I Hate Panther

I just installed Panther on my laptop to see how I liked it (and whether I'd bother putting it/taking it off my new G5 arriving any day now), and oh my god it's terrible.

Oh how I hate thee, let me count the ways.

1. Lucida Grande is all messed up. It looks like crap in Panther, and I don't know what in the world Apple was thinking. The new anti-aliasing that comes with Panther would be better off implemented inside of a dumpster rather than on my screen. The bold looks goofy (and has a wacked-out x-height in comparison to the "old" Jaguar Lucida Grande Bold), and the regular size is thinner than the old. As a web designer, I look at type on the web all day long, and I'll be the first to tell you that I'll probably start avoiding Lucida just because I don't like the way it looks in Panther. As more and more people switch to 10.3, more web browsers will be chocked-full with crappy Lucida renderings.
2. When I had Jaguar running, my freakin' internet worked. How difficult is this for the computer to work with: DHCP connection, the IP is assigned based on MAC address filtering (I'm not going to explain, use Google for more info). With Jaguar, I plug n' play — the IP address just works. Then I installed Panther...

   Boot it up, same network connection settings, and NOPE no IP address. I try everything in my Mac OS X toolbox to fix it, but NOPE. So right now I'm on my roommate's wireless connection because it only makes sense that the wireless network will pull an IP address down for me, but the physical connection won't. Mike Rundle is not enthused.
   

3. TextEdit doesn't work. I open it up, and the stupid application doesn't record my mouse clicks correctly. I click on the scrollbar to move the window contents and it clicks the I cursor in the middle of the screen about 75 pixels left and 10 pixels down from where I'm actually clicking my mouse! No, seriously. Then, I try and quit by using Apple-Q and the app doesn't respond to my keystrokes... you gotta be kidding me. What is this, a cruel joke?
4. The Finder windows don't save the position nor the size from the last time they were used. When I open up finder window, I like it to be about 250 pixels high, and three "large columns" wide (you know what I'm talking about). So the first time I opened one up, I changed the size and had everything all set for the next time. Nope, it resizes it every time. And, I swear that the leading between file/folder lines was shrunk because my eyes are going bonkers trying to look down the names of the files in a large folder.
5. I have an additional monitor attached to my laptop. In Jaguar, I could be at my desk with the extra monitor plugged in, and be rocking the applications on both at the same time. Then, I'd unplug the additional monitor, take the laptop in the living room, and the operating system would automatically understand that I unplugged my monitor and that it is no longer there. God forbid that actually happen in Panther. I unplugged the monitor and the menubar didn't transfer over. Neither did the dock. All my application windows were still "over there". My mouse pointer still moved off the screen in some kind of desperate attempt to find the orphaned display 20 feet away in my room. I had to restart. Great.
6. AND OH YEAH, MY INTERNET STILL WON'T WORK.

Please do yourself a favor, and do not buy/install Panther. It will ruin your life, like it has mine. If this post has spelling errors and some grammatical mistakes, I don't care. It is 4:30am and my perfect computing experience I had 8 hours ago is ruined because I assumed that Apple wouldn't put out a garbage operating system.

You know what happens when you assume something...

Comments

[Darice]

I think you just had a very bad luck. I have my iBook with Panther for 1 month now and I still like it. Internet is a breeze, I tried a crosscable from my windows box and no problems at all no configuartion needed. Right now I'm on a router also working smooth. About Lucida Grande I can't say because I never used Jaguar but even so I like Gill Sans more. The mouse gestures is a bit buggy in any application, I hope that will be fixed soon. Other than that I'm still loving Apple/Panther being a newbie at it.

[Paul Michael Smith]

I love Panther. I started with Jag on my G5 but it didn't work very well because of the G5 being 64bit and the fact that I had over 1.5Gig of memory it made Jaguar confused.

Some early releases of Panther had missing perl headers and some other bugs, have you updated yet ? 10.3.2 is the latest and adds some improvements and bug fixes.

Would you rather have WinBlows ?

[Tim]

I am brand new to the mac, and the first thing I did was whack on Panther over my factory Jaguar install. The Expose feature works pretty good for my cluttered way of working and I love the brushed chrome look. However, I am still having difficulty coming to terms with the Mac OS overall. Its not all that.

