Initial Leopard Reviews
This morning a ton of reviews are out and, as I expected, all over the map. There are install problems and people with the same hardware with no install problems. There are people loving the new interface and others hating it for the same reasons. There's no way to please everyone, but Apple has done a good job by all accounts, and an excellent job by some.
The Ars Technica review is nice, balanced, reporting of the pros and cons that you can expect to see in the first week of use. Even they agree that there's no way to review an OS in one shot, so they look at the high points. Fair. They spend more time than I would on the visual elements, but that's what they do, so no big deal.
There have been a few others that I've read that are totally taken aback by one little thing that they state they'll refuse to use it. The Dock is a lightening rod... Java 1.5.0 is another... Ruby is yet another. I mean really people, is this all about one little feature? Sure, it'd be nice if they had made it easy to change the Dock's visual appearance, but they did allow you to revert it in the defaults system. Sure, it'd be nice to see 1.6.0 on Leopard, but they have 1.5.0 and there aren't that many apps/applets/servlets that I've seen that require 1.6.0 because it's not really that widely adopted yet. Sure, they added Ruby on Rails, and it might have been nice to put in the very latest Ruby, but they went for stability.
In all these cases, people are mad because their pet project or tool isn't as well supported as they had hoped. Given a little perspective this list isn't bad. Java will be updated, Ruby will be updated, life goes on. I'm just sifting through all the reviews looking for real issues that might make me delay my conversion more than a few weeks.