Wow, it's really not too bad...

[AriX]

Well I've used several different builds of Leopard now, and a lot of them have been extremely unstable, but when my MacBook's hard drive failed, I had to boot from my external hard drive on Leopard Build 9A283 (I know, old) and it really is the most stable of any build I've ever used... I've been using it as my main operating system for a week now, and I've had VERY few system crashes... less than 10.4.8 I think. Also, unlike some other builds, almost every single app I throw at it simply runs, instead of starting and quitting. Anyone else had this experiance? Is there an even more stable build? Do you agree that the recent ones have been very unstable? On the other hand, I don't at all notice it's Leopard, which isn't a good thing because it means that at least I will not be using most of Leopard's new features, although I like the few minor enhancements I've seen, like Quick Look and preview.

[Adrian Fogge]

I would say that 303 has been the "most stable" build, but then again, it lacked the hardware support for the C2Ds.

 

My Macbook Pro never fully worked under it. No power mangement, no wireless networking, no Quartz Extreme.

 

283 definitely had to go through a lot more quality control and screening simply because the number of people who got it, and the fact that it was the ONLY test bed available for testing new applications under 10.5. Add to that that everyone at WWDC would have wanted to check their projects and then talk to Apple to find out what needed to be done to get their apps to work and best utilize the new libraries. If one build NEEDED to work reliably for at least a week under intense testing, 283 was it.

[Markandeya]

I am at the uni right now, I don't remember the build but it was like 9a2*. One of the first release of the leopard. To be honest it is very stable and I didn't get any crashes at all. All programs works perfectly(except minor problem in pages). All hardware works perfectly(except headphone jack). I will continue using this build till the first Leopard released.

[Markandeya]

I've just checked it it is 9a241e.

[Fizzeh]

The current build is pretty unstable.

 

9a321 was nice, but also had a lot of problems.

[FarmerBob]

If 343 is the last release, it needs a ton of work. It, so far, is the most unstable release that I have run.

• System Prefs (not responding) a lot.
  
• Network Prefs load 20% of the time and result in the Pref Panel needing to be Forced Quit.
  
• Bluetooth unavailable until after the Finder loads. No Option key start up.
  
• Can install IP and AppleTalk Printers, but not Bonjour. Even though the drivers are in the install.
  
• When Network Prefs Panel does open, settings disappear when apply is clicked.
  
• Airport won't activate from Network Pref, but will from Menu Bar icon. Has to be manually activated after each restart.
  
• Login App is active in the Dock and nothing happens, won't quit nor Force Quit, have to restart and 50% of the time it still loads.
  
• Everything has a feeling of failing when accessed. Proper operation is a surprise . . .
  

. . . and many other things.

 

I can't see how they say that this is anywhere near ready. It looks more like, one step forward, two, three, four steps back.

 

Depending on when this is released, I'm waiting on purchasing. I'll go watch the show and talk to the reps, but that's all for a while until I hear that there is none of this craziness.

 

 

:glare:

[hemiola]

I'm assuming that each build is buggier because they have two concurrent builds - External and Internal.

 

The Internal contains all the 'top secret' GUI and feature stuff that they cannot make available to Devs until they first unveil it at an event. The external is a bit of a frankenstein that is simply to facilitate developers.

 

That's my hunch .... there is no way they will release something as buggy as the current builds. It simply defies logic.

 

To me, the most stable build thus far has been the original WWDC build. I had ZERO problems with this, and for a while used it as my main OS until i made the mistake of upgrading to other builds, then i began disenchanted with the whole deal.

[Adrian Fogge]

There are no doubt two separate trees going on inside of Apple.

Back when I was working at Microsoft, we kept three separate build trees, one that went out to testers, one that was for internal development testing, and one that went out to all employees for Self-Hosting.

 

The idea there is that the Developer Builds contained all of the debugging enabled, making it a performance hog but gave every single piece of information that was needed to fix it.

The Self-Host Builds were generally the ultra-bleeding edge ones that had everything that was promised for Vista but was not yet working.

The Testing Builds were the ones that could actually run for a few days without needing to be reimaged.

 

Most of the Self-Hosting builds needed to be updated nightly simply to run from day to day as issues were found and resolved.

[hemiola]

Thanks for the insights Adrian