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.