Apple pushed this out instead of a full OS because they are too busy and making too much money with the iPhone. I have disk but with all the incompatabilities, I am afraid to install. Lepard runs great, no problems.
Not even CLOSE to being true. SL is a full OS, and well worth the upgrade.
Anyway, as someone who went through both the XP -> Vista 64-bit upgrade and now the Leopard -> Snow Leopard upgrade, I can say that
no, SL is nowhere close to being Apple's Vista.
Have there been incompatibilities? Sure! I had problems with
- iStat menus (fixed)
- Flip4Mac (fixed so far with a beta release of the new version)
- Growl (not yet fixed but still useable, though I hear betas fix the problems)
- and iCal (publishing calendars to the Web doesn't work for all-day events; workaround for now is to run the app in 32-bit mode on the Mac that does the publishing)
Considering most of these issues are mitigated for me with workarounds, I'm pretty happy with SL right now.
Vista? Heh! When I upgraded,
nothing worked, and there were no workarounds. My computer was pretty much unuseable for over a month before fixes finally started to trickle in, and it
was enough to make me switch to a Mac. Is Snow leopard bad enough for me to switch back? Not in a million years.
The press pretty much bears it out too. Reviews are mostly positive for SL. Whereas Vista got near-universal bad press all around.
Microsoft likes to take zings at Apple for charging $29 for what they claim is equivalent to a "Service Pack" upgrade. But, why are
they charging anywhere from $119 to $329 for the release of Windows that supposedly cleans up their last big mistake?
I guess bigger mistakes lead to bigger upgrade costs, huh?