I’m now running the final version of Leopard on my MacBook Pro. I had been running various developer builds on my iMac since WWDC, but I never installed it on my MacBook Pro since this is my main personal and work system.
After doing a full backup to an external drive and verifying that I could boot from it, I did an upgrade install rather than archive or clean install. It took about an hour, although at one point it said the install would take 5 hours. The upgrade went smoothly and everything worked without any problems.
Although MacFixit tries to frighten people about OS upgrades, and in particular using anything other than archive or clean installs, in most cases it’s perfectly safe.
Leopard feels a bit faster than Tiger on my MacBook Pro and almost all of my applications work with no problems. However I really miss SAFT’s safari enhancements and Chax’s iChat enhancements, since neither of them work in Leopard. Input Managers (including SIMBL and most Safari enhancers) are no longer supported in Leopard.
The dock appearance in Leopard never bothered me, even though I put my dock on the right side of the screen. The new plain dock does look nicer, though. I never did like the translucent menu bar, but it doesn’t look bad at all if the top part of the desktop picture is a solid color. I use Hamad Darwish’s Vista Wallpapers, which work nicely with the translucent menu bar.
I rarely bother with Text To Speech, but the new high quality voice Alex sounds a lot better than any computer voice I’ve ever heard.
The picture screen saver has a great new mosaic style. It assembles a mosaic of each selected picture from your iPhoto library.
I sometimes tire of MaxFixit. They're very alarmist, and add very little relevance to the conversation they're attempting to be a part of.