Last night, during our weekly podcast, we ended up having quite the heated discussion about whether people should upgrade to Leopard now or not. In the end, we pretty much all ended up agreeing that many people should not. Here are a few of the points brought up. If you have only one computer and it's your production machine, don't upgrade. The 10.5 upgrade is a big one--not a small update, not a few bug fixes. Lots of stuff gets broken and if you need to keep getting your work done, just wait. Let a few dot releases ease things out.
If you work with Adobe software and need your software to work reliably, don't upgrade. Apple didn't get its gold master out to third party developers in time for the upgrade path to proceed smoothly. Everything was rush, rush, rush. Developers simply did not have the time to work with the final product and make sure their apps would be compatible. If you need Acrobat (and I do) or In Design, you need Tiger. Don't upgrade to Leopard.
If you work with Windows, don't upgrade. Windows networking isn't working so good, according to several of our panelists who need to connect to Win machines on a regular basis.
If you have a lot of system customizations, don't upgrade. Many customizer tools like APE (application enhancer) are broken with the Leopard upgrade. You can do a clean Leopard install but you probably don't want to upgrade at this time.
So what do you do if you really want to give Leopard a spin? I recommend dual booting. Keep your Tiger installation now for the real work and add a Leopard partition to play.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
10-29-2007 @ 12:13PM
Moose said...
This was exactly the post I was looking for but hadn't seen yet - being on a production/Adobe CS3 machine, and yet wanting to upgrade. Cheers!
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10-29-2007 @ 12:14PM
nagrom said...
No problems here. Working in a windows environment, running Vista in a VMWare Fusion session. No problems connecting to other machines from either Vista or Leopard.
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10-29-2007 @ 12:16PM
Matteo said...
I performed a clean install and must say Leopard works well. I used Photoshop CS3 and without a problem.
Must agree on some things however...
More apps than what I thought are struggling big time with Leopard. The first that comes to mind (and that I use a lot) is Aperture. TUAW covered that extensively. Apple better come out with a fix really soon!
Windows networking however worked much easier and better than it did with Tiger. But then again, it might be because of the clean install.
All in all I recommend updating to Leopard, but only to the people whose life is not "going to be put in danger (i.e. people who really use these tools for their jobs)" if some Adobe app doesn't work or if "Aperture" doesn't. I haven't checked Illustrator or Acrobat, but if TUAW says so, then....
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10-29-2007 @ 12:20PM
John Day said...
The other major application that gets left behind with Leopard is FileMaker. Not much on this issue in TUAW yet.
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10-29-2007 @ 12:26PM
iGO said...
For all of you that DON'T like the 3D dock when lacated at the bottom of your screen, Mac Pilot v2.3.6 can restore it to 2D, as an option setting. Leopard supported o'Course.
http://www.koingosw.com/products/macpilot.php
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10-29-2007 @ 12:31PM
Johnny said...
So InDesign has problems with Leopard despite what Adobe said in their FAQ? For shame.
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10-29-2007 @ 12:31PM
Steven said...
@Johny Day:
Filemaker issues will be solved on november 18.
http://filemaker.com/support/leopard.html
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10-29-2007 @ 12:31PM
redsnowant said...
I'm a graphic designer, I live in Illustrator and Photoshop, I use Bridge, Aperture, Suitcase, Acrobat, Stuff-it etc haven't had any problems with the apps (fingers crossed) and I've gotta say Spaces is amazing!
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10-29-2007 @ 12:35PM
JR said...
You can make the dock 2D with these 2 commands in Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.Dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock
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10-29-2007 @ 12:41PM
Galley said...
I encountered the "blue screen of sadness", but an "archive & install" quickly fixed that. It appears that APE is installed by Logitech. Damn my Harmony remote!
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10-29-2007 @ 12:41PM
drakhul said...
Spaces ROCKS!
Have not noticed any issues thus far connecting to my Samba server or Win machines.
I did have to reinstall Acrobat Reader... Preview just does not cut it for viewing PDFs for me...
As a new Mac user, I must say this was a very painless upgrade. My MBP is only a month or so old, so that may have made a difference too, but I am used to major hassles upgrading Windoze machines.
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10-29-2007 @ 12:43PM
metin said...
Oh great . . . now you tell me!
I installed Leopard as soon as I got home Friday night, with my new T-Shirt on the whole time.
Now my www (dot) com extensions don't work. I didn't even know where the (w) was on the keyboard this whole time.
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10-29-2007 @ 12:45PM
Allan L. said...
Regrets: Half a day of my life wasted on a clean install, a misconfigured migration, an aborted manual update, and (finally) a good migration. Now I have an OS with ugly icons, an illogical and unreadable dock (stacks, mirror, 3d are not improvements for me!), a new challenge for version control (Time machine), and a bunch of utilities and programs that don't work (DiskinventoryX and, especially, Parallels 2.5). I haven't had an experience like this since I switched from a PC 3-1/2 years ago. Fortunately I have a bootable Tiger drive, but dual booting is a pain in the neck. I do hope it won't take a lot of time for these issues to be resolved. It's all understandable, of course: I mean, who could have imagined that this upgrade to OS X was coming?
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10-29-2007 @ 12:49PM
Watcher said...
Please, learn the proper use of "good" versus "well"
"Windows networking isn't working so good"
WRONG
"Windows networking isn't working so WELL"
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10-29-2007 @ 12:57PM
wnelson said...
Two production machines running all CS3 apps, and also running Parallels on one of them -- all quiet on the Western front.
Dedicating one Space to Parallels and turning off Coherence is _Righteous_.
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10-29-2007 @ 1:03PM
Ed Silver said...
Windows Networking issues are really a problem, I can't seem to access my shared Mac OS X drives from my windows network at all, has anyone heard of a workaround for this?
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10-29-2007 @ 1:05PM
STrRedWolf said...
I have Leopard... and the only good thing I can say is that Front Row looks and works better, and Alex (the new voice) sounds great.
Spaces... well, I'm mainly a Linux geek. I have four "Desktops" in KDE, each with seperate wallpaper to keep them distinquished. If something needs your attention and you're on a different desktop, tough cookies.
On Leopard, you have a bug with Screen: If a window needs your attention, Leopard will switch to the first space. Doesn't matter if the window's in #3, it'll auto-switch to #1. Gee, that's nice.
There's alot of other small nitpicky things Apple could of done. An option for turning off menu translucency. More dock options (I have mine on the bottom and to the left, and you know about the glassy effect). Oh, and if you try to network browse in CoverFlow, it shows Linux SMB servers as blue-screened Windows boxes. It! Could! Be! So! Much! More!
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10-29-2007 @ 1:06PM
Ari B. said...
@16
You're right. Allow me to use another example.
Incorrect: "I want to throw grammar nitpickers into a good."
Correct: "I want to throw grammar nitpickers into a well."
:-D
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12-12-2007 @ 2:52AM
Neil said...
Great one!
10-29-2007 @ 1:08PM
required said...
Since it's not ready for prime time they should sell it for less or hand out "early adopter aka unpaid bugger" rebates.
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