Panther and how it works so far
 

Hello,

I've got Panther on my Powerbook 12", and here's the rundown so far:

1. Expose. The reason to upgrade. This is AMAZING. It improves my productivity by a large factor, and doesn't involve taskbars.

2. The upgrade. Since I don't run hacks, it was actually pretty sweet. Worked well out of the box, which is more than I can say for most OSes. Most of my stuff still runs, except XChat.

3. The dev tools. I had to recompile GTK+ (I am running GTK 2.4 on there now with glib and the rest). These are freaking amazing.

4. The speed. This is slightly faster.

5. The look. It also looks cooler :).

Here's the bad stuff:

1. Fink is broken (obviously). Won't resolve dependencies, and I have to manually compile all my stuff. Xchat is broken because of it, but the programs I manually compiled, like Nessus 2.0.7 and Nmap 3.45, work just fine.

2. Still figuring out sound and how to get that to work so my UAE install works correctly on it. I want to port over my WinUAE/Amiga Forever/Amiga In A Box install so I can run Amiga demos and amIRC.

3. Still can't figure out Active Directory integration so I can actually use it on our AD realm and map shares. This takes time, I guess.

Fast User Switching is a godsend for people that have two girls in the house using the laptops and always somehow manage to go to the Cellar (when you've told them NOT to) and fuck up your cookies. Just teach 'em how to use fast user switching.

Exposé does indeed rule (thats alt-ee for you, mbpark). Holy smokes is it awesome. I thought it was kinda one of these buzzword features reading about it, but using it... jesus. It's awesome.

Panther is noticeably faster on my PMG4 dual 1.42GHz. I've got it installed on all my machines except the PMG4 dual 800MHz (that'd be the iBook 800MHz, iMac G4 800MHz, PowerBook G4 15" 1GHz and the PMG4 dual 1.42GHz).

It looks nicer, and a lot of apps have been redesigned (Disk Utility and Software Update are the two I've been using most).

The new Finder is nice too. I like it.

Overall, I give this upgrade 10/10. I'd give Jaguar 10/10 too. We'll see how the next one is.