Of course, like many, I read several professional reviews, consulted several resources, and backed up, repaired permissions, and checked the disk before installation. Links to the online resources I mention include clickable links.
As many of the professional reviews mention, the installer for Snow Leopard is different, most noticeably in that it allows you to at least start up the Installer app before reboot. Being a cautious traditionalist, I manually started from the Installer DVD (by holding down C as I booted up) and ran Disk Utility before starting the Installer app, as traditional before this release, also from the Installer DVD. Installation took about 45 minutes, but then the machine crashed while automatically restarting (before the restart happened), giving me a dialogue offering the chance to save a crash report, shut down, or restart.
Once I restarted, the machine started up from the new 10.6 System Folder, but I was a little leery about the crash. So I re-inserted the DVD and clicked on the Installer app as it had originally wanted me to do. Installation then came off without a hitch.
Once up and running, other than a few 3rd party programs that I had known going in were not yet compatible, everything worked generally as well as the 10.5.8 installation I had just installed over. In Safari did I see a few cosmetic rendering irregularities on banner ads, and one crash of the Flash plug-in (which I was happy to see as advertised, did not cause Safari itself to crash). I followed the instructions to report the crash to Apple, and hopefully it will be addressed in or before 10.6.1.
I have also had a few instances, in the Finder, of non-response to clicks on icons or buttons. Almost always, clicking later on the same icon or button worked. It's admittedly possible that it's user error with the clickable trackpad, but at least subjectively, 10.5.8 seemed to do what I wanted to do with trackpad clicks more than 10.6 seems to. Hopefully this can be addressed in a subsequent version, but it's currently spotty to reproduce, and of course it doesn't crash anything, so there's no crash log to submit.
I also get a consistent bug where a Dashboard widget I know not to work on Snow Leopard (and have manually removed) keeps getting loaded (apparently by MobileMe sync, as it's on a synced 10.5 computer) and crashing, even though I never get a MobileMe sync dialog telling me of the change, just a crash notification with the Ignore or Send Bug Report to Apple buttons. Maybe I should just manually removed them one more time, then make this computer the master to sync from (thus removing the widget from the other computer, but at least it would stop crashing on this one).
In general, Snow Leopard seems to range subjectively from at least as stable and bug-free as, to considerably more stable and bug-free than, x.0 releases of Mac OS X in the past.
The few visual and organizational changes to the overall Mac OS X interface seem to be what they're sold as: refinements. In my estimation, it's a good idea to link Exposé to the Dock, grid-view of Stacks (at the very least) should be scrollable and clickable down to the next level (although now that I think of it, there were a few instances of the click happening, and the grid disappearing, only to have me need to drill down again on my next click on the Stack), and there's no particular problem with renaming the International preference pane as Language and Text, or separating out Keyboard and Mouse preference panes.
With regard to performance, it did take me some tinkering to figure out how to turn on the more powerful of the two GPUs (finally realizing, no thanks to any forums or other such posts online, that it was inside the Energy Saver preference pane, in the form of the Graphics toggle for "Better battery life" or "Higher performance"). Having done that, I could then run a benchmark test of the OpenCL performance of the active GPU against the CPU. These benchmarks were within the bounds of other users who had posted their results. Also, my Geekbench results tended to be about 2% better overall than under 10.5.8, whether the 64-bit kernel was loaded or not, whether "Higher performance" graphics were selected or not.
Real-world performance has been essentially the same as 10.5.8, as I haven't been crunching any real numbers. I ran a game demo or two, and while the fans went as crazy as I've ever heard them, the performance at any level of rendering (even maxed out) was exemplary: beautiful with no skips or weird textures at all. Better, actually, than the limited problems I experienced with Safari after the update.
Quicktime X is good, in terms of how easy it is to make iSight and Screen Recordings. I did have to switch to Quicktime 7 Pro to run an older .asx file (via Flip4Mac, probably as Quicktime X doesn't load any plugins at all).
All in all, a good update. $9.95 for Up-to-Date was better than $29 for the full purchase price, in terms of the limited changes to the interface. But I've drunk the Kool-Aid (in part by my own testing, or at least ability to test) that the changes under the hood set a great foundation for the future.
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