Apparently, Panther is Apple's attempt to bring OS9 back into OSX. It's faster, more colorful, more usable, and... less stable and buggier.

Problems Installing:
I have two computers on my home network: an iMac DV SE, 400 MHz G3 slot-loading, bought in the summer of 2000, and a 12" iBook, 500 MHz G3, bought in the fall of 2001. Both have AirPort cards. Both were successfully running Jaguar before the upgrade.

When I upgraded, I actually chose the "Upgrade" option, not the "Archive & Install" option, because I have done a simple "overlay upgrade" in the past, all the way up from OS9 through Jaguar, with no ill effects, and the least disruptions to everyday workflow. But this appeared to be the wrong choice for this update.

On the iBook there was an actual failure during installation, which I have never seen before. Gave up on Upgrade after hitting it a second time and did an Archive & Install.

Another horrible surprise awaited, however; finishing the installation and finding that whichever user had initiated the update was now afflicted with an infinitely-crashing Finder. The Finder would start up, experience some kernel bug, die, then get relaunched, forever. Other accounts not affected. Weirdly, both the iBook and iMac were affected with this same bug, though the iMac had done an Upgrade and the iBook (because of the aforementioned problem) had done an Archive and Install.

Going on nothing but pure superstition, I did an Archive & Install on the iMac, which fixed its infinitely-crashing Finder, but the iBook required significant manual surgery to resurrect my wife's account. I had to delete her account to a .dmg, create a new one with the same name and carefully copy documents and preferences from one to the other. Finally got her up and running again.

Because she uses Backup to back up to .mac, I thought I could restore her important acct. info via a Backup Restore. No. It failed with the most unusual and alarming error messages, about not being able to write to .mac. Ahem, I'm doing a software restore so you should be complaining about not being able to read from .mac, right? Right?!? Bleah. Pretty crappy treatment, and a significant loss of faith in the Backup utility at all. Maybe I should shop around for something else. This is like getting a kitchen fire and discovering that your extinguisher plays "Happy Birthday" instead of actually extinguishing the fire.

Complete lockups
Apparently at random. One time, trying to start iTunes, another time, trying to switch between apps... really awful stuff reminiscent of not just OS9 but Windows 3.1. They're gone now, but why were they even there? On the plus side, my journaled filesystem made for a dramatically faster recovery.

Problems that continue:
The menu bar icons get all messed up as I switch between apps, leaving me with doubled or missing AirPort, volume, and iChat icons, and worst of all, really crappy-looking drawing artifacts. Check it out:



Part of this, I am sure, is because I run my monitor at 800x600 and it has probably only been tested on 1024x768 monitors and up. The reason I run my monitor at such a low resolution is because on my 2000-era iMac, things look best there: the monitor runs at 95 Hz vs. 75 Hz for higher-res and there is no eyestrain at all.

Disks that won't dismount
You're going to think I'm crazy, but I swear it happens all the time. I download a .dmg file which mounts, then I copy out what I need, eject the disk image and... nothing happens. Well, it half happens. The disk icon disappears from the desktop, but, significantly, not from the navigation bar to the left of every Finder window. Ugh.

Why it's still worth using
You might think that after all this I promptly deleted it and reinstalled Jaguar, but no: there are too many good things about Panther that do work that I cannot imagine living without anymore. A short list:

• Exposé. Amazing. Finally, the ability to "stand up" from your desk and look at your "papers" spread out below.
• Fast User Switching. Dude, you can't even do that with X11, and that's saying something. (On the other hand, I do believe this was a feature that showed up in Windows XP first…)
• Faster Everything! Apple must be seriously applauded for releasing software that actually runs faster on existing hardware, rather than making you unhappy with your suddenly slow, suddenly bloated machine.
• New Open/Save dialogs. Better-looking and better-behaved than those in Jaguar and previous. Count me in.
• iDisk Mirroring. Nice—finally I can work on my network drive without getting my shoulders all scrunched up, which happens whenever I have to deal with large and erratic network latencies.
• New Mail.app. I like it. Quiet improvements; no downsides.
• Activity Monitor. Finally Apple takes some responsibility for giving you a view into what's happening on your machine. Comprehensive, and has finally weaned me from the command-line tool "top".