Finally bought Leopard

Breezer

Well I finally took the plunge. There's a few nice Leopard-only apps floating around at this stage, I've money in the bank again, I got a good deal on eBay, and I've finished college so it doesn't matter hugely if the whole things goes pear shaped.

Having said that, I'd like the upgrade to go as smoothly as possible, so just wondering if there's anything in particular I should be aware of that I haven't heard of. I'm probably gonna do a clean install since I have the time and because I had APE installed a while back, should minimise the problems.

In other words: any mad Leopard bugs still causing chaos?

(Sorry for the disjointed nature of this post, I'm a bit excited )

triple h

And indeed you should be excited, Leopard is amazing. I love it. Congrats.

I did an upgrade and had no trouble.

I loved Tiger, but i would not be happy to use Tiger now after using Leopard. Can you imagine how i would feel about another operating system after saying before i upgraded that Tiger was the best OS i had ever used.

Type 17

You mentioned doing a clean install - good idea, but if you chicken out and don't go that far, be sure and do an Archive and Install, rather than a simple Upgrade - most of the issues that people had when migrating to Leopard were when they did an Upgrade install.

10.5 is stable enough, but has a few annoying interface issues like stacks in the dock not being viewable as folders, so I'd take the time to download all of the updates to 10.5.2 before you dive in too far, as you'll have a much nicer initial experience then.

As triple h said, it's definitely superior to (the fabulous) Tiger. I also felt that Tiger was the best OS when it was current, but when I see it again on the Macs at my brother's office, I'm happy that I migrated to Leopard...

Halfa

Archive and install is recommended. I have Leopard since release with little or no issues. It initially wouldn't install at all though. Took 2 weeks with Apple Care to find out i'd 1 stick of faulty factory installed RAM! Tiger never noticed. Thankfully Leopard did cause my warranty was due up two weeks later!

Spaces is totally cool as is time machine
Back to my mac is good as is the ability to control someones machine through ichat



Enjoy

kevteljeur

I bought Leopard at Christmas, waited until 10.5.2 to upgrade, but after that I had to wait until I had a window of several days in my work schedule to do it (in case of gotchas taking my notebook out of action) and because overheating was starting to knock out my notebook every hour or so, which was a week and half ago.

It didn't disappoint on many fronts. I decided to do a clean install, wiped and re-partitioned the drive and then to manually migrate my accounts and data, but the real killer was the several blue-screens I had to get through, along with learning about the single-user start-up (did anyone know that 'fsck_hfs' can do the same directory rebuilding trick that makes DiskWarrior so useful? I didn't, but I had to find out :-( ) in order to fix whatever was wrong several times. In 12 years I've never dealt with a Mac OS that was this sensitive to mis-installations of software; almost certainly some stuff which was playing a little rough with the filesystem. That nearly broke my heart.

However, migrating the settings and then the files all went smoothly enough, and the speed and feature increase really made it all worth it. When I first got my MacBook Pro I migrated all my data from my iBook with Mac OS 10.3 using Migration Assistant, so up until I wiped and installed Leopard, I still had some rubbish in there from OS 9 and earlier. I really think that a clean install with minimal migration of system settings files can get you 10% performance over using an Upgrade install, or using Migration Assistant. Also, an Upgrade can leave various apps and plugins in place which Leopard is very sensitive to; it would be a killer to have to try and pick them out manually.

Lastly, I ended up having to muck about with compiling PHP and some other web development stuff; not everything has quite caught up with the OS yet, but t least it wasn't as painful as I'd expected.

Now it's all up and going, I think it's fantastic, and well worth the effort. I reckon 10.5.2 probably took out any of the serious bugs, and the remaining ones are more like 'differences of opinion'. The Finder is great for example, but I have a feeling that a later update will add some settings to adjust the behaviour of it. Spotlight's CPU usage (in the wrong circumstances it will bring your Mac to it's knees - read up about it), and some issues with Time Machine are things I'd look out for. I have Spotlight switched off until I can work around it...