** The Official Mac OS X Leopard First Impressions and Review Thread **

I bit the bullet and installed it. Upgrade from Tiger too. I backed up so I was confident. Been using it for a few hours now.

So far...

Good:

  • Dock doesn't bother me half as much as I expected with all the whining I've read
  • Quicklook is a lot more useful than I expected, as is coverflow for flipping through photos.
  • The upgrade process was really painless, I was impressed.
  • The webclip Dashboard tool is very nice. I've already made myself a weather widget I'll actually look at.

Bad

  • Some of the animations seem slower than they are on Tiger. Particularly minimizing windows. Also, the mouse tracking speed seems different.
  • I experienced my first ever "hang" on a Mac. While a DVD was loading I accidently triggered Dashboard and it seemed to fall over. Had to hard reset.

These are impressions after only a short period of time. I'm running 10.5.1 btw. No doubt I'll have more opinions as time goes on and I have a play with Time Machine and Spaces, but so far its been more good than bad. I'm happy.
 
I upgraded the RAM myself (Crucial sticks) and ran Tiger flawlessly for many, many months. :)

I even did some folding on it for a while which would have highlighted any problems. I think its just an OS bug, I had a look on the official forums and people are losing sound and everything. I'm sure it will be patched up given time.

Another good:

Been playing with screen sharing. Its a tiny bit laggy but highly useful for me, since I use my iMac as a home server. Now I have a nice little GUI instead of SSHing into it. I know there are other clients out there I could have tried but its a nice little OS feature. :)
 
Installed Leopard on Saturday. Clean install, after cloning my Tiger setup. Didn't get a chance to do much apart from reinstall my EyeTV software.
Sunday was spent migrating across my user and my wife's user from the Tiger clone. Then reinstalled some of my apps (didn't bother with ones I don't use much, and those which don't have Leopard compatible versions yet).

So far, it's all good. :D
My wife has a day off today, so I guess she'll be using the machine a bit today.

The 3D dock doesn't bother me at all (it's usually hidden anyway).
Stacks haven't bothered me yet, but that's because I only have the Downloads folder in the Dock.
Spotlight ROCKS compared to the Tiger version... really quick to start up those apps which I don't have a shortcut for in the Dock.
Spaces ROCKS. Very useful when installing all my apps again (one space for Finder windows, one space for Pages which had my document with all my keys and notes in, and one space for Safari when digging around to make sure I had up to date DMGs for all my installs).
Those little animations and everything seem smooth enough to me, no real change. (I'm on a generation 1 MBP 17inch, purchased in July 2006.... not true 64bit I believe :( )

I've not yet tested Time Machine yet (not set up yet). I need to check how that works with regards to having many users. Do you set up TM once, as an admin for all users (so my account, my wife's and also the Shared folder)... or does it need to be done separately. If the later, can each account's Time Machine exist on the same partition.

I need to have a play around with XCode now. That's for the Saturday when the missus is working (get to spend some 'my time').

EDIT: Wish I hadn't spent money on CandyBar2 now. See no need to have CandyBar3 to be honest... if there are any specific folders I create, I may wish to change the icon the manual way... but I'm quite happy with the standard look and feel to be honest. (In Tiger I was never really happy with the standard Look and Feel even in Graphite... which is why I used CandyBar2)
 
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Spotlight is faster and I like the definition field in the search results. Handy.

Spaces is a nice idea but I turned it off the other day through lack of use. I tend to prefer having windows open on the same screen, Expose it still my favourite feature.
 
Absolutely brilliant, no show stopping bugs at all!

The only problem I have is that I've had to drop down to 1gb, and its slowed up and started beachballing quite a bit with lots of applications open. Hopefully, once i've got my replacement from crucial, that shouldn't happen any more!
 
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