Thursday, November 29, 2007

Leopard is officially troubled

Leopard is the New Vista, and It's Pissing Me Off is a rant about Leopard -- from PC Magazine. Not from Dvorak.

I read it, and it seems pretty plausible. It matches up with what I hear from friends who've updated.

I, of course, have said for some time that I wouldn't consider Leopard before 10.5.3.

Now I'm thinking 10.5.4.

Apple should have slipped Leopard a solid year, instead of seven months. Beyond the general bugginess I hear off, there's no doubt they made some arrogant, arbitrary and just-plain-dumb UI changes.

The current recommendation has to be:
  • Do not install 10.5 on a Tiger machine. Just don't. If you'd like, wait until I do it and say it's safe to proceed. I am very good at finding bad stuff.
  • If you can, put off buying new Apple hardware until 10.5.3.
  • If you must buy a machine now, don't migrate any apps or settings from old machines. Just move data. Backup rigorously. Install applications carefully and check that they're all Leopard safe.
  • Refrain from making rude remarks about Vista.

2 comments:

Dave Walker said...

Same old story -- people having trouble make lots of noise, people with smooth upgrades are quiet.

I did upgrades from Tiger on two machines -- my home box and my work laptop. Both were trouble free. Time Machine alone has been enough to justify my upgrades.

JGF said...

I'm convinced some people are just blessed by the gods of computing. I'd say my friend Andrew is one of those, but even he has had Leopard problems.

Me, I mostly find the bugs. I remember 10.3.0 was pretty bad, but 10.5 sounds a bit worse based on those I know.

Nowadays I've become really conservative, so I won't have any personal experience for a while.