. The glitch was related to a long-standing filesystem corruption that I'd lived with and had not been able to correct without a total reinstall, which I was too lazy to do until Leopard came out. (Actually, the glitch forced me to do a clean install. That was the glitch.)
After that, perfection. Lots of GREAT features. We haven't had the budget to upgrade the machines at work yet, and I am sop frustrated by all the missing features when I have to use TIger.
Interface "quirky"? The only thing I could conceive as a quirk would be how the Finder is now sticky in regards to window display mode. (I.e. you switch to Cover Flow in one window and new Finder windows pop up in Cover Flow mode.) Other than that, it's all gravy for me.
I love the new Preview, Quick Look (I hit spacebar all the time at work and get... nothing), full-featured Spotlight, Web Clippings (I've got a couple already in Dashboard), Time Machine, etc. When we get it at work, I'll be SO glad to be able to share individual folders, etc. And from a techie viewpoint, DTRACE! It's simply amazing. (Not to mention tabbed Term windows, etc.)
The Firewall does remove a bit-o-security, and that's bad. It's not a straight-up take-away-features, though, but rather an attempt to make the Firewall smarter, which ended up making it too smart for its own good. Blocking all incoming and placing it in Stealth Mode is very secure, as far as I understand follow-ons from the original security guy's posting. (And for the truly paranoid, ipfw is still in there and can be configured if you want.)
The new network interface, I assume you mean for shared drives in the sidebar? Haven't used it yet to see how it works in practice. But it looks like it'll actually be more useful around the office for me, plus you still have CMD-K, I'm pretty sure, if you want to go the old way to mount drives.
Your experience sounds very Windows-like, true. Bit ny exoeruence,
lorenjohnson
· 2 years ago
I've had no trouble whatsoever. As a developer it's a bit irresponsible for me to jump on a new OS version without waiting a month or two, but a week ago I did it and I've not looked back. Call me silly but Timemachine was why I did it. I'd spent hours searching for a decent Mac backup tool in years past and nothing ever suited me so I never backed-up (bad bad bad). I've got my backup now and for a bonus Spotlight is works fantastic now and there are real performance improvements with the better multi-threading. My system overall feels more stable after this upgrade tha before it. Go figure? I think you may be having networking environment issues causing you troubles. I've not see a systems crash ever on my MacBook Pro.
david
· 2 years ago
I've performed multiple installs of 10.5 - it is part of my job - and I've seen no problems on the computers I use every day. In fact, knowing full well I was taking a big risk (every new OS release is a risk, let's be honest about it) I upgraded my workhorse first. My MacBook was an archive/install after first uninstalling all my little extras. (In short, 3rd party contextual menu items, input manager items, and pref panes - things that affect the computer at the OS level.) I'm using it, I'm programming in Java, I have yet to have a BSOD or kernel panic. I did have one ungraceful restart which I blame on myself - I didn't restart immediately after installing a QuickTime update.
Quizing people who have had problems, I've found that most involve plain Upgrade or using programs and/or utilities that are not upgraded for 10.5
asdasdas
· 2 years ago
Its called linux
julie
· 2 years ago
Sadly I went back to Tiger on my MacBook after 3 days - some automator scripts I use for backup would cause a repeatable kernel panic and my network shares would come and go as they please.
I noticed they changed the presentation of the date in the finder (maybe settable and I missed it) but now it's all computer like instead of Today .. or Yesterday or Wed....
Hoping 10.5.1 will fix the crash (inexcusable) and the network issues (very disappointing)
Tom Clarke
· 2 years ago
I updated from Tiger the other day. My machine's running faster than ever and I'm enjoying the new UI, generally. CoverFlow in Finder is great (thiugh I still confuse Finder windows for iTunes windows because of it!). Seriously, I've seen no problems whatsoever.
keyglobal
· 2 years ago
Leopard does have its differences, but it has proven far more stable for my uses. Installed on three computers, with no issues on any of the. The biggest problem I have had was installing Windows via Bootcamp, that was a pain, and it ticks me off I have to use any HD space for Windows at all. The only reason Windows is install is to test new pages and programs for Windows users.
No problems here with Networking, other than a printer which will not work wirelessly via an Airport Express connection, while the other printer is working fine. Some things I haven't quite figured out yet, spaces is just a confusion to me, but I have a large external monitor, which seems to be enough "room" for my typical work flow.
Sorry you are having trouble, Leopard has been all they said it would be for me, and I like the changes/improvements.
Alex
· 2 years ago
You know, I've installed it on 3 macs (the monday after release,) and haven't had a single problem with any of them.
Now I understand where you're coming from as far as firewall, but I've never used that feature, that's handled on my router. I love many of the new features and haven't come across any that annoy me yet. What hardware are you running it on? Is it possible you're having disk or memory problems?
Larry Magid
· 2 years ago
Dave,
I'm sorry to see you having trouble with Leopard but I am glad to see an open discussion about Mac flaws. It appears to me that Apple often gets a free ride from the press, largely due to Apple's excellent PR and marketing as well as its vocal base of enthusiastic users. That's not to say that there aren't things to like about Macs -- there are many - but that users and reviewers sometimes turn a blind eye to the same types of issues that get enormous attention when they rear their ugly head on Windows operation systems.
