My experiences with Tiger so far, after a few hours’ playing:
- The installer refused to install anything at first, failing after the hard disk verification stage with the everso-helpful message “There was a problem with the installation. Please try installing again”. Luckily I knew where to look for the install log when I rebooted, whereupon it claimed it had encountered the dreaded Error -9972. Not wanting to take any chances, I backed up everything and did a clean install.
- Things do generally feel somewhat snappier, as promised.
- Spotlight does what it says on the tin, but for me, not quite as elegantly as Quicksilver, at least as an application launcher. Biggest annoyance in that regard is that you hit the shortcut (Cmd-Space, rather that Quicksilver’s Ctrl-Space, but that’s fine), type the first few characters of the app you want to run, and the results come back. At this point, Quicksilver will show you the closest match and you can launch it straight away ny hitting Enter. Spotlight, however, always pre-selects “Show all matches” rather than “Top hit”, so you have to arrow down to select the app or file you want to open. A tad annoying.
- Dashboard is very pretty, but some of the widgets duplicate stuff that’s already in OSX, and it would be much more convenient if the widgets could be placed on your actual desktop, rather than an Exposé-like overlay. It also takes up a space on the dock… haven’t checked to see if it still runs if you remove it, yet.
- Still no virtual desktop support– Desktop Manager to the rescue.
- Photoshop CS refuses to run any more, even after a complete re-install. (Update: I tried again, and now it does.)
- Had to upgrade Desktop Manager and my Wacom tablet driver to get them to work, but now they’re fine.
I haven’t yet looked at Automator, the 3D video chatrooms in iChat (nobody to talk to!), the improved mail client (as I only use that for my work email, which I can’t access until Cisco come out with a Tiger-compatible VPN client), or much else, really.
Update: samba also looks to be somewhat broken… I can connect to my office share using smbclient, but I can’t mount it with mount_smbfs (or Connect to Server, in Finder).
Update II: Mac On Linux can’t run Tiger yet.
Update III: There is a way to have dashboard widgets on your desktop
Update IV: Samba does work after all; in 10.4 it just sends passwords encrypted by default, which our office servers can’t handle yet. Adding this to /etc/nsmb.conf fixes it:
[default] minauth=none