This weekend the idea of installing Gentoo Linux crept into my mind. The PPC docs are fantastic, and Gentoo is a well optimized distro. I dare speculate that it would whup OSX hands down on speed. The downside is that all those lovely OSX apps go out the window (unless you do a dual boot - more sensible methinks). As with all ideas about installing linux on something that creep into my mind barely acouple of weeks pass before the object in question is penguinified. I will let you know how the iMac likes Gentoo in due course - screenshots 'n all.

[Honus]

That sounds really buggy Mike. I didn't think they would have changed that much for a point upgrade and not a whole number. Shouldn't there be laws against such things?

Oh wait... I got it......!!!!!

You need to go to www.windowsupdate.com Jeez silly, that'll fix it all.

[Jeff]

So, because you have a bad experience with Panther on your machine, you somehow extrapolate that all installations of Panther are therefore bad, and people should avoid the operating system altogether?

Sounds like you have a problem, all right, but maybe you should try a clean install instead of running a dirty upgrade before you condemn the OS out of hand. You probably have some corrupted preferences files. I was lucky: the Panther upgrades on all four of my machines worked flawlessly, and I certainly have none of the problems you're experiencing. Nor has anyone else I know who's running Panther--a population of around fifty people. Give it another shot, and don't give up on it. Besides, you won't have any choice on your G5.

[Richard Heend]

Surely you must realize your results are not typical. Panther performs remarkably well on my iBook (G3) and screams on anything later. First, create a new user and log in as that user -- you might have some bad prefs. If that doesn't work... back-up your drive, reformat and do a clean install (if you'll pardon the OS9 lingo).

[cjmp3x]

On the Internet connection, did you try turning IPv6 off? I noticed that once I did that, my dhcp services worked just fine.

[Jan Swesey]

I bet that you tried to up date your system to Panther instead of doing a complete clean install. I orginaly tried an update from Jaguar for my first Panther install and it was not complete or sucessful.
So I did a complete reinstall and disc scrub and after Panter was installed clean, I got back a great working computer. I think that would solved all of your issues.
On my first install I too had keystroke issues but in the finder. All is resolved and forgiven.
I can say that Panther and I are getting along great now. I hope this helps you.

JS.

[Krishna Sadasivam]

Panther works absolutely fine on my machine (a Dual 2GHz G5). In fact, I've installed it on several computers (G4s, PowerBooks, and G5s) with nary a problem. Did you try a clean-install?

[Jan Swesey]

I bet that you tried to up date your system to Panther instead of doing a complete clean install. I orginaly tried an update from Jaguar for my first Panther install and it was not complete or sucessful.
So I did a complete reinstall and disc scrub and after Panter was installed clean, I got back a great working computer. I think that would solved all of your issues.
On my first install I too had keystroke issues but in the finder. All is resolved and forgiven.
I can say that Panther and I are getting along great now. I hope this helps you.

JS.

[foo]

sounds like you downloaded a developer beta. make sure you are using the released version.

[hal]

Panther worked flawlessly for me out of the box. I second those who suggest you must have some odd bad-karma-related issues.

[Charles]

If your Lucida looks whacked on your Laptop, go to System Preferences>Appearance and set Font Smoothing Style to Medium (best for Laptops). That will smooth things out.

Get used to Panther. Your G5 will ONLY run Panther.

[Steve]

iBook and G4 running Panther perfectly.

[Jon]

I've been had! All this time I thought I installed Panther. But after reading your report, I can only conclude I didn't install the same operating system you did. For some reason, my PowerBook can operate smoothly on the Internet on my local LAN and any wireless cafe in town, and the damn machine will run for a week without a restart! It feels fast, smooth, and bulletproof, and it never crashes! And get this...it's an OS upgrade that actually runs faster than the one before it...Windows would never try to pull that kind of crap on me! What a sucker I am. Thank you for showing me the light!

[August]

I've installed Panther on at least 6 computers, some as an Archive and Install, some as a clean install, and I've yet to have any problems.

Either you're just baiting, or you had horribly bad luck. Backup your system, then do a clean install. Panther is leaps and bounds above Jaguar, and well worth the upgrade.

[Mike]

I have an original Ice iBook 500, and Panther works great overall. I own the update disks, so to do the install I erased my hardrive, installed Jaguar, then the update. Everything works great, my only quiblle is that the CPU does run warmer when plug in to the wall.
The finder display is a great advance. You need to start from scratch.

[Nicole]

Okay, wow. Where are these people coming from? Was your post linked from a popular Mac-nazi site somewhere?

But, yeah, you should really try to refrain from posting your personal feelings and experiences on your personal weblog.