As I said in my Mercury News column this week (on my blog http://pcanswer.com/2007/11/06/windows-or-mac-a...), there is an alternative. I'm not ready to switch over yet, but Linux gets better every year and, eventually, it should pick up traction and, I think, may someday rob Apple of that uber-cool status. We'll see.
As a user, I'm dabbling with three OSs -- Vista, Linux (Ubuntu mostly) and
Ano
· 2 years ago
Are you sure you'r using Leopard and not your Vista disguished? becose the only thing i noticed and can agree with you is the Firewall comment. For about all the rest I'm very glad to have upgraded to Leo, wich compared to that buggy shit called Tiger, is 10000 times more stable and reliable. Concerning the issues for compatibility, or you'r a moron otherwise you should know very well that this is NORMAL for a new sysyem, and always in the same wave, if you had a look a the very first release af the tiger GM the issues were mooooooooooore important then in this one. And also .. its about 3 months now im running Leo and frankly IT NEVER CRASHED!! even the very first beta.. So dunno really what you'r talking about, maybe the really only solution for you is to go back to winblows, so you could finally be back to happyness. For sure its very embarassing for us "mac users" to be confronted to this new GUI, which as everybody noticed its more and more Winblows like, i'm still uncapable to belive that this monkey of Steve jobs is fucking up a wonderfull OS just to make childish toys which are completely useless, i'm stll on PPC and glad to.. i'll never buy for sure an intel, a mac is a mac, intel inside.. is another story.
zxspectrum
· 2 years ago
i have been using a Mac since the IIe days...and this is the best upgrade ever. for the first time it's not about the features but rather about the core system. they rewrote most of the OS and the result is a smooth and fast experience. also, all of the small annoyances from 10.4 are gone.
anyway, everybody knows that it's not a bad idea to wait for 10.5.1 although i had absolutely no problems upgrading three units.
zx. copenhagen, Denmark.
btw - i still think that it was a great way to get on Techmeme;)
Paul Stamatiou
· 2 years ago
Do you have specific examples?
stwf
· 2 years ago
I agree with the comments, this is a GREAT upgrade. The home networking features are excellent, the new Finder is much faster, a pleasure. Strange glitches, usability issues and missing features are expected in a new OS no matter who its from.
Although this release seems slightly buggier than usual its still exteremely usable. I wonder how many of your problems are ocrner cases, not really encountered by the majority of users. Did you report the bugs? As developers know feedback about arcane setups that don't work is gold!
I never upgrade my reference platform until the bugs get worked out, but this time its killing me. Going back to Tiger feels like running through molasses. I have noted some strange wireless behavior, when they fix that I'm upgrading everything....
baiss
· 2 years ago
WebObjects 5.4 is released with Leopard, so I move from XCode, EOModeler, WOBuilder to Eclipse, WOLips and Entity Modeler. The Web on Objects.
kawika
· 2 years ago
Not that anyone else's good experiences with Leopard lessen your troubles, but count me as another happy upgrader from Tiger. The translucent menu bar and dock, though, are eyesores. I believe Apple does understand how many people depend seriously on their Macs; however, they've made some casual customer-level tradeoffs in networking and security that are easily modified in an update. We'll see. Meanwhile, don't give up hope.
tibor
· 2 years ago
Worth listening too: this episode of the TUAW-podcast.
hardaway
· 2 years ago
Yeah. I upgraded with no trouble, but my system has crashed several times, which has NEVER happened to me before on a Mac, and sometimes it seems very, very slow by comparison. And I really didn't gain anything except coverflow, which doesn't seem to open the apps very easily.
I never understand why anybody runs out and installs major upgrades of any OS, whether it be MacOS, Windows or Linux. There are always a ton of really annoying problems and often catastrophic ones. Waiting for at least patch 1 but probably 2 or 3 is much more sensible.
Alexander Muse
· 2 years ago
If your computers are important to you, why would you upgrade to the first version of any operating system? Taking you at your word, that the previous version of OSX worked for you, why migrate back to Windows? Your actions seem to be a bit rash and thoughtless. Take some time, relax, take a deep breath. Think before you leap. My advice? Downgrade Leopard to Tiger and continue to enjoy your Mac until Apple gets all of the kinks out. Let the first movers do the heavy lifting. You need to hold your time and work in higher regard. Migrating back to Windows is a huge mistake. By the way, which version of Windows did you revert to? XP or Vista?
amy
· 2 years ago
Switch to linux. Use only the command line and terminal. It's the way to go!
Jonas
· 2 years ago
back to the stone-age, right? :) This comment stoked my laughter. Thanks!
Bob
· 2 years ago
Indeed. I'm not impressed with Leopard either. The only OS I really ever got excited about was BeOS. The only bad thing about Be was lack of apps, which was its death knell.
I think Apple has lost focus on being a computer company.
Paul Stamatiou
· 2 years ago
Do you have any specific examples?
David Jacobs
· 2 years ago
My Leopard is working great. No problems whatsoever. I *love* quicklook. No way in hell I would go back to Windows, not for anything. I'd rather go Linux.
mayday
· 2 years ago
So happy to read your post, I was beginning to think that I was the only one that was suffering with Leopard. After waiting so long for this much hyped release from Apple I am now running Vista on my mac book pro.... Wow, what an improvement. Everything just works! I am begining to think the only benefit to leopard was built in bootcamp.
