Moving to OS X 10.5 Experience

So I went to my local Apple store (Glasgow) on Thursday and picked up a copy of 10.5 along with a backup hard drive for Time Machine.

Didn't have the best experience in the store (was ignored by all staff for about 20 minutes even when I was waiting at the cash desk) so things weren't off to a good start.

My setup when I bought 10.5 was a Macbook with Boot Camp running XP SP2. Not because I'm not a fan of OS X, just because there is some software I use at University which simply doesn't run in OS X. The two main advantages of upgrading to 10.5 for me were A2DP (Bluetooth Stereo) and Windows Vista support.

Right from the start it didn't go too well. I had planned on wiping my XP partition, installing 10.5 and then using the new version of Boot Camp to install Vista. Unfortunately Boot Camp has expired so there was no way of wiping the partition that I was aware of. So I just decided to go ahead and install 10.5. To my surprise it was incapable of finding a partition to install onto, it didn't even detect my already-existing OS X partition. Ugh.
So I did a bit of surfing and found that I could change the date on my Macbook so that I could use Boot Camp again and therefore switch my disk back to one partition. After this was done I installed 10.5 without any real problems.

So I got started. It is a lot slower than 10.4, that's the first thing I noticed. Even going through finder can cause everything to grind to a halt, not very impressive.
So I cracked out my bluetooth headphones and really wasn't impressed. The sound is worse than the sound my phone delivers to it and it is very hard to actually get the music playing out of it and not just getting error messages.
Time machine seems cool. Really doubt that it will ever have been worth me buying a backup drive but you never know these days. All my music is backed up on my mp3 player I tend to be very careful with files that I am working with.
All the interface stuff is very superficial. The dock actually annoys me, in 10.4 I used a transparent dock and the arrows with active programs was more informative than little lights under programs.
Spaces? Meh, the exact same thing has been possible for years in Linux environments and I had an app that did it in 10.4. Same as the extra stuff with folders on the dock, was all available in 10.4 with a little work.

Boot Camp... works too well... I installed Vista extremely easily and the plug-ins on the disc are great, all the advantages of using a Macbook are available, the function buttons work a lot better than in the beta build.
I'd never used Vista before... but it's nice. I know it steals a lot from OS X but it does it well, a lot smoother than the current 10.5 build. Plus my headset works great with it.

I spent the last few months since I got my macbook (my first mac) growing to love OS X but I fear that 10.5 is going to push me to using Vista.

If you actually prefer Vista to Leopard, please say so, because otherwise I can't believe that's what you're saying.

So far yes, nothing has struck me as a great improvement in Leopard yet

You should try manually rebuilding the spotlight database and running all maintenance scripts. When I first installed Leopard on my MacBook Pro, everything was slow and jerky. Once I had rebuilt everything, it ran smoothly.

I have noticed that people who were using Bootcamp and then upgraded to 10.5 seem to be having the most problems, so your story doesn't surprise me.

Thundermoon1994 said:

You should try manually rebuilding the spotlight database and running all maintenance scripts. When I first installed Leopard on my MacBook Pro, everything was slow and jerky. Once I had rebuilt everything, it ran smoothly.

Click to expand...

Ok I have no idea where to even start with this. Sounds like it could make a difference if you sent me a link explaining how to do it but why would this help? It is Finder that is misbehaving, not Spotlight.

baggss said:

I have noticed that people who were using Bootcamp and then upgraded to 10.5 seem to be having the most problems, so your story doesn't surprise me.

Click to expand...

Well I said in my post that I had completely restored my partition before upgrading so I really can't see how your post is relevant.

First of all, there's Virtual Desktops and then there's Spaces. If you move from space 1 to space 1, your entire "space 1" moves to the left so you know exactly where you are. Plus assigning applications, moving windows, expose within spaces, it's a much better deal

Second, I found Leopard to be significantly faster than Tiger. Spotlight shows the biggest improvements.

If you don't need to backup, then don't use Time Machine. There's no need to complain about something you don't need. Others like us are tired of 'maintaining backups' and Time Machine provides a ready respite.

The dock/menubar does seem to affect some, but there's an easy terminal hack to get rid of that.

All in all, an excellent upgrade on my side...

goobimama said:

Second, I found Leopard to be significantly faster than Tiger. Spotlight shows the biggest improvements.

In All in all, an excellent upgrade on my side...

Click to expand...

Agreed. Spotlight is SO much faster here it's scary. Amazing speed increase with Spotlight over Tiger.

Leopard is way faster. Only in Mac land do the next generation operating systems run faster. In PC land they run slower and slower, Microsoft has to keep the PC OEMs happy by forcing hardware upgrades.

If you are familiar with Kubuntu which is another Unix shell then it's use of Virtual Desktop is almost the same if not better than Leopard to be honest, it's easier to move windows around and more accessible. And Expose is an OS X feature, not a Spaces features, if you were running a Virtual Desktop application in OS X it would still have Expose (At least my 10.4 application did)

As for Spotlight, I have to say that it's something I possibly used twice in six months in the 10.4 since I keep all my files organised and easily accessible Iso never really need to search for things.

What do you mean about the dock/menu affecting some? What affect?

If anyone has any suggestions about anything I could do to improve my A2DP connectivity and speed up Leopard for me then those would appreciated since these were the main focuses of this topic.

I meant, expose within Spaces. That is, hit F8, and then hit F9 to see all your windows with expose

Dock/menu affecting some as in, they dont' like it. To revert back to the flat dock and the non transparent menubar, there's a simple terminal hack.

Yeah I know what Expose is, I could do it with a Virtual Console app in 10.4

Kinda weird reverting the dock back to 10.4 when apple are so happy about their shiny new GUI. Again to be honest I didn't really like the 10.4 dock either, I always used application enhancers but they won't run in 10.5, nor will insomnia x =(