[Mario Gonzalez]

I have to agree with previous posters. I myself did an upgrade/install on my g5 2ghz, and when i noticed problems happening i didn't complain, because i knew why. i had the same window-doesn't-remember-size-and-position problem and it never would have happened had i doen a clean install. have you tried apple's discussion boards? i found answers to many of my problems there.

I just bought two 250gb sata hard drives and i'm doing a clean install first and foremost.

[Nigfriegman]

Heya. Sorry your upgrade sucked. A few tips to help you out:

1, 6: Run Disk Utility and choose to repair permissions on your machine. That can only help. I think it might get you past your DCHP problems, too. Worse comes to worse, set your DHCP-less connection to manual, then back to DHCP and see if matters improve. You should only have to do that once.

2: Grab a copy of Jaguar and use Pacifist (check MacUpdate/Versiontracker for it) to pull out its version of Lucida Grande. Replace the Panther version in /System/Library/Fonts. Log out/in and you'll be back in Jaguar-Lucida-Heaven.

3-4: The permissions repair might help with this. If not, run the combo updater for 10.3.2 (again) and then repair permissions again. Pain in the ass, I know, but it beats reinstalling your system.

5: You don't have to reboot to force your Mac to pay more attention to what monitors are plugged in. Just put it to sleep (or close the lid, same thing) and wake it up again. Yay! Monitors!

Not sure why you didn't have to do this in Jaguar. I always have.

Free advice: Check Macosxhints.com and macfixit.com ('specially the latter's forums) for tips and advice on how to upgrade and apply later updates without hosing things. Apple does all right, but they've lately gotten almost as bad as Microsoft when it comes to have crappy updaters.

[James]

I have installed Panther on three machines - old and new. It works very well. I had none of the problems you describe.

The only trouble I had with Panther appeared when I loaded old fonts into the Apple Fontbook app. My font ID conflicts affected many programs including Safari, Mail, and Address Book. That's all been sorted out now, with the help of the Apple forums and Font Doctor. Perhaps you should use the Internet to research answers to your various issues instead of issuing foolish blanket denounciations.

[Doug]

I've only had one machine in our studio have quirkiness under OS X and it was under Jaguar. Mail and Safari are constantly crapping out under Jaguar on that particular machine despite complete reformats and reinstalls. However, once we moved the baby to Panther it hummed along nicely. Our machines here are HEAVILY used. My particular workstation sports over 90 applications... many of which require specialized hardware drivers and the like. Not a hiccup besides the rare application crash. This sounds like you either have some bad preference files left over, need to fix your permissions or maybe even do as others suggested... reformat and do a clean install. Oh... are you running 10.3 or 10.3.2?

[Brian Morisky]

I am loving Panther. I have an iBook G3 366 and I thought that OS X upgrades would be pokey, definately NOT. I am amazed at how well this is going. I am baffled by your text rendering problems... I noticed that all text rendering is so much better in Panther than Jaguar. I have to agree with previous post that Gill Sans is preferable to Lucinda Grande anyways. Sounds like you need to do a clean install and switch to Gill Sans.

[Yoda]

Never install new OS's in the wee hours of the morning cause if any problems are encountered, it makes you write the sort of ranting gibberish you have just done. I have installed Panther on all sorts of Macs and never a single problem. You have had either incredibly bad luck, your laptop HD had a lot of crap on it or you tried to install Panther on your PC rather than Mac laptop (....joke....don't throw another fit). Do a clean install and you will NOT have problems!

[David T.]

Its a BLOG. Of course someone can be frustrated at Panther the first day and vent on their blog. It is also not surprising that an angry male 20 year old comes off as a bit trollish during a frustration driven rant. Most males are completely insane until they hit about 25, Lord knows I was. On a bad day, even us more staid older folk act a little goofy sometimes.

This guy just had the misfortune of having his blog linked to on a mac news site (good fortune? I bet this entry sees more responses than most of his others.) Fortunately most of what people are posting consists of helpful, honest tips.

What is telling is that only one other person corroborated any of his claims and most people are "huh? Mine went fine." Clearly most of his problems are just bad luck or due to his unclean install. The failure to recognize when a monitor goes bye bye is an odd (and presumably accidental) change.

What is also interesting are the trolls that got drug out of the wood work and automatically assume things like "oh, you aren't a REAL mac user" and just can't accept the "OSes are tools not religions. Some tools are (much) better than others," thing. Sillies.