Jon T
· 2 years ago
Count me as another happy camper on Leopard. It's VERY fast and apart from a few lesser third party programmes not yet tuned, perfectly reliable too.
I had the BSOD scenario when I installed, but we now know exactly what caused that. Before installing just make sure you remove any non-Apple preference panes you have added to your system and you will be fine.
Leopard is 32bit and 64bit compliant, operates across two chip architectures - Intel and PPC chips and it introduces next generation file systems with ZFS among other under the hood innovations too. The odd glitch and you are complaining like mad and comparing it to Windows?!
Well don't is my advice, because it simply isn't possible to compare cheese with diamond...
Mark
· 2 years ago
How did you lose two days restoring a backup? Try SuperDuper and backup to a bootable clone: you only lose 10 minutes.
Tracy
· 2 years ago
I don't know what you did wrong... works great for me. I only had to stop using "menushade" which makes sense. It did take a little time to figure out the networking, but that works WAY better now then before. Just wait for the patches, I'm sure you'll be happy
Lounge
· 2 years ago
This is the typical mentality of Mac users. If something does not work it is the users fault. They dont blame Apple. I think it is widely known there are Leptard issues and i just wish all Apple fans out there would do something about it and show their distain for it. Like this post.
DBL
· 2 years ago
I can't believe that somebody as experienced as you in the computer world made such a newbie mistake as to install a point-zero major OS upgrade within weeks of its release and expect not to have any issues. This is your operating system -- if you're not going to be cautious about that then you are simply not a cautious person, and you pay the price. I've been advising my Mac-using friends to wait three months before jumping on any major new OS, for years now. After the three month wait, everything is usually copacetic. Mind you, I don't disrespect bleeding edge adopters -- only when they whine and make stupid self-lampooning noises about abandoning the platform. Hell, I have a boot drive with Leopard on it, it's just not my main drive.
I can understand some computer rookie making this kind of mistake -- making the biggest change possible to his mission critical systems with a few weeks of that change coming available. But you! You have no excuse. I feel no sympathy. In fact, you should be embarrassed.
Jim
· 2 years ago
" It disappears for long periods of time."
I'm lost. on that one.
Singulus
· 2 years ago
But It Doesn't " Just Work " and in particular it would appear that the biggest problem is this issue of 'backward compatibility'. Over half of Apples installed base runs the PowerPC chip-set. Leopard's primary target is the new Intel chips. Bottom-line is they want to sell the newest Mac's, but in order to thrive they had to release this new OS. What have they sacrificed?
I'm not one of those closet PC fanatics. I switched when OS X was first released. When I stumbled upon Steve Job's Introduction to OS X on the internet, I ran right out and purchased a used G3, the turquoise & white 'smurf'. I added a third-party drive and OS X was everything Steve promised an more.
I ran right out and purchased an original 1.25 GHz PowerPC G4. That experience was so good, through several upgrades I might add, that I invested in an original dual 2 GHz PowerPC G5, both with extended DDR SDRAM, and external drives for backups.
At this point I noticed Apple heading down the same path that Microsoft had always run. They were starting to have cooling issues and front-end buss problems.
I was somewhat concerned when they switched to Intel, but had no problems, no problems whatsoever until OS X 10.5 Leopard.
Both machines have some rather serious issues, the G4 worse, but they are inter-related. 'Time Machine' actually ate over 114,000 files backed up and tested weeks in advance on the G4. Three years of backup that took over eight days to copy & compare, tested extensively prior to upgrade. Gone.
Both machines hide even recently created files some where in the bowels of the OS. " Spotlight " fails to see them either. " Finder" and even the new "Mail" bog down and quit inexplicably. And why?
In the name of 'backward compatibility'. They just couldn't bring themselves to admit, This OS is designed, targeted, for the Intel Chip-set. Serious compromises were made to 'sell' this OS to the installed base, regardless of the consequences.
I'm afraid the author was correct, " It doesn't Just Work " any longer.
Eric
Charles
· 2 years ago
I guess I've been pretty lucky. I did an update the day leopard came out and it's been flawless. I haven't had any problems with speed, wireless connectivity, crashing etc. I'm not wild about stacks, but I use launchbar to access my common folders.
pabon
· 2 years ago
why you gotta dis windows, because the mac suk?
thommango
· 2 years ago
Sounds worse than windows. I've been using windows since 3.1 and never had a windows upgrade cause me to lose data. Even a recent Ubuntu upgrade went really smoothly.
W
· 2 years ago
The pinnacle of Operating Systems was DOS 6.22, it was all downhill from there...
-W
macnixer
· 2 years ago
I started with Leopard in the Beta stages... I work for an org developing software and we are ADC members. I never had problems even with the beta. Fact it to try the speeds I installed the beta on a usb hdd and connected my Mac and booted. I was surprised the system was so stable an fast. I have tried using Vista on a proper workstation with all it wants hardware but the system lied to me crashed on me etc. So I would not say Leopard is Windows like. Frankly you must be either running an ancient machine with 128 MB RAM or a paid for from the other side. You sound simple but you are not and you are trying to get milage through CNET et al.
You do not know Macs.
M
· 2 years ago
I agree.. it does feel like windows.. what's up Apple! How can I go backwards and install Tiger.. that system just ROCKED!
mpb
· 2 years ago
Disagree completely.
