Leopard: Take 1

I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard last night. First thing I did was back up safely to a bootable drive using SuperDuper!, then I slipped the DVD in and gave it a go. I was thinking about starting from a fresh partition, but I’m busy right now and don’t want to lose the time spent restoring files from backup, etc.

First impressions:

That install took a long time.
After install, the 10.5.2 upgrade ran. There was a firmware upgrade somewhere in there that ran after the reboot; it’s interesting that upgrades are a place where Apple’s famed usability doesn’t really hit. The status message for the upgrade said something rather indescribable and utterly forgettable in computerese. I don’t remember this bare-bones of a firmware upgrade before… usually they have at least a non-geek message up during the upgrade. Is the candy-colored skin fading?
When it first boots, gawd, it’s slow. Just wait, it gets better. I think it’s faster than Tiger.
I don’t like the translucent menu bar at the top. Wish I had a way to change that.
I really don’t like the new dock (I keep mine on the left) with rounded corners.
All of my SCPlugin icons disappeared. Haven’t tried reinstalling it yet, but this does kinda cheese me.
I hate the new applications flyout in the dock with a passion that has to be experienced to be described.
I do like the ’spaces’ feature… it’s handy for when I’m working on a big coding project on my laptop, or to switch between a home project and a work project.

Overall, it’s kind of a meh upgrade. They changed a lot of things in ways I didn’t like… and a lot of the new features seem to be, well, an excuse to upgrade. I’d rather have seen them spend time upgrading things like how much memory some of the stock dashboard widgets take, or maybe fixing the finder so that you can easily re-associate files, or adding a reasonable Terminal.app, or a laundry list of 101 other little things that bug power users in their every day lives.