Quick observations on Snow Leopard
I’ve been running Snow Leopard for slightly more than a week. Thought I’d share some early observations.
The hardware:
- The Desktop: A Mac Pro with 2 Dual-core Intel Xeon processors running a 2GHz with 2GB RAM.
- The Laptop: An early MacBook with a single Dual Core Intel Core Duo with 2GB RAM.
The operating system was upgraded in place on each machine with no application changes. The Desktop is my school machine and is connected to the campus network and authenticates against a Windows Active Directory server. The Laptop is my primary machine and is a standalone machine connected to my home network.
Didn’t have any major problems with installing on either machine. The only issue was a problem with the physical install media on the Desktop.
Observations:
- Some of the tech pundits have complained that this release should have been treated as a maintenance release on Leopard. They’re wrong. While the visual experience isn’t very different, the changes in underlying infrastructure are wide and have far-reaching implications.
- Which leads to the first point: 64-bit support. The OS went for 64-bit mode on the Desktop. Broke a ton of kexts that I had to manually remove. However, it did seem to improve application performance on that machine, esp. for apps that have been ported to 64-bit.
- Had to upgrade a bunch of applications to new versions. Waiting on some vendors to release versions of their applications with Snow Leopard support. Biggest problem so far as been with Growl. Had to completely turn it off on the Desktop. Had some problems with R2009a version of MATLAB; MathWorks just released R2009b with major revamp of their OS X support. Snow Leopard still ships the broken version of the X Server and we are waiting on an update from the XQuartz team for a more recent version that can handle the SL changes.
- Just had to punt on some applications. Snow Leopard cannot tolerate the early versions of the Parallels hypervisor (anything earlier than v4.0).
- Lot’s of people pointed out the issues with Flash application. There are other applications that suffer the same issue.
- There’s an issue with Software Update blowing chow on you when you attempt to perform an update while logged on a remote user authenticated with ActiveDirectory. Was able to update to 10.6.1 by
running Software Update using a local user. - Ran into the issue multiple times with older applications requiring you to install Rosetta. Have been able to just delete these applications in most cases as I was either no longer using them or the functions they provided is now provided by Apple as part of the Operating System.
Assessment
Wait about a month unless you’re buying a new machine. Seeing too many little gotchas that need to be ironed out before most people should do the upgrade. The transition from Leopard to Snow Leopard has much of the same feel as the transition from Jaguar to Panther.
Just as with the 10.2->10.3 transition, lots of stuff that appears to be same at the user level in fact works very differently under the covers. Need to give Apple some time to react to feedback and make some adjustments in a few maintenance releases before you make the leap.
Selah.