Sure, there are some annoyances with Leopard.
Transparent Menu Bar - Doesn't bother me, my desktop image makes this a non-issue. New Icons - I use custom Icons Quick Look - Absolutely Love It Performance - Much smoother and more fluid than Tiger EvDO Card - Plugged it in and connected, not a problem 8021.x Wireless - It works great! Unified Theme - Love the lack of Aqua & Brushed Metal Space - It's great Spotlight - Change allow me to get rid of Quicksliver, no more annoying QS load at login
Overall, it just feels like a faster more refined Tiger to me. I haven't had a single stability issue. I use it for work running VMWare w/ WIndows, MS Office 2004, Omnifocus, Yojimbo, OmniGraffle, Unison, iWork, iLife, Bento, and Adium. I normally have all of these apps open and running with about 20+ tabs in both Safari and Firefox.
Not a single issue on a MacBook Pro Core Duo w/ 2GB DRAM. (1st Gen)
NenadWeb
· 2 years ago
I cannot understand why you write so hard against Leopard. I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard and I had not one problem. I have here a WinXP PC at home, too. And every single time I start my PC I know why I have a MacBook and don't use the PC anymore that much.
Think before you write nonsense.
Dave Marcoot
· 2 years ago
Well my experience has been somewhat different. 10.5 on my duel g4 is Stable and responsive system apple has ever shipped. To freezes, spinning wheels or crashes in 2 months. Faster wake up and user switching.
That said, your are absolutely correct about the network interface. It is mind boggling that they dumbed it down, where it was usable for since 10.0.
caglar
· 1 year ago
You talk about how unreliable Leopard is, and I have to agree a 100%. I also have to say that I loved my old Mac, a titanium PowerBook which I ran all OSX variants between 10.1 through 10.4 on. Maybe because of my good experiences with those OSs (and that machine), I felt OK installing Leopard shortly after it was available on my brand new MacBook Pro. The result is as disappointing as it can be...
You know, I don't care much about flashy new features, as long as the computer does the job well, and is reliable, and BOTH the hardware AND the software on my new MBP with Leopard fail right there. And the bugs..... Aaaarrgggh!!! Nowadays, each time I see a Mac commercial on TV, it infuriates me...
It seems to me that Apple dropped the name "Computer" from their name for a reason. They probably want to be "Gateway", or something... It's a shame really... In the mean time, I'll struggle to make some use of my $2000, disappointing new machine without ripping all my hair off...
Next time I'll get a $400 Toshiba or something... At that price range, at least you know what you're getting into...
tom
· 1 year ago
well its been, what, 4 months since leopard was released?
im now using 10.5.2 and havent had a single problem - leopard would now seem to be a vast improvement on tiger.
All Comments
Some of the user interface tweaks are plain wrong. Everyone has told Apple this; I feel that they tried a bit too hard to look different rather than better. The dock is fixable, the menubar not yet; the always-on-top help windows are probably a bad idea.
I'm not sure how you lost hard disks; haven't heard this from anyone else.
I agree on the firewall but the networking preference pane is better than the last (truly sucky) one, although it's by no menas perfect.
On the positive sign: Time Machine is so worth it; Spaces is excellent (and works flawlessly, unlike the hacks available in Tiger); at least all the windows have a consistent look now; the wireless network flakiness i always had under Tiger (and blamed on my router) is just gone in Leopard. The new finder kicks the ass of the old one, and doesn't hang up when network volumes don't respond.
The extremes in your comment, I think, are unwarranted.
I am currently waiting for a 10.4.3 retail disk to be shipped. I have no idea how downgrading is supposed to work. Why not just face it: Apple screwed this one up. Big time.
My top 5 loathings:
[1] Transparent menu bar--WTF? Opaque Menubar claims to fix it but I have yet to get it to work.
[2] Self-healing fonts folder in the system, which attempts to put Helvetica and Helvetica Neue back in any time you remove them. This is nanny-wheels for the Apple GUI people, who decided they like Helvetica, but can't be bothered to make some way to access it if it's not in the system fonts folder like they expect. And it's at the expense of the users. Name me a single designer who doesn't need to use Helvetica--and frequently NOT Apple's dfont Helvetica.
[3] Spotlight find is still an incredibly broken piece of junk. 10.3 allowed you to find for pretty much anything. It also allowed you to filter the selection using the upper-right search box. 10.4 nuked all that and 10.5 hasn't fixed it. How is it that two iterations after 10.3, I still can't change my search defaults to MY preferences?
[4] Dock Stacks--They completely failed to implement hierarchical menus back into folder menus. Fan shows you like 7 items? Grid shows a max of 70. A quick click and navigate to a subfolder is now 3 or 4 clicks. Also, you can't find your bloody folder because the icon changes depending on what the contents are. Yep, that makes good GUI sense.
[5] New Finder icons--Again, what were they thinking?!? These things are pitiful compared to the icons from early OS X versions! Actually, they're more hideous than pitiful, come to think of it.
Okay, but it's not all bad either. Time Machine could easily be worth the price of entry for the vast majority of people out there who suck at backing up and afraid of a complex system like Retrospect (or even SuperDuper). They will finally have reasonable data backups almost all the time.
