Evaluating Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)

[Phil St. Romain]

- It's coming real soon!

Let's use this thread for general evaluations and comments only. For troubleshooting requests about specific issues, please use the System help request forum.

Note - you can vote without commenting.

[Phil St. Romain]

How about some of you who vote sharing general remarks. It seems most of you really like Tiger. What do you like about it?

[Craig R. Arko]

Well, the combination of Tiger and the new mini I'm running it on have been a real pleasant combination in terms of performance, although I'm waiting for the 1 gig RAM upgrade to arrive from NewEgg before really being able to put it through it's paces.

It's clear that in conditions of low memory some funky stuff happens in terms of beachballs on network access, forgotten prefs and cache file corruption. I can deal with this pretty readily, but I wouldn't be too shy about suggesting waiting for 10.4.1 for a number of folks.

What I really like? I'm going to become a real Dashboard junkie, and the performance has been quite pleasing, especially given the low RAM in the mini. I'll know more after upgrading the Pismo (which I think will happen Tuesday). If you get the chance, there are some very nice HD Movie trailers that require QT7 on the Apple site. These should work with QT7 on Panther as well.

Spotlight is OK, but I don't think it will come into its own until the applications take advantage of it. Haven't played with the Dev Tools or Automator yet, and probably won't much until the RAM arrives.

[sighup9]

I've done it both ways:

Clean install on PowerMac G4 DA w/ 1.25 GB RAM - no problems and running like a CHAMP.

Archive install on Alumbook 1.25 GHz w/ 512 MB RAM - only problem was
Norton Internet Security 3.0. I ended up reinstalling and then uninstalling (the uninstall tool did not work - no big surprise).

It was worth forking out the wampum for it IMHO - only thing I miss is Desktop Manager. Font rendering looks better on my displays than under prior OS X versions (running oddball 1344 x 1008 on my PowerMac which is all I can squeak out of a Dell 1701 FP and 1280 x 854 on the AlumBook looks crisper too).


FYI - the default Tiger install occupies ~4.81 GB

By default all the extra language stuff is installed and X Windows is not installed (you can choose differently during the install from the customize button).

The clean install came out to just under 7 GB occupied after importing my 6000+ message mailbox, installing X Windows and Xcode Tools.

--Evan

[mkoreiwo]

I wish the choices were a bit more "flexible"... I'd like to say that overall the upgrade is worth it. Safari and Mail in particular.... Dashboard..... well.... It'd be nice if the widgets you wanted could be "stuck" on the desktop. Spotlight looks very promising....

I play games so the Core Image improvements are what I was looking for. Unfortunately I don't have any prior benchmarks o compare before and after....

Install was smooth, and I had no problems....

[CAlvarez]

Quote: I'm going to become a real Dashboard junkie

Me too. And working on making my own. I just switched a director of operations to a Mini, and am hoping I'll have a Dashboard view of his ops data warehouse running live. That alone may convert a few other people at that company.

Performance improvements are surprising. What really suprised me is that Virtual PC no longer "idles" at nearly 100% CPU usage (though it always shared nicely, it would just hold it there when other apps weren't using it). Now it idles at under 30%.

[blubbernaut]

I'd love to hear some more feedback from those low-end G4 and G3 guineapigs if possible. Is the general user experience snappier than Panther even on those rigs?

[CAlvarez]

I plan to put it on a G3/400 with 384MB tomorrow.

[blubbernaut]

Excellent Carlos! That's almost exactly the specs I was interested in testing it on!

[Phil St. Romain]

I gave it a "Good but not great rating," as I don't notice much improvement in speed or overall performance, nor do I use Safari or Mail. iSync will no longer syncrhonize my calendars via .Mac but it seems this can be done via the .Mac pref pane (not exactly convenient). iChat AV will be great if I can get my family hooked up with video cams. Dashboard looks like a lot of fun.

So far, I've just upgraded my Panther set-ups and it went smoothly.

[vancenase]

i'm still waiting for spotlight to index my slow hard drive, so no vote yet ... but, it seems that the FolderOrg applescript folder action i am using is much much Snappier(TM)!

[bramley]

I've been reading the developer documentation about Dashboard during the weekend. Interesting stuff.

When downloading widgets one needs to be a little careful of Cocoa plugin-bearing ones. You should get a warning that a Cocoa plugin is on board, it should require your password to get going. But the plugin needn't do what it supposed to. A trojan horse-bearing widget is a possibility.

