Various people seem to be having problems with Mac OS X 10.4, particularly in the installation process.  Perhaps it’s just my innate desire to rub it in but I feel compelled to point out that my upgrade has been pretty much seamless.  The only problems I’ve had are with Mail.app – GPG caused it to crash which is to be expected since Apple explicitly said not to use those APIs as they are likely to change.  I’m also having a weird problem where Mail.app is no longer synchronizing mailboxes properly.  When you choose ‘Synchronize “adrian@intencha.com”’ from the Mailbox menu, it doesn’t do anything – nothing shows up in the activity viewer and new messages aren’t found.

Upgrading GPG fixed the first problem, not sure what’s going on with the second, but it worked originally after upgrading to 10.4.  Perhaps 10.4.1 was the culprit or perhaps it was all the fiddling around I did with my account settings….

Otherwise everything has worked.  No crashing Safari, no system instability, no real complaints at all (as always, there are things that could be improved, but nothing that annoys me enough to complain).

If that’s not enough to make those who had trouble after upgrading jealous – here’s the real kicker:

I did no pre-install preparations other than backing up my home directory and just did an upgrade install.  No erase an install, no archive and install, just upgrade.  Since many of the problems I’ve seen have to do with the user migration tool that’s probably part of why my upgrade went so smoothly.  The other part of it is probably that unlike many others, I don’t go round doing system maintenance like running fix permissions and various other superstitious things people do.  I just try Apple to get it right and on all but two occasions that’s been well-founded (10.3.9 broke java – Apple released a fix for this within a couple of days, and a 10.2 update broke a few apps and I had to manually reinstall the update).

With previous upgrades I’ve been in the erase and install camp, but from now on I’m turning over a new leaf and being lazy.  I’ll upgrade via a straight upgrade install and then reinstall if and when I’ve made a mess of things.