Quick look is awesome! I have used it tons and it is a habit that grows on you almost as fast as the first time you bind Expose's "Show Desktop" and "Show all Windows" to buttons 4 & 5 on your mouse. For designers, there is finally a fast way to flip through your fonts too, as Quick Look does a really cool font preview too.
Spaces is pretty nice too. As I have yet to install this on a "work" machine, I don't know how it plays out in the long run, but the organizational aspects are greatly appealing to me.
I upgraded two of my main machines to Leopard last Friday. I've had the same frustrations with random crashes of programs that used to never crash.
For some strange reason after booting into safe-mode and restarting everything seems to be working fine now. I have no idea why booting into safe-mode would fix anything but it worked for me.
Good luck
Arnie
Kinda surprised that you upgraded most of your Macs to the new system, though. I upgraded my main laptop and a backup laptop, but I'm leaving my iMac in my office at Tiger for now, mainly because I want to make sure everything I *need* to do works smoothly before switching it over.
OS X isn't perfect, but every new OS has some issues - be it Windows, Linux, or OS X. Most businesses and folks who need stuff to work won't move to a new OS until a point release or two on the OS X side or a service pack on the Windows side. You've been around long enough to know that, surely.
http://tomkarpik.com/articles/massive-data-loss...
That being said, I don't use the Finder and I hate the new dock.
OK, I do use the finder for one thing - previewing lots of images with the coverflow thing is actually very nice. But as soon as I find the images I'm look for, I'm back to terminal to move them around.
c'mon, linux, hurry up and evolve past these suckers .....
-- stan
Maybe what I'm seeing here has something to do with my network, or electricity, or gamma rays, not sure. Let's hear what other people say.
(You should give it a fair try though.)
Actually, scratch that. Just QuickLook. I would buy an entire OS upgrade just for that one feature.
Dave...man...seriously...Windows? Gutsy just came out and you're going back to Windows? Give it a shot -- you may not hate it!
until then....
Boot Camp is missing some serious instructions for ease k of use. The Apple support folks don't seem to a have a clue as to what a cordless keyboard will and will not do. i.e., try ejecting a disk from the internal drive.
since i installed it - my machine has been freezing at least 5 times a day (no exaggeration) - i mean full freeze, getting the MAC messag telling me to press the on/off button....
various application keep crashing (snitter, Parallels, iTunes) , and I have just found out the i cannot print - when printing - i only get partial text printed. similarly when creating PDF files.
it is worse than windows machine I have had. many friends of mine report similar issues
just noticed - cookies on safari seem to react differently (cannot yet fully define the issue)
1) Dock's "Stacks". That makes a nice demo, but it's an absolutely terrible UI. My Applications folder in the Dock now has an Acrobat icon (with some unnoticeable junk behind it). It's totally non-obvious that it's actually an applications folder instead of the Acrobat application. Worse, clicking on it shows the first 62 Applications alphabetically (most of them with truncated names, like "Imag...pture"). To open one of the others, I need to navigate over to the "Show...inder" icon. As far as I can tell, this UI has absolutely no redeeming features.
2) Spotlight's "Show All" window from 10.4 is gone. Now, "Show all" just opens a finder search window. This is unfortunately a huge step back. Now I must choose whether I want to sort by "last opened" or "kind", where before I could conveniently group by the same categories that are even now used to group spotlight's menu results.
3) The Help viewer window floats over everything, obscuring whatever you're trying to get help on....totally stupid.
But, it's not a total lose. There's many many little fixes here and there that seem to me to make it a better OS in total. Mail.app in particular seems to be much speedier, and I like the integrated RSS reader. Safari also seems to work better than the previous version. I find "Spaces" useful, and appreciate the little detail of being able use both the "Show all spaces" "Show all windows" keys at the same time, to show all windows in all spaces. Time Machine is almost perfect for my simple backup needs. (the additional feature of backing up to a network drive would be appreciated).
I will say that if I had ever used the firewall, or wanted to use it in the future, I would be pissed about that too.
I have systematically used DiskWarrior to "condition" my computer BEFORE each upgrade (run it from the DW disk itself by starting at "C"-button pressed during start. Fix permissions, check all files, and then full start-up directory replacement (by DW).
My recent migration to Leopard 10.5 (again on day one) was flawless and painless. I can also say that having followed the evolution of MAC OS X this Leopard is the very best version so far. It is quicker and smoother, and absolutely nothing crashes. There are softwares that needs updates, and also some older versions (like Photoshop 7.0) will not any longer run. This is acceptable to me in the course of progress.
I really recommend DiskWarrior (that I have used for many, many years - it even helped saving (scavenging mode) all data from a friend's crashed HD in an iBook G4 this year). It really supports trouble free Mac computing. It is a mystery to me why Apple have not bought up this little company with their spare cash, but maybe that is exactly why this software remains so excellent.
So, Happy Leopard to you!
My only issue was that a cheap USB to parallel cable I bought on eBay for 99 cents which was flaky on Tiger was finally just outright rejected (which is probably a good thing, I need to get a better cable). I'm also not a huge fan of the way stack icons are represented on the dock, but that's easy to work around, and I'm sure they'll offer an option to change it soon enough.
Well I sympathize with your experience and the issues you've had, there is no comparison between Leopard's quirks and Vista's quirks... Vista's issues are orders of magnitude worse.
http://scripting.wordpress.com/2007/11/05/scrip...
