On Leopard's stability

Created , updated 2 minute read

I was somewhat surprised to read in Michael Tsai’s summary of John Siracusa’s Leopard review (I’m not capable of wading my way through the entire, ridiculously prolix review) that he says it’s stable:

Well, the actual GM is just as good, probably even better—though I’ve yet to produce a single crash of anything even in the September seed.

My own experiences couldn’t be farther from that. In the short time I’ve been using the final version of Leopard I’ve found it to be very, very flaky. Nothing to be too concerned about as this is standard fare for a point-zero Apple OS release; after a few point releases we should see stability getting back to Tiger levels.

Some examples from only a few hours of use:

  • Machine froze during upgrade install, had to hard reset and do an archive install instead
  • Machine froze trying to quit the Disk Utility after performing First Aid after the first hard reset, requiring a second one
  • Inability to connect to local AirPort network on startup
  • Reproducible Spotlight crashes when typing in search strings like "12 * 3"
  • In fact, Spotlight failed to produce an index on the startup disk at all, only ever returning results on the other attached volumes
  • Finder refused to hide despite being told to do so repeatedly; finally when hidden refused to come to the front, requiring that I quit it using Activity Monitor
  • System Preferences became unresponsive; force quitting has no effect and icon continues in Dock despite the fact that the process no longer appears in the process listing; the same later occurred for Disk Utility (which incidentally froze on launch)
  • Doesn’t recognize Pioneer DVR-K06 optical drive installed after the Apple-supplied unit flaked out
  • Crash reports can’t be sent to Apple, windows perpetually stuck at "Sending" phase
  • Asked what I wanted to do with inserted DVD when nothing had been inserted
  • Failed to respond to keyboard and mouse input on waking from screensaver; was necessary to unplug and plug back in keyboard in order to get a response
  • Apple applications that have crashed include Spotlight (multiple times), System Preferences and Mail

In short, I can see myself instigating an always-reboot policy every morning and perhaps every afternoon too just to keep this thing running in a non-degraded state. Very much looking forward to 10.5.1 and its siblings; they can’t come soon enough.