Leopard

Leopard is total trash. There I said it.

Rixstep has been documenting some of the egregious flaws in the OS at the programming level, but I’ve hit a snag that is so blatantly obvious that even normal people will be taken aback.

The bug that has driven me over the edge is with Front Row. I’ll play a song in the application, and it my utter delight my entire computer will freeze up. I’m not the only one suffering this either. Front Row worked just fine in Tiger, though even then it took a number of times for Apple to finally get it right. The one upside then was at least you could force quit the program. Now I’m completely screwed. Front Row takes the whole system with it now.

Apple has literally 7 hardware platforms that they have to target. It’s one of the most luxurious positions to have in the field of testing and QA. Microsoft has to try and support every piece of hardware that ever existed. Apple has it so easy and they can’t even push out an operating system that doesn’t completely screw up an application that worked reasonably well before. I’m left with a certain amount of awe, that Apple can code an application so badly that it will actually take everything down with it and force a UNIX system to do a forced power cycle.

Now, obviously crying over spilt milk (Front Row) is a bit much as one commenter has suggested. I’d agree, if Leopard was able to connect to Active Directory. Since binding OS X Leopard clients to Active Directory forests was left broken for at least two releases, we’re in a bit of a pinch. The most we can use our Leopard machines at this point is play our music.

Overall the outlook is fairly grim. Tiger stability was less than stellar on Intel machines until about the 10.4.9 update to Tiger. Maybe by time 10.5.9 comes out we’ll have a OS that is ready for public consumption.