Mac OS X Leopard Released
Leopard is out.
It’s got built-in incremental backups, multiple desktops, and something like VNC (via iChat). So far the rest looks like fluff, although maybe upgrading would fix stuff the auto-updates broke, like the modem (known issue, won’t answer faxes as of 10.4.9).
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I’ll be on it next week and give my thoughts.
I was on it for a couple of days before my laptop had to go into the shop for unrelated reasons. Early thoughts:
Very nice multiple-desktop mechanism. Welcome to 1992, Apple!
They fixed an irritating bug where a printer shared from one mac wasn’t visible in the shared-printer list on another mac. (Even though it was visible from, say, Linux/CUPS.)
iCal got slightly worse — in month view, you have to double-click on an event to fill in the details, whereas before you could just hit tab to get into the detail window.
If you had a very recent Tiger install, the Leopard upgrade didn’t properly update /usr/bin/emacs, leaving you with a broken emacs post-update. I wound up reinstalling Leopard, this time choosing the “archive” option rather than the “upgrade” option — I figured if emacs was botched, other things would be too.
The X11 launch system has changed under the hood. You can just type xterm, or whatever, at a Terminal window, and launchd will automatically start X11 as necessary. Pretty slick. On the other hand, there’s a bug that may leave you with multiple X11 icons in the Dock when you have multiple X11 apps running. (Known bug, no fix date promised.)
Rumor mill says they didn’t do a good job with Java yet, but I haven’t run into that personally yet — although NeoOffice is god-awful slow, I wasn’t running it under Tiger so I can’t compare.
Jay, last I knew you were still on a power pc mac…Mike, you got a fancy-ass Intel, correct? Jeremy, which do you have? I can’t remember what, if anything, in os x itself was still running rosetta, but any speed hits/increases to speak of?
I’m a bad comparison point. I’ve had a G4 mini running Tiger for a long time. It’s always been agonizingly slow. I needed a laptop, though, so I took the gamble and bought a Core Duo Macbook Pro about 3 weeks ago. So I had Tiger on that for a couple of weeks, and then Leopard came out and I got it for $10. I can’t say I’ve noticed any performance differences, but I’m not a Mac power-user — I don’t have any Adobe tools, etc. I mostly get along on native apps, Firefox, and I’m just discovering OmniGraffle.