I’ve spent a weekend with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, now, including a couple aborted attempts at installing it, and I think I can safely say I’m liking it. I tend to shy away from *.0 releases, primarily because they never have all the bugs worked out. For the most part, I’m impressed at how 10.5.0 is. Sure, there’s a couple rough edges, but I expect they will be addressed in point releases over the next couple months.
By far my biggest problem was getting Leopard installed. It had been long enough since I upgraded from Panther (10.3) to Tiger (10.4), that I had forgotten all the good advice and experience. My first attempt was an in-place upgrade (choose “Upgrade” from the install types). Due to my ignorance, I had left a number of relatively “hacky” things installed before the upgrade that wouldn’t work post-upgrade. Once I restored my 10.4 system and pulled out the hacks, things worked much better. And, while I’m making a point to go into some detail here about these problems, the overall experience was actually very good. (My final system, for the record, was installed with the “Archive & Install” option, not the “Upgrade” option.)
Really, my biggest complaint about the upgrade was that it took a couple hours for the install, and then several hours of Spotlight re-indexing my HD. Starting the upgrade before going to bed cured me of having to wait for it, though. I imagine a current-generation MacBook or MacBook Pro would take much less time for the install.
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