[macmath]

I just voted "Superb...", but I admit that there are some specifics that make this more valuable for me than for some others. On the other hand, there are so many improvements it might be that a lot of people could also say that there was something in the upgrade that they were not aware of originally which made it valuable for them.

My 4-CD set (from the Media Exchange program) arrived Friday and I installed using 'Archive and Install'. We've had company over the weekend so I've not been able to use it much, but I can say that:
(0) I don't see a lot of the problems which some others do: my script menu works for shell scripts, including bash shell scripts; I can print to all my printers, Mail.app works as it should;
(1) It is snappier than 10.3.9; (once SpotLight finished indexing)
(2) Mail seems to check mail and update faster than before;
(3) I think the memory management might be even better. I've put it through a lot and generated swapfile 3, and it quickly gave that one back so I'm now showing swapfile 2 as my latest one. I would have though with spotlight (indexing) and dashboard and a third user account (added one) running at once while running installers and compiling with Fink, that it would have been less forgiving.
(4) I echo what others have been saying about LaunchBar being still useful.
(5) Little things here or there such as a few of the widgets, Automator, spotlight, improvements to the Apple applications;
(6) The new Graphing Calculator;
(7) Spotlight will really help my disorganized spouse and help justify the purchase of Tiger (via the education discount);
(8) Finally, the biggest one for me, and more of those could materialize over time as developers update their applications for Tiger:
The improved PDF services allowed the developer(s) of TeXShop to make some improvements which are very valuable to me. For those who aren't familiar with TeX, it is a typesetting system which has more general uses but which is particularly valuable for typesetting Mathematics. The code

 $$\leqalignno{\sup_\beta\| T(a_\beta)\|_{B^\sim }\
&\leq\
\sup_\beta\| T\|\cdot\| a_\beta\|_1 &(2)\cr
&\leq\ \| T\|.\cr }$$

is needed to generate the example below.
With a large document, it can be time consuming to go from a line in the typeset document to the corresponding code in the editor document to make changes; it is somewhat less timeconsuming to go from the editor document to the typeset document to check on the looks of the corresponding part of the document. The command line tex and dvi preview have flags that can be set which allow automatic location of corresponding parts in X11, and recently these have been incorporated in some gui versions, but flags have to be set and it does not work perfectly. With the new TeXShop and Tiger, it works well 'out-of-the-box' without flags or additional input files. Clicking on a word in the editor window takes you to the typeset pdf document where a red oval surrounds the corresponding text. Clicking on a word or phrase in the typeset pdf document highlights in yellow the corresponding word or phrase in the editor document.

[blubbernaut]

Quote: Originally Posted by CAlvarez I plan to put it on a G3/400 with 384MB tomorrow.

So...how did it go? Smoothly I hope? what's the speed like?

[CAlvarez]

It didn't go. Wouldn't install, and left the machine locked up on the Apple logo on boot. I posted about it in another thread. Gave up, didn't have time to continue.

[Photek]

backed up 10.3.9, clean installed Tiger, copied everything back, waited for httpmail plugin to be released......all is is running SWEET and noticably faster. No complaints here on my PB 1.33 with 768ram

[toneyc]

I put it on my Mac Mini (1.42GHZ, 512MB RAM, 80GB HD) last week and have seen sluggish performance. Thinking of going back to 10.3.9.


Toney.

[macmath]

Quote: Originally Posted by toneyc I put it on my Mac Mini (1.42GHZ, 512MB RAM, 80GB HD) last week and have seen sluggish performance. Thinking of going back to 10.3.9. Toney.

Spotlight might have been indexing your drive, or have run into trouble indexing your drive. It will probably take longer for a laptop-type drive to index than for a desktop size drive. In Terminal type:

sudo mdutil -E /

and then let it run unbothered for awhile until it says that it is done indexing. I ran mine too hard while indexing and not everything got indexed. I also tried to search on something that started with a parenthesis and Spotlight took over my machine until I killed the process. My lowly G3 at less than half the clockspeed runs noticeably faster...it should run fine on your Mac mini.

[cudaboy_71]

i did an archive and install.

sooo...where exactly is this graphing calculator? i see a 'calculator.app' that has some interesting new eye candy. but, i dont see any graphing capability.

am i missing something?

[retcynnm]

/Applications/Utilities/Grapher