Pros and Cons of Snow Leopard

I'm starting this thread in the hopes that others will reply with their own lists of pros and cons to help others in deciding if they want to upgrade or not.

Pros:

1) SL supports the Intel graphics chipset in the AAO out of the box, with full acceleration.
2) The new Apple vanilla kernel supports hyperthreading on the Atom.
3) It uses less memory on boot up. Quite nice on a RAM-limited netbook.
4) There are some UI tweaks that are especially nice on small screens (the new scrollbars, and inter-folder browsing of grid
stacks right out of the finder)
5) Seems a bit faster, but I haven't done comprehensive tests.
6) It is the future.

Cons:

1) It is pretty buggy, and not just on hackintoshes. Even proper Mac's have issues.
2) Many high-profile apps have issues. Ableton Live, Guitar Rig 3, Logic Pro 8, and others.. issues range from crashes when using MIDI, to inability to load/save WAV files, and other strangeness. There is an incompatibility list for apps having issues on SL. Just google for it.
3) In the last 4 days or so of using SL, I've had two inexplicable kernel panics / system crashes. Not sure if this is an overall SL issue, or hackintosh related. But it is there nonetheless. My Leo 10.5.8 install based on iAtkos 7 was rock solid like a porn star on viagra.
4) There is no 10.x voodoo kernel yet, so VMware Fusion will crash your system. Use Virtualbox to work around this.

I could probably think of some others on both sides, but I think that is a good start.

I actually signed on to post the above, with a Con #5 - 10.6.2 will kill Atom support, and then sign off and set about restoring my 10.5.8 install. But it seems that this isn't necessarily the case. Apparently the newest 10.6.2 build works on the Atom OK; so we won't know for sure until the official update is released.

So there is hope that 10.6.2 will fix some of the cons, and still work on the Atom .. I might hold out a while longer before heading back to Leo.

 

Cons : no ethernet, no webcam, no sleep. Unless I've missed something.

 

On my A0A 150 webcam worked straight out of the box, both iChat and photobooth. Ethernet just needed this:

"To fix the ethernet; install realtekr1000.kext; reboot, then run these command in terminal:

sudo chown -R 0:0 /System/Library/Extensions
sudo find /System/Library/Extensions -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
sudo find /System/Library/Extensions -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
sudo kextcache -v 1 -a i386 -a x86_64 -m /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.kext.caches/Startup/Extensions.mkext /System/Library/Extensions

Reboot again. Your screen will now be 800x600. To fix this run NetbookInstaller and only check install general extensions. Reboot and enjoy!"

Only thing that does not work for me is sleep.

 

If someone can explain what these commands do, I will type them. I don't like to type commands I don't understand. Thanks!

I guess the three first ones change the owner and permissions of all files in S/L/E globally, but the last one is a mystery to me.

EDIT : OK I tried it anyway (thanks to http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/ ... che.8.html I understand what it did - more or less), and... IT WORKS !!!!!!

So there's absolutely no reason now not to upgrade to SL (except for the webcam, which I never use).

 

:cry:

Just realized your on a different model. There might be a fix for the webcam out there. If your on the A0A 150 it works without any hacks. Glad you have the ethernet working. I am just waiting for my dell 1390 to show up from e-bay. To think how long I dealt with windows and antivirus, malware, spyware, crashes, and on and on before I looked into installing OS X on this machine.... LOL :roll:

 

Something weird : a friend of mine, who owns the very same machine (AOA110, aka ZG5), told me his webcam is working. Maybe Acer shipped the same model with two different type of webcams, who knows...

Well anyway, I really never ever used the webcam, I don't like these things, so it's no big deal

 

It has happend before .. the eeepc 901 uses 2 different cams for Linux/XP models..
I guess it might be the same here .. ?

anyone got the webcam working on the D250 ??

 

Yeah, I had no problem getting ethernet working on SL. And the webcam in my ZG5 works out of the box. Sleep is always an issue w/ OSX. No big deal for me as I'd never have my machine sleep anyhow.. it is either off, or being used.

I did end up rolling back to 10.5.8. Way too many apps that I use are buggy under SL. You know, if I didn't want to run MacOSX software, I'd just use Linux

I have a time machine backup of my SL install though, so after the 10.x kernel sources come out we'll get a voodoo kernel. By then, hopefully there will be further updates available for my apps, and I'll switch back and try again. Next time I think I'll try for a dual-boot Leo / SL set up though.. because I'm confident it will still be rubbish or something will go pearshaped and I may as well save myself some headaches.