Dave
I've installed Leopard on two machines and aside from a minor issue with Time Machine (you shouldn't try to open Time Machine until it has made a backup) it's been 100% stable. Sure, there's a few 3rd party apps that needed updating to work under Leopard, but that's usually true of any OS update. I would have thought you would have welcomed some of the changes, particularly the network ones. Every time turn my Mac Pro on and find that every computer and NAS on my home network has automounted is another day I thank Apple for Leopard.
Dave, could it be hardware related? Perhaps you're not using the latest Mactels? I'm guessing on that, but it has to be something given my own experience has been close to flawless.
Overall except for a minor glitch in networking when I installed, I've had zero problems (knock on wood). I'm sorry you're having problems, but I'm very, very happy with Leopard.
If you want to go back to shitty Windows, that's your problem, Dave!
Jason
On the plus side, Windows XP Professional works wonderfully under Boot Camp. It's like a whole new OS: stable, beautiful and very fast. And it's even configurable to look like classic Windows, if one so chooses. APPLE HAS APPARENTLY FORGOTTEN THE IMPORTANT USER INTERFACE RULE THAT OLD FEATURES SHOULD REMAIN AS NON-DEFAULT OPTIONS WHEN NEW (AND SOMETIMES VERY FLAKY AND AWKWARD) FEATURES ARE INTRODUCED. How can businesses take the Mac OS seriously when such dramatic unwanted changes are made? Hey Apple, wake up!
Lost data is always serious, should not happen, sometime does with a newly released OS.
Is this endemic? On my pretty much spec machine (added some third-party RAM) I have had some minor issues but overall feel like useability and performance are improved. Many (probably most) others are reporting the same.
Is Leopard unpleasant to use? Some of it is annoying gloss, some of it is significant improvement. Spotlight actually works, which is a big deal for me.
Windows-like? Not for me. Not at all.
Is networking broken? Some things are better, some things are slower, other things are just different. But then, I don't have a very complicated network.
Has the firewall "moved and lost features"? Um, no. That's not what the article says, anyway. It's a different firewall, with a different interface, that does what firewalls do but appears to have some issues. They say "appears" because their main concern is that it's an undocumented firewall that Apple made themselves, a "black box," something that security people hate for all sorts of good reasons. As they point out, though, ipfw is still there if you want it.
Now it's faster than Tiger was, and just as stable.
Worth a try.
We're yet to see the dreaded BSOD.
I like using both operating systems - OSX and WindowsXP, depending on what I need doing,. Also for testing out webdesign on both platforms.
That's why I love the Apple Intel boxes - I can choose my OS. Nice ;)
"It's that unpleasant to use."
It feels no better or worse than Tiger to me. The major issues for me are matters of aesthetics. The translucent menubar is annoying, I turned the 3D dock off 10 mins into using it the first time. It doesn't get in my way though, and these niggles are more than countered by the addition of handy stuff like Spaces.
"Systems that didn't used to crash now crash regularly."
They do? Oh. I haven't seen any of this. Moreover the 'Finder locks up when a network share wanders off the network' thing is no-more which made me rejoice vocally. Oh and Safari doesn't have nearly the number of pregnant pauses it used to. Everything feels *faster* to me, and stability issues are not something I have come across.
"On one system three hard disks were rendered unusable, and I lost a couple of full days restoring them (luckily I had good backups)."
Ouch, I'd be interested to know what hardware you had this issue on. From the vibe I'm getting older PowerPC hardware (G4s and older G5s) are causing the most issues. My G4 iMac (literally only a music jukebox) has gone back to 10.4 for the moment becuase it won't come out of sleep right. I don't count that though because it's not supposed to run Leopard anyway ;)
"The user interface is quirky."
All user interfaces ave quirks. They'd all be the same if they didn't. As I set out above, there are parts that bug me slightly but the Dock is easily fixed and the menubar is going to get fixed one way or another by user pressure, or hackers (maybe the latter, followed by the former).
"The new networking interface is a big step backward."
Networking as in the pref pane, it's tidier and clearer IMHO. I went back to 10.4 and used it there and though 'god damn this sucks' last night.
Networking as in the Finder works... which is more than it used to! It works well too for my money.
"The firewall moved and lost features!"
They put it under 'Security' which wasn't really all that dumb-ass, but yeh it needs looking at, I am on the verge of installing Little Snitch to see if it still works in Leopard. I agree with this point at least :)
"That's simply never done, you don't charge customers to remove features, esp security features."
I don't feel robbed, honestly....
"I think Apple doesn't understand how many people depend seriously on their Macs."
I'm sure they do. The problem is that if you go to the extent of ironing out every single bug the software is in gestation for a decade. Also they do extensive testing but no lab can test every single scenario on every single machine. Also a lot of people that had installer issues used APE, which IMHO is a dirty hack and I don't use it myself.
