Ad Terras Per Aspera

So, I upgraded my Aluminum Powerbook to 10.5, and most likely this will be the last major version of OSX I use; 10.5 works with no G3s, nor the slower half of all G4s (with 867mhz being the cutoff), so the next logical step is to drop all G4s in 10.6, and all PowerPCs in 10.7 (though thats another 5 years away at least).

That said, the upgrade process went smoothly. Upgrading only took about an hour and a half, and only a few things broke. Three of the major ones are MacFUSE (which I use for SSHFS instead of OSX’s native Samba support), Synergy (which I use instead of X2VNC to remove control my Powerbook, because X2VNC still crashes OSX’s VNC server, even in Leopard, even though I’ve already reported this security bug to Apple and they have acknowledged it), and SideTrack (which I use to enable tap-to-click and drag-to-mousewheel-scroll on the trackpad).

MacFUSE can be fixed with a newly built version for Leopard, but neither Synergy2 nor SideTrack have been fixed (and I’m betting its from the same bug, the input subsystem in OSX has been changed a lot since 10.4).

I don’t care for the transparent menubar, as it makes it harder to read it when using dark backgrounds, such as 10.5′s nebula. The dock in horizontal mode looks kind of cheezy with the 3D look, but I use the dock in vertical mode so it doesn’t bother me. The ability for the dock to display the contents of folders is very useful, and I’ve been wanting that for awhile.

Spaces (ie, OSX virtual desktops) is also something I’ve been wanting for awhile because I use virtual desktops on Linux to organize my workflow in multiple tasks. I don’t have another hard drive to use with Time Machine, so I haven’t tested it yet, but it looks very nifty.

OSX 10.5 and all the stuff I usually have open all the time (such as Safari and X-Chat) seem to use less memory than before (and I was using Safari 3 Beta beforehand, so its not that). Boot and shutdown times seem to be the same (although hard testing by other people have proved 10.5 to be a tiny bit slower than 10.4, but not enough to care about).

All OSX apps use the same consistent look which has been irking me for awhile, and they’ve finally dropped the brushed metal look in exchange for just shaded grays. Since GMail now supports IMAP, I get to play with the new improved Mail.App, and it seems to be vastly improved since the last time I played with it.

Update: To use use IMAP on GMail, do not use the “automatically configure” option in Mail.app, uncheck that and select the IMAP account options manually.

Update 2: Without being able to archive mail, or single click delete all spam, or anything like that, Mail.app sucks. I’m going to stick with the GMail web UI.