My wife and I were all set to buy a Mac Pro this sunday, but I'm a little concerned about a ton of bad reviews I read today about Leopard and ilfe 08. Like Vista/xp, Many people are downgrading back to tiger because of bugs etc.

Is anyone on Leapard and have you had problems with sib, fin, VDL2.5 ?

I'm running Leopard along with Sibelius 4 and VDL2.5 and Kontakt2.  Other than some performance hiccups due to Sibelius 4 not being universal, everything works fine.  I've not experienced any undesirable issues due  to Leopard.

I seem to be using Finale with VDL 2.5 without any major issues.

I think Leopard is actually running just fine. It's probably more a matter of the apps or drivers you use, and whether they're playing nice. For example, M-Audio is still working on updating all their drivers, so if you use an M-Audio keyboard for input, this is worth knowing:
http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=support.faq&ID=36be2fb74b90752fe3568b07c20a2189

Sibelius 4 isn't compatible with Leopard, but Sibelius 5 is.

VDL2 isn't compatible with Leopard, but VDL 2.5 is. Installing it fresh will require you to download the hotfix supplied by NI.
https://www.tapspace.com/support/faq/index.php?sid=383577&lang=en&action=artikel&cat=3&id=47&artlang=en

It might be helpful to make a list of the apps you use most often and check in with the developers before making the plunge. This is generally a good thing to do with any OS update. Things like printer drivers, audio interfaces, external hard drives, MIDI devices, and any other programs you find yourself using often would be worth a look just to be sure.

I bet you it's all a smear campaign by Windows users.

I don't know anyone who's gone back to Tiger after installing Leopard.  Works great on both my machines.

iLife '08 is great - even iMovie which I feel isnt a replacement for iMovieHD but I use it strictly for uploading to Youtube.  But that's about it, other bugs are getting fixed quick in the suite.

The only thing I MIGHT wait for is January to see if any new machines come out (which they always will) but if you need it now, get it or you'll be waiting for the next big thing forever....

my 2�

There are some people running into a Boot Camp snafu.  Those concerned about XP installs should be wary.

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/27/0040206

That said, if you're starting in 10.5, you should not be concerned other than the aforementioned driver issues.

What about ilife 08? If you check out the apple store page here...

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wa/RSLID?mco=7E4EB91E&nplm=MB015Z/A

There reviews are a bit.... strong worded.

Any thoughts from the Leopard folks on this? Perhaps the problems people have been having are with tiger/G4's/G5's instead of the newer systems and Leopard.

I dont use iLife....but I can say that I have had no troubles with Leopard at all....

Leopard is awesome.
I've read the same reviews about iLife 08, but I'm sure whatever bugs there are will be fixed in a future update. I switched to Mac a year or two ago and was very hesitant due to some bad reviews I have read. I can gladly say that I have yet to run into a problem with either one of my Mac's (that wasn't my fault at least). I never thought I would be able to say that I can't remember the last time I crashed (as I knock on my wood colored, particle board desk).
Now that VDL2 and Sibelius 5 are both Universal Binary, my machine is unstoppable (I know it's not a Mac Pro, but hey, don't burst my bubble!).

Consider it a premium for those that don't like to tinker as much with hardware/software...  They're just operating systems.  In reality, they shouldn't be a big deal.  They should just let your programs work.  That's the idea, anyhow.

I have 64-bit hardware, 4g of ram, and I'm still on XP because of Vista.  It's a shame.  So if you don't want to be stuck in-between, and you don't have tens of thousands of dollars worth of windows software, go for it.  I'm screwed; I'll be windows for quite some time because my software would cost way, way too much to change over.

Leopard is a fantastic upgrade.�� I've been more than happy with it.�� There are a few isolated incompatibilities, which isn't too uncommon for new OS upgrades, but the few that existed for me have been fixed so I've been cruising along so far.

As for iLife 08 it's really, really nice.�� The enhancements they made to iPhoto make it worth the price of admission anyway, and most of the criticism of iLife was the new iMovie--which really is a great piece of software.�� The problem with iMovie is it was a bit of a paradigm switch from a design standpoint, and because it was essentially a brand new interface they had to sheer down a few features that iMovie 06 were used to.�� People realllly didn't like that. :P

To ratify that, iLife 08 users can have a free download of iMovie 06 if it suits their needs better, but I've found I actually like iMovie 08 better since it's so easy to use and I do most of my heavy video editing in Final Cut.

--

All in all Leopard is probably the best OS they've put out.�� Lots of great small tweaks that aren't worth mentioning in a features list, but they really made an effort to go back and fix little things to make the OS work better.�� The new features are great (Time Machine is fantastic), some are a bit oversold (personally I don't find Spaces that useful b/c it won't let you assign one application to multiple spaces), and you'll be more than happy for it.

[quote author=Lydian9 link=topic=2120.msg10927#msg10927 date=1196280924]
I bet you it's all a smear campaign by Windows users.
[/quote]

Those rat bastards!  ;)

It seems that many of the reviews I read had specifically to do with the flakyness of the Radeon x1900 XT graphics card flipping out after 6 months of use. Some people thought it was leopard, but the figured out that there was a realy bad bunch of cards that came out. THe problem is still being worked out.

If you don't game much, it isn't as much of an issue in tiger, but in Leopard, it taxes the card more, and pushed the flaws out into the open. For gamers, they have known about the problem for months.