Leopard initial reactions
Rather than buying a new computer, I’m updating my old one right now, and installed Leopard yesterday.
Normally when I install a major upgrade, I do a “clean install”—reconstructing my old environment by manually importing old files and recreating preferenecs is admittedly laborious, but it gives me a chance to re-examine what’s on my hard drive and jettison stuff I never use. I cloned my boot drive to an external drive, and selected the erase-and-install option in the Leopard installer. After that finished, it offered to import my old setup from my external drive. For some reason, I chose this option, and regretted it, as it faithfully imported every bit of cruft from my old system, some of which caused Leopard to lock up. Apart from that, I have to admit it did a sterling job—every jot and tittle was in place. It would be nice if I had more control over what got imported and what did not.
Tried again with the clean install, followed by manual copying of specific folders and files. I had a little trouble importing my old Mail folders, and discovered that I had to export my Address Book data (using Address Book running on a different computer) before I could import it to Leopard. And then I discovered one of those annoyances only a geek could love. For whatever reason, my short user name was now adamjrice. It has always been adamrice in the past, and this change was, of course, unacceptable. The path to my $HOME directory had changed similarly. One new and appreciated feature in Leopard is that it’s actually easy to change this: right-click on your username in the Accounts prefpane sidebar and it gives you the “advanced options” to fix this. Nice. However, it makes this change by creating a new $HOME directory with defaults, not by moving the old one, and instantly, silently migrating you to that. This causes weird and unwanted results. My advice: if you are going the clean-install route, check to make sure you are happy with your short user name before you do any customization. Fix it if need be, and log out/relog.
Other than these breaking-in pains, so far I’m happy. My computer is noticeably faster (not just subjectively—apps open faster, and Second Life, a poky pig, ran at about 2x the framerate making it almost tolerable), although this may have as much to do with blowing out some crufty haxies as anything else. Network throughput likewise seems to be faster, but I haven’t measured this.
QuickLook is probably worth the price of admission all by itself, especially if you can get plugins for the files you use the most. Last night, Gwen was trawling through a directory full of EPSs with meaningless names. Even though she’s still running Tiger, I mounted her drive, installed a QuickLook plugin for EPS, and was able to browse most (not all) of those files with previews in a couple of minutes. Big win. Coverflow in Finder, which seems like a frill, is useful in the same way QuickLook is, especially when, say, trawling through a directory full of meaninglessly-named EPS files.
As others have mentioned, Spotlight has gone from sucking to not-sucking. I reiterate that fact simply because the transformation is so stark.
So far, I’m calling this a success.