I'm not gonna play the part of the apologist, in your case it's obviously not worked out, and it's Apple's fault. That's bad news, and I can sympathise with your angst. Remember 2 things though - it's an initial release, and I know you understand how the unforeseen can catch out initial releases - you're a programmer after all :) Also it's clear a lot of people have got a positive lift and a good experience from it - so your circumstances are not universal. I still understand why *you* are not happy with it though, but be assured it's not all bad, even if it looks that way...
no blue screen of death for me, also no crashes on applications, no data loss, no issues, no problems.
i did a simple upgrade (even though i kept reading the 'please-please-backup-everything' posts everywhere). i dove in and upgraded my 12'' g4 powerbook.
only thing i did was unistall the APE prefpane, since it looked like it was really causing some havoc.
it now runs smoothly, beautifully (as soon as i killed the 3d dock), faster and, for the first time in it's long life, cooler. the fans aren't always on when i'm running a couple of apps. this is an amazing thing as far as i'm concerned.
i was a bit worried because my little mac is on the lower end of the required specs, but i'm so glad i spent this money on leopard you wouldn't believe.
I tried to upgrade it to Leopard. Leopard installed, but you could not log in. It does not accept your user name and password, and KB article on Apple web site supposedly related to this does not help. BTW it instructs users to fix crap through command line in single user mode...
I wiped machine clean and installed Tiger from discs provided just to test my hypothesis. Tiger works, I can log in. Upgrade to Leopard, no way to login after upgrade.
The only way to install Leopard is to do Archive and Install and you lose your apps and stuff, OR WIPE and install.
Now, this tells me that they did not test this basic install scenario. I mean upgrade of CLEAN Tiger does not work properly... How basic you can get?
I am software developer. Every software dev worth its salt knows to test edge and default config cases. Always! Newbies don't know this, but learn with years. Who the hell was working on testing the Leopard???
I do agree the firewall is not very good compared to 10.4.
I assume you will throw your rattle out of the pram and switch back next time Windows craps out on you?
Stop being a Winer and enjoy Windows.
After that, perfection. Lots of GREAT features. We haven't had the budget to upgrade the machines at work yet, and I am sop frustrated by all the missing features when I have to use TIger.
Interface "quirky"? The only thing I could conceive as a quirk would be how the Finder is now sticky in regards to window display mode. (I.e. you switch to Cover Flow in one window and new Finder windows pop up in Cover Flow mode.) Other than that, it's all gravy for me.
I love the new Preview, Quick Look (I hit spacebar all the time at work and get... nothing), full-featured Spotlight, Web Clippings (I've got a couple already in Dashboard), Time Machine, etc. When we get it at work, I'll be SO glad to be able to share individual folders, etc. And from a techie viewpoint, DTRACE! It's simply amazing. (Not to mention tabbed Term windows, etc.)
The Firewall does remove a bit-o-security, and that's bad. It's not a straight-up take-away-features, though, but rather an attempt to make the Firewall smarter, which ended up making it too smart for its own good. Blocking all incoming and placing it in Stealth Mode is very secure, as far as I understand follow-ons from the original security guy's posting. (And for the truly paranoid, ipfw is still in there and can be configured if you want.)
The new network interface, I assume you mean for shared drives in the sidebar? Haven't used it yet to see how it works in practice. But it looks like it'll actually be more useful around the office for me, plus you still have CMD-K, I'm pretty sure, if you want to go the old way to mount drives.
Your experience sounds very Windows-like, true. Bit ny exoeruence,
Quizing people who have had problems, I've found that most involve plain Upgrade or using programs and/or utilities that are not upgraded for 10.5
I noticed they changed the presentation of the date in the finder (maybe settable and I missed it) but now it's all computer like instead of Today .. or Yesterday or Wed....
Hoping 10.5.1 will fix the crash (inexcusable) and the network issues (very disappointing)
No problems here with Networking, other than a printer which will not work wirelessly via an Airport Express connection, while the other printer is working fine. Some things I haven't quite figured out yet, spaces is just a confusion to me, but I have a large external monitor, which seems to be enough "room" for my typical work flow.
Sorry you are having trouble, Leopard has been all they said it would be for me, and I like the changes/improvements.
Now I understand where you're coming from as far as firewall, but I've never used that feature, that's handled on my router. I love many of the new features and haven't come across any that annoy me yet. What hardware are you running it on? Is it possible you're having disk or memory problems?
I'm sorry to see you having trouble with Leopard but I am glad to see an open discussion about Mac flaws. It appears to me that Apple often gets a free ride from the press, largely due to Apple's excellent PR and marketing as well as its vocal base of enthusiastic users. That's not to say that there aren't things to like about Macs -- there are many - but that users and reviewers sometimes turn a blind eye to the same types of issues that get enormous attention when they rear their ugly head on Windows operation systems.
As I said in my Mercury News column this week (on my blog http://pcanswer.com/2007/11/06/windows-or-mac-a...), there is an alternative. I'm not ready to switch over yet, but Linux gets better every year and, eventually, it should pick up traction and, I think, may someday rob Apple of that uber-cool status. We'll see.
Larry Magid
www.pcanswer.com
As a user, I'm dabbling with three OSs -- Vista, Linux (Ubuntu mostly) and
becose the only thing i noticed and can agree with you is the Firewall comment.
For about all the rest I'm very glad to have upgraded to Leo, wich compared to that buggy shit called Tiger, is 10000 times more stable and reliable. Concerning the issues for compatibility, or you'r a moron otherwise you should know very well that this is NORMAL for a new sysyem, and always in the same wave, if you had a look a the very first release af the tiger GM the issues were mooooooooooore important then in this one.
And also .. its about 3 months now im running Leo and frankly IT NEVER CRASHED!! even the very first beta..
