[CIA]

With the release of 10.4.10 now, and the possibilty of 10.4.11 still before 10.5 ships, will 10.4 be Apple most stable OS to run in the long term? They aren't adding any new features, they are only stabilizing existing ones.
Thoughts?

[OreoCookie]

Usually OS X is very stable after the first few updates. Well, 10.3 and 10.4 were quite stable in the initial release even.

If you are very conscious about stability, switch to Leopard after the first two, three point updates.

[CIA]

No, I'm a sucker and will update instantly to 10.5 when it ships 8-) I just wanted to open up a discussion on this. A lot of people are very happy with XP compared to vista for example. And XP has been around for years, getting a little more refined (on the inside) with each patch.

Ironically right after I posted this I installed 10.4.10 and my computer died. But it's my fault I think. I updated the firmware of my Sonnet E4p at the same time I installed the update. I also for the first time installed the combo update instead of just running software update..
/sigh, needed to re-format my boot drive anyway.

[brokenjago]

Hope you backed up!

[Cold Warrior]

I'll update to 10.5 as soon as it ships too. I've always been eager to upgrade, all the way back to the public beta.

As far as 10.4 goes - yes, I think it's the most stable Mac OS ever.

[CaptainHaddock]

I thought 10.3.9 was rock-solid. It took quite a few updates before Tiger reached a similar level of stability.

I do get the occasional system freeze, which I think is due to bugs in Rosetta. Thus, I'm not sure Intel-based 10.4 should win the "most stable OS X" award.

[cgc]

My Mac has only locked up when I was running Ubuntu 7.04 under Fusion while also running XP SP2 under Parallels. Ironic.

[ixus_123]

10.2.8 was pretty damn stable for me - I used it as a webserver and it never went down.

10.4.9 has given me kernel panics every other week since I bought the macbook (about 7 weeks ago).

I think this might be due to installing X11 asa co-worker reported similar. Once I'm done evaluating what applications I want to keep, I think Ill do a clean install - one great thing about Apple is that these are painless

[mdc]

The only Kernel Panic I have gotten was back in 10.2 when someone pulled my iPod out the Dock while it was syncing with iTunes.
Ignoring the few issues I've had with Safari, that I fixed by deleting my SIMBL plugins, 10.4.9 has been really stable for me.

[EndlessMac]

10.3 was pretty stable for me too but I like 10.4 better overall. I had some stability issues with 10.2 but 10.4 is running great. I'm looking forward to 10.5 mainly for some of the new features. If 10.5 is as stable as 10.4 then I'll be content.

[JonoMarshall]

10.3 on a G5 was rock solid for 4 years. No panics, errors, issues... ever.

(I think I was fairly stupid to get rid of that old beast.)

[C.A.T.S. CEO]

I don't think that the intel 10.4 as the most stable, mostly because on my iMac G5 I could unplug my iPod from the computer while it was sleeping (Macs auto-eject iPods when going to sleep, FYI) it would only wake the G5, do that on my MacBook and I get a kernel panic. This was back in the 10.4.7 or .8 days, I haven't tried it with the latest update (and I don't plan to).

[amacboy]

I'll update to 10.5 as soon as it ships.

[osiris]

On PPC 10.4 is incredibly stable, on Intel hardware I've had mixed results. 10.5 will probably reverse both situations.

I have another drive just waiting for 10.5, so I won't touch anything important.

[CIA]

Besides the nice visual bells and whistles of 10.5, what under the hood improvements are there? I know it's got 64 bit "clean" code, and the new "Core" stuff, but if you just need a stable browser and mail client, 10.4 seems to be the choice for awhile?

[EndlessMac]

Originally Posted by osiris 

On PPC 10.4 is incredibly stable, on Intel hardware I've had mixed results. 10.5 will probably reverse both situations.

That's probably the key issue. 10.4 existed during the Intel switch over and may not be optimized for Intel Macs but that's just my theory too. 10.5 will probably solve this issue as you have mentioned. I own a PPC and haven't had really any problems. I can't remember any crashes since upgrading to 10.4 and I just did the 10.4.10 update.

[Chuckit]

If you only need a stable browser and a mail client, yes, it sounds like 10.4 should meet your needs just fine. All the improvements to networking, speed, graphics and the user interface won't really help with that.

[Horsepoo!!!]

All I can say is that I've never had a single kernel panic on my Mac Pro with 10.4. I've had it for a little under a year now and this thing has never had any problems. Rock solid OS and rock solid hardware as far as I'm concerned.