Charles on… anything that comes along

I know I said I’d do a clean install of Leopard. Yeah, well. Call me a coward. There’s just too much in there, and I don’t have a spare machine to play that game with (and I can’t be arsed doing all the re-installation of so many things).

So I waited until 10.5.1 appeared - which seemed smart, once I tried it, because 10.5.0 has something flaky which means the wireless connection drops out every couple of minutes. If this is your problem, upgrade (via Ethernet?) at once.

Anyway, now we’re at the point where it’s a release-able version, here’s my take, to add to the few million others. Bear in mind I’m really trying to do things which are production-oriented: scripts, cron jobs, IMAP mail, that sort of thing. Twiddles generally don’t make a lot of difference to my productivity.

The good:

• Spaces may be quite fun, though I tend to be a tab-between-apps person. Actually Desktop Manager is much better (tip o’ the hat to Kevin Anderson), except it doesn’t work on Leopard. So I’m trying to hack the code - recompile it on Xcode, really - so it will. Hmm.
• the cosmetic changes are nice, I think: my laptop’s so old I don’t get the transparent menu bar
• the Finder sidebar is a big improvement: rational and organised
• gradient on top of windows is good, and the darker-not-lighter of front windows is good too. Overall, the cosmetics are great. Would it be too much to ask them to stay consistent now, and not get screwed up by iTunes and iLife launches in the meantime?
• left my install of MySQL completely alone
• TextEdit can do a lot more - almost good enough to replace Word.
• system-wide grammar checking! Neat

The bad:

• sometimes simply crashes, hard - screen is frozen and the only way to get out of it is a force-power-restart. That’s really bad. Maybe due to lack of disk space. But how can one find out? The logs won’t get written, because the system’s frozen
• terrible battery consumption during sleep - my Powerbook lost 9% in five hours asleep
• wake up from sleep can be very unreliable: sometimes Mail stalls hugely (perhaps due to my using Gmail IMAP)
• doesn’t have the System Preferences clock which can be transparent and floating above your desktop - which had been there since the beta. Boo.
• firewall is a bit crap: turned off by default even if you had it on before
• deleted, or hid, my cron jobs; reinstating them required editing by hand using the marvellous Cronnix
• hid all the user settings for my web space in Sites
• turned off PHP by default in the new server, even though I’d turned it on before
• seems a bit heavier on memory and disk space
• Spaces can be buggy - I spent an annoying hour having it pull me to another space for no reason before rebooting the whole fscking thing
• Activity Monitor doesn’t show how much is being used by system accurately - says that it’s all being used by me, where that’s patently incorrect, even by its own numbers (I’m not root, after all)
• Java apps run really, really slowly
• Still can’t create a Smart Mailbox based on a message’s colour. How long have we had Mail? How long have we had a rule to colour Mail messages? This is just flipping ridiculous
• Spotlight is sometimes so busy that it kills itself - my machine crashed (or went into a phase where it simply wouldn’t respond, so I force-restarted it) and apparently that took down the Spotlight index; so on restart, the machine is reindexing the whole hard drive.
• Spotlight isn’t particularly faster.
• The whole thing isn’t particularly faster on my 1.67GHz Powerbook (1GB RAM). If anything, it’s quite a bit slower - NetNewsWire in particular seems to be a complete dog, sucking up globs of CPU
• did an upgrade install - but Xcode wasn’t upgraded. DURGH?? You have to go and do a separate install for all the developer tools, which is a bit un-obvious.
• iCal scripts run really slowly. Not that they were fast before, but now they’re really slow.

Overall, though, I feel like this isn’t always faster. I do feel like I’m often sitting looking at the machine spinning its pizza at me. That’s with 7.2GB of 100GB free (don’t ask me where all that space has gone to. Movies?). That’s not productive..

Overall marks? I’d say 7/10. Some of the changes are good, but it’s still short of where it should be.

Update: hmm, my quibbles are pretty small compared with this guy’s - who had a dire upgrade and whose Keynote (equivalent to PowerPoint, only nicer) leapt unprompted to the last slide repeatedly during a presentation. Yeow:

At the start of this post, I mentioned how much penetration OS X was getting with speakers and developers (the very people that others turn to for advice on which computer to buy). What is going to happen now that speakers realize that Keynote on Leopard is not reliable and may make them look bad in front of an audience? How many will downgrade to Tiger or begin their talks with a disclaimer about how unreliable Leopard is?

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Leopard running slow on your ageing Mac? Here's how to speed it up: fewer colours (update: except Apple won't let you) (3 December 2007; score: 34.87%)
• In the Guardian: Why Leopard doesn't make me purr, and others (13 December 2007; score: 32.87%)
• What the *hell* is wrong with my Leopard system? What is "callback_client" and why does it die? (20 February 2008; score: 31.84%)