10.5.3
So Leopard 10.5.3 is out, tipping the scales at an unprecedented 536M for the combo updater! Unfortunately, Radar doesn’t mark my own pet bug - sporadic crashing of LoginWindow, causing the user to suddenly lose their whole session, upon user switch - as being closed. Whether it has been fixed under a different ticket remains to be seen, I do hope so, it’s been a serious issue for me.
Those commentators proclaiming that Leopard has been the most unreliable version of OSX they’ve ever used, however, are way off the mark and only dating themselves as recent Mac converts. While the bug I’ve experienced has been serious, 10.5 is so far ahead of the early OSX 10.0 and 10.1 that these all-encompassing statements are laughable on their face. For me, Leopard has demonstrated instability problems worse than anything I can remember since 10.3 .. but version prior to that were so different, in so many ways, that comparisons seem ridiculous. 10.1 was pretty unstable and 10.0 was barely functional at all. Anyone who compares Leopard unfavourably to either of those prior versions is simply proving they obviously never used them.
That said, for me, and many others, 10.5.x has been significantly less stable than 10.4.x and has reawakened some unwelcome fears of triggering a crash by performing some action which has sporadically caused a crash in the past - very OS9-esque. The sooner this nasty bug is squashed for good, the happier I’ll be.
UPDATE: Not fixed, happened again last night. Symptoms: long pause upon selecting another user to change to, screen turns blue and then the login window appears - the user’s session has been unceremoniously dumped.
May 30th, 2008 at 2:49 am
I’m hoping they’ve fixed the NSAppleScript crashes under Garbage Collection. I suspect they haven’t, however; nothing in the release notes and my own bug report on the subject was marked as “Duplicate/Closed” a long, long time ago.
For me it’s been a very damaging issue because it’s caused one of my applications to crash sporadically and has definitely had a negative impact on the product’s image because people assume the fault is in the product rather than in Apple’s OS.
June 3rd, 2008 at 12:05 am
Have you found anything common at the stack traces for the crashes? 10.5 has easily been the most reliable release for us (mix of Intel / G5 hardware) and I’m curious whether there’s a bad combination of hardware/drivers to beware of. The biggest problem I’ve run into were network and Java performance regressions - 10.5.3 fixed the former but we’re still stuck with the latter since the JDK 1.6 release doesn’t help our G5 or 32-bit Intel systems.
June 3rd, 2008 at 8:35 am
Yes, the stack traces are all the same: crashes in NSAppleScript when running under Garbage Collection. It’s a known issue being tracked in Apples’ Radar. I first found a public admission of it in a mailing list post by an Apple employee. My own ticket for this issue is here.
Apart from the NSAppleScript issue I haven’t had any problems with Leopard myself.
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:35 am
Ah - we’ve avoided using AppleScript for automation so we wouldn’t have run into that.