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Leopard and Vista - More alike than you might think


section: windows, for your questions: KezNews forum, 6.11.2007

When Vista was released the chorus of complaints and criticisms quickly grew from a low hum to a near deafening roar. A little more than a week since Apple released Leopard and that low hum of discontent has already been amplified to the point where it’s starting to hurt my ears.




Within weeks of Microsoft unleashing Vista on the buying public the issues facing those making the switch from XP to Vista were clear and you could sum them up in a few bullet points:

* UAC too intrusive
* Too many bugs
* System slow-downs
* Too many compatibility casualties
* Glitchy interface
* Baked-in vulnerabilities
* Install buggy and prone to crashing
* Systems that were rock-solid under the XP now falling over regularly

Now that Leopard has been in the hands of users for a little under ten days and you can draw up a similar list for Apple’s latest OS:

* Too many bugs
* System slow-downs
* Too many compatibility casualties
* Glitchy interface
* Baked-in vulnerabilities
* Install buggy and prone to crashing
* Systems that were rock-solid under the Tiger now falling over regularly

Dave Winer does a good job of summarizing the problems affecting Leopard:

I’ve given Leopard a chance, but it’s pretty clear, this is not a good operating system release.

I’ve been out of the Mac loop for most of the last decade, just got back in a bit over 2 years ago. I don’t know if early OS releases are generally as crappy as this one, but I wasn’t prepared for where we’re at now. If I had known, I would have waited, instead of upgrading most of my Macs to the new system.

In fact, Winer also goes on to compare Windows to Mac OS X:

Talking with a friend a few days ago, he asked what I thought of Leopard. He had installed the new version, like me, the first day it came out. “I’m not liking it,” I said. He said something that was simple, profound and revealing: “It’s like Windows.” It is. It’s that unpleasant to use. It disappears for long periods of time. Systems that didn’t used to crash now crash regularly. On one system three hard disks were rendered unusable, and I lost a couple of full days restoring them (luckily I had good backups). The user interface is quirky. The new networking interface is a big step backward. The firewall moved and lost features! That’s simply never done, you don’t charge customers to remove features, esp security features. I think Apple doesn’t understand how many people depend seriously on their Macs.

I’m guessing that the root cause for these problems echoes Vista too - a rush to get the OS out of the door. It makes me sad to say it but we as consumers are now having to put up with buying far too many flawed products because companies are rushing to get products out to market and leaving us (the poor saps stuck with the defective product) to road test it properly, I’ll bet that the road to fixes for these problems will be as long and rocky as the one for Vista. Something else that the two operating systems will have in common.

Leopard’s not generating good press for Apple at the moment (actually, when you stop and thing about it for a moment, not much is generating good press for Apple lately) and it might help is affected users were given a timetable of when to expect robust fixes to come down the tubes.

The strange thing is that I’m quite happy with my Mac and Leopard. I’m guessing that this is because I’m still near the bottom of the Mac OS X learning curve and not pushing the OS too hard.

source: blogs.zdnet.com

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Comments(11)

I knew

By BasicKiller on 07.11.2007 - 07:11
i already new it will s*ck...

leopard

By swandike on 07.11.2007 - 10:11
vista is more crap than leopard.
at least leopard got drivers, compatible with most osx programs, at least works with most macs.

vista has been here for a year and i still dont like it. thats bad

I'm surprised!

By Martha on 07.11.2007 - 12:11
i'm surprised to know that leopard has such problems. but i doubt it's in a worse state than vista, that would be a stunt! lol

Vista's just fine

By drwillmore on 07.11.2007 - 12:11
face it ppl! right now vista's just fine. i don't think they have major compatibility issues with new machines. mine is 2 yrs old, has all sorts of customized s/w from lg and yet it works just fine with vista. in fact, i'm much much happier with vista than xp.

vista is not fine

By kj on 07.11.2007 - 18:11
unless you are running a machine with 512mb dx 10 graphics 4gb ram 2.6ghz cpu and at elast a 200gb harddrive vista is terrible. when i use xp it surprises me how speedy it is and its great how my programs never crash on xp. face it vista is bad and will never be good (btw im actually running a pretty new fast machine and vista still blows)

Bad mouth Leopard disease just don’t cure my Vista illness

By Vista Patient on 07.11.2007 - 22:11
i don't spend a dime on the mac os so i don't give a sh!t about the mac leopard problems. bad mouth the apple leopard disease just don’t cure my vista terminal illness
i spent $420 on vista ultimate so i only want to kick the microsoft engineers to get them off their behinds to release much needed fixes for my vista os. i want fixes to speed the vista up to 20 times faster, cut out the bloat wastes and useless craps, restore useful xp functions, fix bugs, give me more drivers, fix the multi-3d audio environment for gamers, speedup the file transfer, speedup i/o, speed up user interface with immediate response after a mouse click, kill the damned spinning blue circle, my old doggy xp intel pentium 4 512meg ddr 266 mhz ram seem to has faster response time than my vista intel core 2 duo 6650 with 2gig of ddr2-800 mhz ram.


YEAH GREAT

By Macman on 08.11.2007 - 20:11
yeahhhh right!!! for more then a week i installed leopard on my mac mini core2duo 2.0ghz 1gb/120gb/sd and i haven't got one single problem, it works like a charm. it's stable, fast (faster then tiger) and looks awesome. if it goes about timemachine (wonderfull), quicklook, the new finder, spaces and of course the new dock with stacks it just working great. vista, don't let me lauch. i used a couple of month's but it's nothing compared to leopard. it's slow (if you install many programs wait 2/3 minutes to load), unstable, virussen/spyware...ohhh i am so tired, only to talk about vista.

cheers vista lovers....

BASED ON TRUST

By Macman on 08.11.2007 - 21:11
if you have an older x86 system you must upgrade your hardware or buy a new system to run the unstable vista with a lot of bugs. leopard runs fine on older systems.

vista ultimate retail costs more then 500 bucks and leopard (ultimate), with everything in it, costs only 129 (family pack for 5 systems costs 199).

if you buy leopard, you own your copy (it's based on trust)..not like microsoft does with that stupid activation.

I dont understand

By Whitts on 09.11.2007 - 05:11
i have run vista since feb and havnt had any problems apart from a few games not running. these days i leave my computer one 24/7 and it never crashes. i only rebootwheni install new updates. all games run fine - infact when i go to work and im on my xp machine or my windows 2000 sidekick - things seem sluggish in comparison to vista (i dont know if thats the fancy effect hidin gthe fact) but to me it seems faster. everything but file trx, what the **** microsft..... got to wait 10 mins before i can copy files off my camera because the green bar thingy has to reach the end..... never tried mac... never will.... due to the fact that i dont need to..

TO: Whitts

By Macman on 10.11.2007 - 22:11
you''ll change you mind if you try leopard for one week.

Compatibility

By LATechGuy on 14.11.2007 - 09:11
yah, everyone loves to rag on ms for poor compatibility... ms software works great on ms os's. but guess what, all the other apps are not ms's problem. you want working apps, then tell those 3rd party software co's to get off their lazy asses and write decent code, they have only had a year to do so now. same goes with drivers. ms is mainly software not hardware. they built a product, with generic drivers to make it work out of the box. thats all they need to do. if you want full power, tell the hardware guys to code some decent drivers according to spec and not hack/re-write xp code to get it to work. vista costs so much because its a new fresh os from the ground up with familiar features, not an os with some updates and a facelift like apple. the thought of apple charging for a service pack with a few gui enhancements is horrible. (yes i know there are other features, but nothing larger than an ms service pack which is free.)


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