One Month of Leopard

It’s been (just over) a month with Leopard. I’ve used four different installs (including a troubleshooting install) on five separate computers, three of them mine.

All and all, I love it. I’ve got my Mail Act-on back up and running for easy mail sorting. Inquisitor works again in Safari. Candybar has been updated and replaced Pixadex, including dock modification for those not happy with the default dock. EVE online works great on my MBPro, though I just don’t have the time. Quicklook is absolutely indispensable. Spotlight searches work quicker, and searches make more sense. Back to my Mac and the built-in screen sharing work well as can be expected across various networks.

I love it. Don’t regret it for a second.

That said – there are a few issues (other than my initial blue-screen – thanks again Logitech) that really annoy me:

1) Groups and Permissions on updates. In Tiger and earlier versions of the Mac OS, every User had a group created for it of the same name. When updating, Leopard does not change the existing user group or any related permissions in your home folder. So far so good, this makes perfect sense. What doesn’t make sense to me is why this group didn’t get entered into the groups available to Leopard when it was busy wiping netinfo, so that every file in my home folder was associated with an unknown group, instead of staff. Fortunately it’s much easier to change groups and home folders for a user account than it used to be.

2) ACL’s. Two of my machines had rogue ACL’s creep up out of nowhere, one of them twice, that would not allow me to delete files without authenticating first to get root privileges. Of course, this prevented things like calendar updates through iSync as well. Worse, the “man” page (documentation for commands) didn’t get updated to reflect the new ACL commands available that allowed removal of ACL’s without having to isolate ACL-infested files from those that aren’t.

3) Stacks targets – with a set of drawers icons and some creative sorting I’m now working around this, but *shrug* I shouldn’t have to work around this to get a stable visual cue.

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