Post your Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”) upgrade experiences here as comments on this post. To get things started, here are a few of mine.

NOTE: There seem to be lots of reports that third party “haxies” that use Unsanity Software’s Application Program Enhancer (APE) technology can cause major problems with the Leopard upgrade. Unsanity’s site currently says APE version 2.0.3 is not compatible with Mac OS X 10.5 so if you have APE installed (look for an Application Enhancer icon in your System Preferences window) then you should definitely uninstall it using it’s built-in uninstaller option before upgrading.

UPDATE: Yep it’s true Apple now says that APE causes problems with the Leopard update.

I upgraded three machines: a PowerPC Mac mini, a G5 Tower and a MacBook Pro, and so far the experience has been excellent!

I decided to do a “clean migration” installation on all three machines (What is that you ask? Well, first I did a full backup of each to external hard drives using Carbon Copy Cloner then did a clean install of 10.5 wiping out all existing data. When the install finished and it asked if I wanted to copy my info I choose to restore it “from another Mac” then plugged in the firewire backup drive when it asked for the other computer and allowed it to restore everything from Applications to Users. The end result is a fresh OS install with all of my data and settings the same as they were right down to the Desktop picture. Takes about 2-3 hours total.)

Only glitches I noticed were on the Date & Time System Preference pane: my time zone was reset to Atlanta, GA and the option to synchronize to a time server was now turned off. Both are easily corrected.

.Mac users, don’t panic if when the upgraded machine first tries to sync your Bookmarks, Contacts, etc. you get warnings about multiple conflicts. I’ve seen it here twice and in both cases there were no actual differences between what was on my Mac and what was up on the .Mac servers and allowing the synchronization to proceed didn’t result in any lost information (but your mileage may vary so to be safe consider exporting your entire Address Book contents to a Vcard format backup file in the Addressbook application before doing the upgrade or first sync.)

If you have one or more external hard drives attached you’ll see a prompt asking if you want to use one for your Time Machine backups. You can choose to back up to drives that have other data on them but make sure there’s enough free space to hold everything on your internal drive plus room to spare. If you want to dedicate a drive for Time Machine I’d suggest erasing and unplugging it before installing Leopard, then when the install is all done plug it in and select it when you are prompted. The backup runs in the background so expect it to take a while before the full initial backup is done.

So far things are looking good and problem free. Beyond the obvious visual differences (good and possibly otherwise) expect to keep finding lots of small improvements just about everywhere as you settle in.

Personally I’m thrilled with what I’ve seen so far, Leopard seems to have that extra bit of polish and stability that I sometimes thought was missing in 10.4.

Don’t forget, post your experiences here by clicking the “click here to comment on this post” link below.

Dave