Clark's Tech Blog

OK, it’s nearly been a month now since I upgraded to Snow Leopard. My posts about upgrading have, by far, been the most popular. I noted a few blogs (like The Apple Blog) are doing one month reviews. I like these as your initial impressions and your final impressions are often different.

First the negatives.

1. Python was quite rocky. For some code I ended up just running the older 2.5 version of Python for compatibility. But probably 95% of my scripts either worked or were easy enough to modify. (Some scripts that used alias code had to get converted to using symlinks but that wasn’t that big a deal) Some stuff still isn’t working with Python 2.6 and I’m eagerly awaiting the update to PyObjC to be able to call some of the new Snow Leopard libraries. But frankly I’m so busy I don’t have time to mess with that too much.

2. If you have HP peripherals you were in a world of hurt. HP is listing a lot of drivers as not being available until late December. Several of my HP stuff isn’t working (including a scanner). HP’s drivers were buggy before. I don’t know who heads their Mac team but it’s clearly not terribly well run. In comparison even old hardware from other vendors like Brother and Epson worked flawlessly.

My advice (and the advice of many others who have used HP): stay as far away from HP hardware as you can. What was in the 90′s a fantastic company is embarrassingly bad now.

3. There were a few older drivers and launchd programs that managed to “survive” through the upgrade that needed manual removal. I suspect many people have built up a lot of cruft. While upgrading is so much nicer, if you don’t know how to look for this stuff I’d suggest a clean install.

4. There have been reports of horror stories. But honestly, you’ll always get a few of these with any upgrade like this. I can say that the horror stories with Leopard were far, far worse than with Snow Leopard. Still, if you can, mirror your disk before upgrading to see if you have troubles. If you regularly use more obscure software – especially stuff that depends upon custom drivers – I’d suggest waiting a bit.

5. Some UI changes irked people. (The new Expose bugged some people although I think this is vastly overblown and I may do a post on this later) By and large though the UI is pretty much the same. (Although I do wish they had standardized the scroll bars)

6. The mouse situation is better now. The third party drivers are now 64 clean. But neither Logitech nor Microsoft have their updated drivers out. In particular with the Logitech mice, the third party drivers don’t handle it well. (In my experience)

7. Windows networking is very disappointing. Yeah, it was kind of bad still in Leopard. But that was the one thing I’d hoped Apple would fix. I find I still need to connect most of the time to my Windows machines by typing in the IP address and doing it manually. For whatever reason they just don’t show up properly in the Finder automatically.

8. Some people are having minor problems with CS3 (I run CS4 so I don’t experience any). There are some people having minor problems with Word but I’ve not encountered them.

9. Many plugins for Safari still aren’t available although a surprising number are. Glims seems to slow down Safari slightly although that will hopefully be fixed in a future release. ClicktoFlash has some really annoying bugs of autoplaying movies in a window – and when I turn off h264 handling it downloads them instead. 1Password works perfect in 64 bit mode (although it’s standalone app UI is horrid) However Safari has been rock solid: not one crash. Those crashes that happen tend to be Flash and are now isolated. It seems like most of the instability in Leopard Safari was actually due to Flash.

OK, enough of the bad. And as you can see there wasn’t a lot of it. Honestly I haven’t had any problems on the two machines I have it on. And I haven’t heard of many problems beyond HP peripherals and the occasional driver.

Overall I think this is a real solid upgrade. Many bugs are fixed. The speed on many machines is slightly better. The UI “feels” significantly faster and more responsive. The minor UI improvements in places like Expose are quite nice. I especially like the Dock – Expose features. The blue glow around windows is slightly annoying, but not unduly so.

After a month of using it I’m very, very pleased.

Related posts:

1. Complaining about Snow Leopard
2. Upgrading to Snow Leopard Part 6: 64bit vs. 32bit
3. On Supporting Snow Leopard
4. 64bit vs. 32bit Kernel in Snow Leopard
5. Upgrading to Snow Leopard Part 2: Minor Tips
6. Upgrading to Snow Leopard Part 4: MySQL
7. Upgrading to Snow Leopard Part 3: MacPorts
8. Upgrading to Snow Leopard Part 5: The Python Gripes