i feel like steve jobs is playing a cruel game of punk’d on me.
so here’s the deal. i have a macbook. many applications that i want to use don’t work or don’t seem to be entirely supported or have weird issues in tiger (such as the bizarre instance of photoshop not being able to open .psds). plus, spore requires 10.5.3, and spore on the mac would be awesome. so i finally decide to try to upgrade from tiger (10.4.11) to the latest leopard (10.5.5).
that’s when i started reconsidering suicide. or at least technocide.
leopard installed okay the first time around. in fact, better than — it was more responsive and had a faster boot time. so i did the software updates…which proceeded to kill everything. after the 10.5.5 combo update, the laptop would no longer boot. ultimately, i had to start over from scratch — erase everything i had installed and do a new install. here’s the summary:
for some reason, every install directly from the 10.5 disk failed.
trying an archive & install (that keeps all your old settings and applications) didn’t boot after it got trashed from the update.
which means i would need to install 10.4 first and upgrade.
the 10.5.5 combo update, according to various mac forums, seemed to have issues for some people, so I did each incremental update separately, but I only got as far as 10.5.1 before i started having more issues.
so here’s my dilemma. i love osx, i really do. if i had a choice, i’d use it as my de facto operating system. but i don’t want to spend another 2-3 hours hacking away at the laptop to try (and possibly fail. again) to get it up to 10.5. i thought about running time machine, and making a backup as soon as i have a successful install of 10.5 so at least i have a restore point when it fails, but that just means that i’m expecting to fail when i install the updates. i’d rather not just expect to fail.
so my options are:
install tiger again and leave it. possibly funky-acting programs and no support for current/next-gen applications (making the laptop dated).
install tiger again and sell it. possibly using the money to buy one o’ dem fancy schmancy asus eee pc’s which i read have had osx86 successfully installed on them.
install something completely different. i downloaded and was this close to installing the google linux distro, gOS — the biggest detractor was, a) no app support for what i wanted, i’d have to find possibly lesser-quality equivalents of what i want and expect the adobe suite to not work 100% (so back where i started with that), plus, what’s a google OS without chrome? seriously. considering waiting until they finish chrome for linux and inevitably release a new gOS with chrome out of the box.
ultimately, installing something completely different doesn’t solve anything, but the install process would be like 15 minutes vs. 2 hours. and my sketchy cd-rom drive just keeps getting worse everytime i do this, so by the end i’m kind of expecting that it won’t accept any cds anymore at all, which doesn’t help things.
so i’m at a loss. what do y’all think?
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