The point of this post is so that other mac users thinking of upgrading to snow leopard have an idea of what they could face. I have performed a 'upgrade' from 10.5.8 to 10.6.0. This was not a clean install and it was performed on a late 2008 unibody macbook.
So installed snow leopard about half an hour ago and here are the following are my main niggles. But before that, can i say I am a bit annoyed that snow leopard infact made my mac slower. The installation took about an hour and the first bootup was surprisingly and painfully slow. I am talking a full 1.5 minutes from the time my wallpaper loaded to the time the dock loaded. The time taken to the blue screen was surprisingly fast but the stupidly long time for the desktop to appear more than made up for it. (I am willing to post a video for anyone that refuses to belive)
Here go the niggles:
All of them (referring to speed or otherwise) are noted after another restart because things generally tend to be sloppy on the first, automated reinstall
1. Expose and spaces (especially when using command- to switch spaces) have become quite a bit choppy. Expose is not that bad and i personally like the new one. The multitouch issue (4 finger one) exists but doesnt effect me because i am used to talking my hand off after the gesture
2. Quicktime X: No comparison with pro here, just QT7. The movie doesnt start when quicktime is launched and does even launch when you skip forward/back. It is very annoying that one has to always click the play button. Plus, it has no preferences what so ever. It also looses the double or triple size feature
3. Safari 4 and flash. Disastrous to say the least. Trying to watch youtube is nice switching on an electrical has hob. Within seconds your MBP can start cooking eggs on its backside. I switched to safari from firefox once it was announced it would get 64 bit but in my usage safari has become slower than it was in leopard. Add that with the flash disaster and the fact almost all ads are in flash plus adblock not working made me return to firefox where i am living in peace
4. Stacks. I am one of those very well millions who have their applications folder as a stack. Because of the large icons and the ability to scroll, you can only see the applications till 'F' before you need to scroll. In leopard i could see all but 2 applications
5. Overall the whole system is slower. An example is that itunes used to take 5 'bounces' on the dock to open from a cold boot, it now demands 9.
Same can be said for just about any application. Dashboard widgets take ages to load
6. Quicksilver - a must have application for many now has a very annoying bug. If your working in multiple spaces and want to launch an application using quicksilver say in space 3 and previously launched one is space 1, launching quicksilvers opens it in that space (1) instead of the one you want to launch the program in (which you were initially in)
6. Animations all over have taken a hit, not only expose and spaces. For example something as simple as opening a finder window from the desktop and watching it zoom/spring into action is now either non existent or very choppy. Bear in mind this is on a unibody macbook with the 9400M GPU and snow leopard was supposed to improve graphics.
The good bits
1. Expose - even though a bit choppy, its integration with the dock and grid alignment has won me over
2. Microsoft office 2008 - finally works with expose and spaces. Brilliant addition for me
3. I gained back about 13GB of space
4. Date in the menu bar - small but welcomed
Now i dont want to put people off from upgrading from snow leopard. These issues, from what i hear and minor compared to the previous .0 releases and no disaster is striking during installation.
I have also heard that things speed up after a day or two of use with a newly installed operating system, in my case, i sincerely hope this is true. I am giving snow leopard a week to mends in sluggishness otherwise a clean install of snow leopard will be performed or a re-installation of leopard via the dvd that came with my mac
