Leopard: Should you upgrade?

My itunes wont open now in Leopard. It tries to open then quits each time. I think it has to do with the 'cloud' extension from facebook tho as some other people i have chatted to on Leopard do not have this issue. I cant work out how to remove the 'cloud' thing out of itunes since it wont open.
Other than that, and a few freezes i am happy with my u/g to Leopard.

Got Leopard on the 26th, pre-ordered from Apple. Sent it back to them on the 28th. Went back to Tiger. I don't see 129.00 worth of work in it. Leopard is nice and all, but I find that most of the new stuff is useless for me.
The new dock is nice looking, but the transparent menu bar doesn't do much for me. I have a lot of desktop pictures and they are rotated automatically. Sometimes the menu bar is unreadable. No way to turn it on or off. An auto hide feature would have been nice.

Finders coverflow does not impress me. Seems to just take up a lot of finders window, to be pretty. I know i can set a different view as default. The new side bar is ok, I can live with it. I have never been fond of the way Finder sorts in list view, and it is no different in Leopard. Apple should take a look at PathFinder sometime.

Quick look is OK.

Time Machine is not for me. I can pretty much copy my home folder to an 8 gig USB pen drive. No control over when to backup, no control over what to backup. It is either on or off. Runs every hour, and your system resources will take a hit when it does.

Mail is ok. The new stationary is kind of cheesy stuff. Not anything I would use seriously.

iChat is useless to me. I am a new Mac user. All of my friends use PC's. I never used it in Tiger.

Spaces. Well I have been using VirtueDesktops since I got the Mac. Kind of use to it. Has tons more features.

Safari... no, I use Camino.

Parental Controls... I am a single male.

Boot Camp....lol I left windows in February, why would I want boot camp.

Leopard made me think Vista.... "Apple$oft"

Here are 5 reasons not to upgrade http://digg.com/apple/The_Top_Five_Reasons_Not_to_Upgrade_to_Leopard

I bought a family pack of Leopards on opening night, got the shirt. all is cool. But have only updated one of my machines - my notebook - because I just can't have my primary development machine broken for (x) time while they work these things out.

I'm hoping someone here knows something I don't about spaces - I'm also a KDE and GNOME guy, as well as a CodeTek virtual desktops guy for Tiger. I love having my windows at the bottom left of my primary monitor so that I can just click where I want to go, rather than having to do the F8 thing or the nav keys. I have 10 desktops all the time at least and the extra step is a pain and unintuitive IMO.

And speaking of desktops and monitors, this part about spaces REALLY bugs me. Since I have 5 monitors on my Mac, 4 are "outriggers" where I keep lots of stuff that I need open all the time, and my big primary one in front of me is what I used to switch with CodeTek virtual desktops (works like the desktop switcher in Gnome or KDE). So for example I could have a couple browser windows open in the outriggers, and when I switch to desktop 2 (for example) I have browser windows there as well ... but with the spaces model, an application is either on top all the time or switched with all the desktops. This is really the first time that I've been *terribly* disappointed with an Apple GUI mechanism because it looks as though it was written by people that have never had virtual desktops before, rather than being hardcore users of multiple virtual desktops and extending that. Grrrr.

So can I just get the new Mail and TimeMachine for Tiger instead please?

Back on topic, looking forward as well to a SAFT update ... it's just a marvelous upgrade to Safari and frankly I'm surprised that it's not embedded because it's just so naturally useful. And clearly, as you might imagine from the description of my rig above, having to re-open all my browsers every time I restart Safari is HORRIBLE.

I wish I read your arrticle before, and waited with the installation. The leopard is not a friendly software . My new Aio printer does not work as a printer and not as a scanner. If I new how to get back to 10.4.10 I would do it right away. The cosmetic "improvements" are not worth the money and effort.

@ Ed Silver

Setting your location from 'Automatic' to 'Workgroup' worked for me, but it's still intermittent.

The APE thing was fixed the day Leopard was released, wasn't it?

More FUD?

I had to find about all the adobe stuff the hardway.

Some more caveats from the open source side:

1. Inkscape
Inkscape won't start, because it doesn't recognize the X11 version

2. font forge
Font Forge will not be taken over by the "archive & install" method. Further investigation has to follow to find out whether a new install procedure will work.

3. Gimp 2.2
Gimp.app won't work. Already at start, when Gimp is trying to build a font cache, it runs into a problem and won't go on.

All these rely on X11, which is finally included in the standard installation of 10.5. To answer the most important question regarding X11: OpenOffice.org wil work, no difficulties yet.

I read on this blog for two days about what a problem this upgrade is. Terrifying I must say! When my copy arrived from Apple, I did an A/I, preserved my settings, waited twenty-five minutes and whamo -- not a hitch -- just a nicer, more functional, and (dare I say) quicker machine. What did I do? Updated all 3rd party software, did a complete back up with Super Dooper, removed all CRAP plug ins and disconnected my Lacie drive during the process -- works perfect -- everything....