I’ve been writing a short note here after each minor release of Mac OS X 10.5, noting the major problems with it, and 10.5.5 is unfortunately no different. Today I applied it to my main machine’s Leopard install and tried two fairly simple operations:
* delete a partition with Disk Utility
* install Software Updates
The first totally messed up my drive’s partition table, resizing a supposedly untouched partition from 96 to 26 GB, rendering it unusable. The second, applying a half dozen software updates failed on the first attempt, and on the second attempt rendered the system unusable (LoginWindow would keep crashing and re-loading in an endless cycle).
So, I’m restoring my machine from backup now, and will stick with 10.4 (Tiger) until Leopard is as stable as Tiger.
Maybe 10.5.6 will be better, but as of now I’m still recommending clients stay on 10.4.11. A year into Leopard now, and it still has fundamental problems – that Apple has 10.6 (Snow Leopard) planned as a no-new-features release specifically to address architectural problems is a sure sign the issues run deep.