Hands On with Mac OS X Snow Leopard (Developer Preview) | Hacker News Reader

Hands On with Mac OS X Snow Leopard (Developer Preview)

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15 pointsbarredo10 comments

"I upgraded Snow Leopard over my existing Leopard setup (instead of a clean installation)"

From my experience upgrading comes with a lot of extra baggage then a clean install. The performance numbers might not be 100% accurate.

ive done the upgrade myself on a macbook pro. the numbers are extremely accurate as far as time to complete and further, free space after the upgrade. you can watch the log as the install is chugging along. turns out you will end up with more space after the upgrade due to the intel only os deleting all ppc references, i also recall them saying they were using some new file compression.

They are compressing all the system frameworks by default. How this impacts application performance is yet to be seen.

Did they remove the PPC libs too? IE does Rosetta still work?

Rosetta is an optional install/download now. You can install it from the DVD under the 'extra tools' installer, or you will be prompted to download it the first time you run an application that is a PPC application.

I am not sure about Rosetta. That is a good question as I was under the impression that if you need _anything_ ppc related you should stay with leopard and not upgrade. Again, I have no specifics here.

I don't feel this was too informative. I would have liked a comparison of clean installs of Leopard and Snow Leopard to compare the speeds and disk footprint, as well as just an upgrade. I'm also disappointed Apple didn't update the Finder.

Finder will probably get an update in 10.7, whenever that comes out (2010? 2011?).

Apple has been known to follow the "first make it work" rule with all their software. I guess Finder is no exception.

(As always, I'll continue to use the commandline for most of my file management tasks. I'm a big fan of the Konqueror way of file management (although I don't use KDE any more), so you can probably guess how constrained I feel when I use Finder.)

All apps shipped with snowleopard are native cocoa where applicable, specifically finder, and compiled with the new (to Xcode) llvm compiler. Terminal has also been upgraded :)

The 10 second shutdown and overall quickness had this PC user flirting with the idea of converting for just a minute, but we all get similar speeds when we first reformat. How long will these speeds hold up for?

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