Apple. Please FINISH Leopard.
As much as I want to love OS X Leopard, I'm having a hard time doing so. Not only did my installation process not go over as smoothly as it should have, but that is just the beginning of my complaints.
I had hoped that after 10.5.1 was released things were going to get better. It hasn't. Back to my Mac still doesn't work. Dashboard still doesn't work with Parental Controls enabled on another account. Mail crashes frequently. Safari crashes almost as often as the iPod does on my iPhone while I am using Safari. Those are just the most obvious ones that constantly remind me this OS was rushed and doesn't feel ready.
If you go look on the Apple forums, they are filled with horror stories of installation issues. The user groups forum I frequent send emails daily about problems with Leopard installation & other issues. Don't even ask me about the firewall. I won't be polite.
My personal experience is with an upgrade & a clean install. I did an upgrade on my iMac and was greeted with random Kernel Panics whenever my Mac would sleep. I finally couldn't tolerate it any longer and did a full erase and then a clean install. Still I am plagued with a machine that feels much less reliable than OS X Tiger. My wife's iBook is very slow after her Leopard upgrade, and the beach ball spins more than she gets work done on it. I have to hear about this every night!
Wireless connectivity is another issue. I take my iBook with me occasionally when I go out. I took it to a venue where the Wi-Fi is always reliable and works perfectly. I tried to connect to the unencrypted network and OS X said it couldn't connect. No detailed explanation... just that it couldn't connect. Why wouldn't this work? The airpport signal was at full strength & there was no encryption on the access point . I thought it might be the Wi-Fi in the building, so I tested it with my iPhone. It quickly connected via my iPhone, so that leads me to believe it was my Mac. The only change to my Mac was the upgrade to Leopard the previous day. I did all of the usual troubleshooting & rebooting and resetting.. but nothing would make it work.
It's little niggling things like this that are making me really hold off recommending Leopard to people. As much as I love some of the new features (Quick Look is my fav), I am really disappointed with this release thus far. It's almost there... but Apple really needs to get on the ball and make sure it stays the best operating system on the planet.
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I am totally on board with you on this one. I have had nothing but trouble out of Leopard since the first day I bought it. I waited in line to buy it for 2 hours. Sure I expect a few issues... it's common with something as large of a project as a new OS. But, give me a break!! Hello Apple... it's quite clear DASHBOARD is broken. Fix it. The little things behind the scenes may be harder to locate and find. Dashboard not working is unforgivable.
AMEN to that Bro!
Sorry to hear of your Leopard woes.
I'm happy to report that I've had quite the opposite experience. My MacBook Pro feels so much snappier since upgrading to Leopard and I've encountered very view issues since taking the leap to Mac OS X 10.5 in early November.
If you have a lot of extensions installed (as I do) I recommend doing a clean install. I've been adding software back one-by-one making sure that it's all Leopard friendly. Even with about 150 applications/plug-ins installed my new cat is purring like a well tuned engine (there's a good metaphor in there somewhere ;).
The wireless connection problem with Leopard is a real show-stopper. With high-speed downloads and high cpu usage (in some cases), people get Kernel Panics with different kinds of machines and different kinds of configurations. I even get it with a brand new machine with Leopard pre-installed, while using Apple Mail and Firefox.
Other people get other problems, in particular involving com.apple.iokit.
The overall improvements like Spaces, RSS in mail, cover flow in Finder, a dock with an improved design, are great.
It definitely is. I've always had issues with Firefox in general. It's a definite beach ball spinner & memory hog. A slower machine expresses this behavior even more so. I try to stick with Safari when I can, and having 1Password makes it easier to do so. I've never been a big user of Firefox extensions, so it's an easy transition to Safari for me.
I do enjoy Leopard more than I dislike it. It's certainly not enough to make me switch back to Tiger -- it's not that bad, and I have come to enjoy and depend on some of the UI enhancements.
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I had some troubles with Safari crashing very frequently. I found 2 causes:
1) Some software I installed put a PPC (not intel) version of a plugin in '/Library/Internet Plug-Ins'. I removed it.
2) Safari crashed when accessing particular web sites consistently. It turned out that there was some problem with the keychain. To resolve it run 'Keychain Access', do a search for the site and delete the offending keychain items.
Safari hasn't crashed since then.
I have had a few issues of Leopard installations, but they all went away when I did a Clean install (vs an upgrade install). The only issue that I have had is that disk images fail to dismount (External HDs never have problems). Other than that, I haven't had any problems with my installs (5 Clients, 1 server) and my home theatre mac is wonderful with the new Front Row 2.0!
Right, that was especially common when plug-ins weren't compatible or universal during the initial switch from PPC to Intel.
I use only a few plug-ins, and they are all Universal Binaries or Intel builds. That's great advice. For other people, if you are interested in finding out what plug-ins you are using, you can go to the Safari Help menu and choose 'Installed Plug-Ins'.
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I wish Apple would return to the process of rolling out major interim upgrades like they did for the old Mac OS or like Microsoft does with their Service Packs for Windows.
Since OS X came out, Apple fixes almost exclusively stability and security issues in their updates. But other things which simply cry for user settings while leaving the core OS untouched (like the dock and the menu bar) are left untouched.
It is amazing how Apple force their decisions down the throats of their users. They can, of course: For me Windows and Linux are not better options.
We currently got a small batch of seven iMacs to replace a bunch of aging G3 Mac for my small business. Thankfully they came pre-installed with Tiger and with a Leopard upgrade disc. Guess what? With all the scary stability problems we reading all around the net, we are not upgrading and sticking with pre-installed Tiger for at least a year before deciding to upgrade.
Although I really love to upgrade to Leopard, and even have it running pretty well on my personal Santa Rosa Macbook Black; I'm not relying my business on a premature OS.