So dunno really what you'r talking about, maybe the really only solution for you is to go back to winblows, so you could finally be back to happyness.
For sure its very embarassing for us "mac users" to be confronted to this new GUI, which as everybody noticed its more and more Winblows like, i'm still uncapable to belive that this monkey of Steve jobs is fucking up a wonderfull OS just to make childish toys which are completely useless, i'm stll on PPC and glad to.. i'll never buy for sure an intel, a mac is a mac, intel inside.. is another story.
anyway, everybody knows that it's not a bad idea to wait for 10.5.1 although i had absolutely no problems upgrading three units.
zx.
copenhagen, Denmark.
btw - i still think that it was a great way to get on Techmeme;)
Although this release seems slightly buggier than usual its still exteremely usable. I wonder how many of your problems are ocrner cases, not really encountered by the majority of users. Did you report the bugs? As developers know feedback about arcane setups that don't work is gold!
I never upgrade my reference platform until the bugs get worked out, but this time its killing me. Going back to Tiger feels like running through molasses. I have noted some strange wireless behavior, when they fix that I'm upgrading everything....
The Web on Objects.
It's the way to go!
I think Apple has lost focus on being a computer company.
I had the BSOD scenario when I installed, but we now know exactly what caused that. Before installing just make sure you remove any non-Apple preference panes you have added to your system and you will be fine.
Leopard is 32bit and 64bit compliant, operates across two chip architectures - Intel and PPC chips and it introduces next generation file systems with ZFS among other under the hood innovations too. The odd glitch and you are complaining like mad and comparing it to Windows?!
Well don't is my advice, because it simply isn't possible to compare cheese with diamond...
I can understand some computer rookie making this kind of mistake -- making the biggest change possible to his mission critical systems with a few weeks of that change coming available. But you! You have no excuse. I feel no sympathy. In fact, you should be embarrassed.
I'm lost. on that one.
I'm not one of those closet PC fanatics. I switched when OS X was first released. When I stumbled upon Steve Job's Introduction to OS X on the internet, I ran right out and purchased a used G3, the turquoise & white 'smurf'. I added a third-party drive and OS X was everything Steve promised an more.
I ran right out and purchased an original 1.25 GHz PowerPC G4. That experience was so good, through several upgrades I might add, that I invested in an original dual 2 GHz PowerPC G5, both with extended DDR SDRAM, and external drives for backups.
At this point I noticed Apple heading down the same path that Microsoft had always run. They were starting to have cooling issues and front-end buss problems.
I was somewhat concerned when they switched to Intel, but had no problems, no problems whatsoever until OS X 10.5 Leopard.
Both machines have some rather serious issues, the G4 worse, but they are inter-related. 'Time Machine' actually ate over 114,000 files backed up and tested weeks in advance on the G4. Three years of backup that took over eight days to copy & compare, tested extensively prior to upgrade. Gone.
Both machines hide even recently created files some where in the bowels of the OS. " Spotlight " fails to see them either. " Finder" and even the new "Mail"
bog down and quit inexplicably. And why?
In the name of 'backward compatibility'. They just couldn't bring themselves to admit, This OS is designed, targeted, for the Intel Chip-set. Serious compromises were made to 'sell' this OS to the installed base, regardless of the consequences.
I'm afraid the author was correct, " It doesn't Just Work " any longer.
Eric
-W
You do not know Macs.
Sure, there are some annoyances with Leopard.
Transparent Menu Bar - Doesn't bother me, my desktop image makes this a non-issue.
New Icons - I use custom Icons
Quick Look - Absolutely Love It
Performance - Much smoother and more fluid than Tiger
EvDO Card - Plugged it in and connected, not a problem
8021.x Wireless - It works great!
Unified Theme - Love the lack of Aqua & Brushed Metal
Space - It's great
Spotlight - Change allow me to get rid of Quicksliver, no more annoying QS load at login
Overall, it just feels like a faster more refined Tiger to me. I haven't had a single stability issue. I use it for work running VMWare w/ WIndows, MS Office 2004, Omnifocus, Yojimbo, OmniGraffle, Unison, iWork, iLife, Bento, and Adium. I normally have all of these apps open and running with about 20+ tabs in both Safari and Firefox.
Not a single issue on a MacBook Pro Core Duo w/ 2GB DRAM. (1st Gen)
Think before you write nonsense.
Stable and responsive system apple has ever shipped. To freezes, spinning wheels or crashes in 2 months. Faster wake up and user switching.
That said, your are absolutely correct about the network interface. It is mind boggling that they dumbed it down, where it was usable for since 10.0.
You know, I don't care much about flashy new features, as long as the computer does the job well, and is reliable, and BOTH the hardware AND the software on my new MBP with Leopard fail right there. And the bugs..... Aaaarrgggh!!! Nowadays, each time I see a Mac commercial on TV, it infuriates me...
It seems to me that Apple dropped the name "Computer" from their name for a reason. They probably want to be "Gateway", or something... It's a shame really... In the mean time, I'll struggle to make some use of my $2000, disappointing new machine without ripping all my hair off...
Next time I'll get a $400 Toshiba or something... At that price range, at least you know what you're getting into...
im now using 10.5.2 and havent had a single problem - leopard would now seem to be a vast improvement on tiger.