I've upgraded my MacBook Pro to Leopard. It was an easy experience. The installation started off telling me it'd take two and a half hours and ended up taking only about forty interesting minutes. I like being able to watch the log records flit by as it does its thing - much like on linux. I also like how that's hidden from regular users. I think I was asked may be 3 questions in total - and then the upgrade was done.
The first user experience of Leopard is quite bad - it's very slow. Why? Well, my shiny new 750gb external hard drive was busy copying 60gb's of data using time machines new backup. At the same time, Spotlight was busy trying to scan the entire disk and make new indexes. So by the next day, everything was running quite fast and snappy and the operating system started to take form.
Integrated backup just totally rocks. I don't have to think about it. However, not everything is perfect - there are a few bug reports going around already. I've found that Safari often won't open web pages that firefox will and it won't tell you why. The bigger problem though is with Parallels.
You cannot use the regular builds of Parallels - you must use the beta build. This turns out to be a slight problem because the page to download the beta build is one of those pages that Safari refuses to open. Doh. I downloaded it with Firefox for MacOSX. Parallels just breaks -badly- without the beta builds so don't even try to use it without upgrading it to the beta build first.
So parallels saves your windows partition as a big file on your disk - say, 32gb's or so. You don't want time machine backing this up because it changes constantly - so you'll quickly be writing new 32gb images to the backup drive every ten minutes or so. Very bad. So you have to setup time machine to exclude this.
But then I found a new surprise in the VM settings in parallels - I could make parallels map my mac user folds to my windows profile. That means "My Documents" in windows maps to $HOME\Documents on Mac. Awesome. That also means that the stuff I work on day to day under Parallels gets backed up. Even better.
Now for some particularly good news for Civ4 fans. The beta build of parallels really does run a lot faster and the 3d support is far superior. Not only can I run civ4.. but I can actually play the game comfortable. I played an online network game with James Robertson from inside Parallels.
Some really cool stuff - the Expose top-right corner on my mac works for within Civ4 running full screen. That means during game if a Skype message goes beep - I can expose the screen, click the message which appears over the top of civ4 and reply, then click on the background game and keep playing as if nothing was more natural.
Speaking of expose, under the beta parallels, individual mac windows in coherence mode appear in the expose exposure instead of one big window for Windows's Desktop.
Some gripes though - swapping back and forth between fullscreen is annoying, because leaving full screen always takes me to "Window" mode instead of back to coherence. Argh. The shared drives breaks constantly with permissions problems under windows - depending on how you attempt to access a shared folder. Argh. And the final problem - sometimes while playing civ4, all sound dies. I have to quit Civ4 and restart it to get the sound back. Argh.
But hey, it's a beta and Leopard is playing along -real- nice now. I'm loving it.