Should I Give it Up and Go Back To Tiger?

Question

That's the decision I'm wrestling with right now. My issues are not legion. Mostly they revolve around three things: Stability, Usability and Speed.
STABILITY:
I get odd freezes and random program crashes that have now twice resulted in having to push the power button to reboot. The mouse moves, but nothing works, no menus, can't even bring up the Force Quit window to quit an offending app.
In one day Mail crashed over-and-over until I could no longer use the computer and shut down and pulled out my PowerBook to send an email! After rebooting and fsck'ing and repairing Permissions the problem seemed to go away, but I have way too many crashes of even Apple programs that ought to be playing nicer with Leopard.
I also get a LOT more bouncing beachballs with Leopard in almost every app than with Tiger. Although my main Mac is not Intel or even G5, I should still be well within the system requirements for Leopard with a dual 1.25GHz G4 with 1.75 GB of RAM. My system drive has over 100GB open (I have four internal drives equaling 1.3TB) and I keep all of my software updated.
I do have one 2nd party PCI USB 2.0 card that doesn't require drivers and it works, but I haven't tested Leopard without that card, but I do have USB 2.0 devices that I need to run, so that alone would require a step backward if I couldn't run the USB 2.0 card because of some odd compatibility issue.
USABILITY:
Two things just irritate the heck out of me and one is a minor irritant that I probably just need to learn more about
One is the lack of hierarchical menus in the dock. Unlike a lot of people I like Stacks, but I'd like to have the option to go seamlessly from a Stack to a hierarchical menu.
The other is the inability to put a custom icon on a dock drive or folder. I have to create a dummy folder, put a blank space at the front of the name and use it as the icon for the item, but even then, all those icons behind it clutter up the look of the folder/drive and thus, the dock as a whole. There should be an option for having a SINGLE clean icon without going through odd gymnastic to get one!
I have a very small issue with the behavior of Spotlight. In Tiger, a Spotlight search's results were displayed in a more quick and orderly way, at least that how it seems to me. In Leopard when you click "show all" although it categorizes them as I have it set up in Spotlight's preferences, there isn't a clear delineation between classifications and there is no "info" button to quickly see the path and general info for the file. To see info you have to right click and choose "Show Info" unless I am missing something.
However, the addition of Boolean logic categories by option-clicking the plus sign or clicking to add categories to the search rules negates a lot of my gripe about Spotlight. I'd like to see it be as responsive as Tiger, but it's hard to argue with the ability to drill-down to exactly what you're looking for.
But, Spotlight is also MUCH slower than Tiger's Spotlight which leads me to:
SPEED:
As mentioned, I have one of the fastest G4s and a dual processor to boot and I'm nearly maxed on RAM, so you'd think Leopard would run faster, but there is a general lag in usability across the board. Not a killer lag, but noticeable and the aforementioned beachballs pop up enough to add even MORE of an irritating lag to the process. I find myself hitting "Force Quit" a LOT more often and seeing "'program x has stopped responding" in the Force Quit menu.
I like Leopard. There are some nice features that truly do improve the overall utility of the OS, so I think it's a good release, but there are just too many issues for me now, maybe because of my G4 PowerMac, it seems to have fewer issues (except for the speed thing) on my FW 800 Powerbook, but for now I want fast and logical and Tiger is all that.
I will return to Leopard if I step back because it's just too good an update to ignore and it is after all, the future of Macs, but right now Leopard is killing my productivity. On more than one occasion I've lost data before saving when a crash happened and that was a VERY rare occurrence with Tiger.
JoeL
Message was edited by: joeldm

Answer 1

Thanks for the responses!
I always do a clean install, backing up, formatting the drive, etc. I find it reduces the number of issues overall.
I was going to do a dual-boot setup with Tiger originally, but I've had such good luck with OS X updates that I wasn't concerned. But since I've had these problems, I hadn't revisited that option so, since I eventually will return to Leopard that may be a good solution.
However, I just read elsewhere after writing this as one of you mentioned, that the 10.5.2 update is slated to be a big release with a lot of fixes, so that may be worth the wait before doing anything precipitous.
There is one very odd thing, though . . . I have an iPhone and while I could sync without a problem initially, recently I've had some issues syncing until now I can't sync at all. I took the iPhone in and they swapped it out for a new phone, but I came home and had the same issues, so before returning to the Apple store I tried it on my PowerBook (running Leopard) and sure enough, it synced with no issues!
So I'm wondering if there isn't some problem that may be hardware-related that is causing me to have more issues on the PowerMac side than on the PowerBook side? I think I need to strip the PowerMac down to its original components, basically unplug everything but the keyboard and mouse, remove that USB card and see what happens.
It ran fine under Tiger so I'm not happy about having to do this, but hey, it's the price of progress and at least it's not that "other" OS!
BTW, I think it's funny how some tech writers are trying, straining to compare the issues that some of us are having with Leopard with the Vista release which was an unmitigated disaster!
I'm content to work through it until I find the same stability I had under Tiger with this new cat . . . let's hope the new update does the trick. Anyone heard a release date for 10.5.2?
Thanks for the suggestions!
JoeL