I upgraded my iMac to 10.5 this weekend, since it arrived after Apple pulled the Boot Camp beta from their web page and one of the main reasons I bought an iMac instead of a Mac Mini was so that I could use MS Flight Simulator running in Windows. My initial thoughts on the newest release are a mixed bag.

The good:

• Spotlight seems to scale much better. I initially loved Spotlight on 10.4, but once it indexed my entire mail archives, it got too slow to be useable. The new spotlight appears to have indexed all my mail and is still snappy quick. I had let it archive my inbox and played around prior to upgraded, just to make sure that it wasn’t just the jump from the Power Book to the iMac.
• Spaces works almost as expected. It’s very nice, but will jump to dialog boxes that pop up, which is a bit annoying.
• Carbon emacs, Quicken, Log Ten Pro (my pilot logbook software), and X-Plane all seem to work out of the box.
• System Preferences sanity — no more secondary, semi-duplicate applications for printing or vpn/wireless. Everything is ordered in a much more sane way.
• X11 integration. DISPLAY is now automagically set and when X11 is needed (such as you starting an xterm), X11 automagically starts. This even works when you start an xterm/emacs on a remote machine using ssh tunnels.

The bad:

• Translucent menus. The menubar isn’t too bad, but the menus themselves are hard to read if you have too many windows open and things are busy on the screen.
• The 3-D dock. It’s ugly. Thankfully, it can be turned off: defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES killall Dock
• X11. They don’t document that you shouldn’t start X11.app at login like you used to do in Tiger. They also don’t document that /Applications/Utilities/X11.app is essentially just an xterm starter and not the “real” X11.app that launchd starts when needed. X11 doesn’t play well with spaces. I also like having the X11 icon next to the Finder icon in my dock (dunno why, but it’s always there on my machines). I couldn’t figure out how to make that happen, but finally did — Add /usr/X11/X11.app to your Dock. Don’t have it started at login. It’ll all work out. There’s some other oddities with X11 — it appears that the upgrade from XFree to X.org codebase was not as smooth as it could have been, but sounds like Apple’s working on it.
• Bloody linker. The Open MPI configure script causes the linker to bus error during the assembly tests if -g is used as a CFLAG. Stupid linkers.
• iCal/iSync. I can’t seem to get iSync to sync my calendars between a machine running tiger and a machine running leopard. iSync seemed to have synced everything else quite well.