Upgrade to Leopard or wait?

talksense101talksense101
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
I have Tiger running merrily on my iMac G4 (1.25GHz). I also bought the retail Leopard DVD. But after reading the posts about Leopard problems even after 10.5.1, should I wait until 10.5.2 before I install it?



Also, if you do recommend installing it, what are the precautions to take? I guess #1 would be to back up your keychain. I have never done that before and I will look at it when I get back home in a couple of weeks (I am on tour atm). What else do I need to look out for?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,181moderator
    I have decided to wait. I think Leopard is worth the upgrade but it's not enough to justify having compatibility issues and I have lots of software that needs to work. I might upgrade over Christmas but Tiger is running ok so if it ain't broke...



    If you do decide to upgrade, clone your entire system first. This means buying an external hard drive (they are really cheap these days, I got a 500GB for £70). You'll be better getting a firewire one because you have a PPC machine - the Intel machines can boot from USB drives but the PPC support was flakey or non-existant.



    Then just use either superduper or carbon copy cloner and just copy your entire internal drive to the external. These will also make it bootable in case you need to start up on your old system. Once the clone is done after about an hour or two depending on the size of the internal drive, just go ahead and install Leopard and you shouldn't need to worry about backing up anything, just apply the upgrade.



    If anything does go wrong, you can clone your old system back and you'd be back to where you started with everything intact.
  • Reply 2 of 7
    talksense101talksense101 Posts: 1,738member
    Guess I will wait. I do have my system cloned via super duper to a la cie drive.
  • Reply 3 of 7
    dutch peardutch pear Posts: 588member
    I really wonder what percentage of Leopard users is actually affected by the problems you seem to fear so much. I have a feeling that it is in fact a very small but vocal minority.



    I have been using Leopard on the home iMac and work macbook since it came out and have yet to encounter a serious problem. Off course I did superduper backups before installation but had no need to use them. Oh, and I just did upgrades on both machines. Worked like a charm.



    Anyway, in everyday use I find Leopard to be more responsive and a real nice improvement of an already great OS. I really would not want go back to tiger anymore, mostly because of spaces, time machine and the new finder with quicklook, all of which have become highly integrated in my everyday computer-usage.
  • Reply 4 of 7
    shadowshadow Posts: 373member
    I've been using Leopard since it's release. I installed it on a separate test partition on my MacBook Pro first, tried how the apps work and found no serious issues. Two weeks later I moved the MBP to Leopard and installed it on an iMac at home. Never missing Tiger since. I know a dozen of people on Leopard and no serious complains (OK, some don't like the new dock, some - the menu bar, and sometimes the new Finder behavior irritates me but I am getting used to, and there are 'defaults write' workarounds for the rest).



    If you have apps your life depends on - check vendor sites/user reports for compatibility.



    Then go ahead and install Leopard. It's a great OS!
  • Reply 5 of 7
    spinnerlysspinnerlys Posts: 218member
    I would advise you the same about backing up or cloning your hard drive.



    But I recommend the "Erase and Install" option.



    At first I did an Leopard upgrade on an 3-week old system, it was more than okay.



    But yesterday I tried a clean Install, and the boot time is up to 20-30 seconds on an iMac C2D, and under a minuter on my old iBook G4 1 GHz. And it's snappier than before.



    My 2 oere.
  • Reply 6 of 7
    talksense101talksense101 Posts: 1,738member
    For one thing, I have data that I don't to lose like my email. Also, I have purchased and installed software over the internet like Novamind, etc. and I will have to do some serious digging to find the license keys if there are any issues. The other problem with internet based purchases is that I retired my .Mac account this year and most of the apps were registered to that email id. I also have a home network (over Airport express) with my Windows machine. As it stands, I need to make space on my hard disk by moving my music or photos to the external drive. It has a partition for backup of the system and another for data.



    But yes, I want Leopard's features and thats why I have purchased it. The way I see it, Tiger was a minor update from 10.3 when you consider the significant changes in Leopard.



    At the end of the day, I will take the plunge when I get back home. I don't think I will have the patience to wait.
  • Reply 7 of 7
    drboardrboar Posts: 477member
    Wait!

    I installed it both on a Intel mini and a Sawtooth with 1.2GHz G4 upgrade without problems. However, Tiger is a big step backward in important regards.



    1. Collapsing finder windows are gone. That is the trick of having an alias of the document folder in the dock that enable you to drill down through many folder levels and open a file and all opened windows close automagically is gone



    2. The firewall is open by default and when activating it many things have to be done in the terminal that previously could be done in the GUI
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