Are you guys having fun? Should I get Panther?

i'm running OSX and really didn't have any plans to upgrade to OSX anytime soon.

Am I missing out on anything? Is thie alpha a *reason* to upgrade?



Maggie

Maggie, how dare you use a macintosh, I'm not talking to you anymore

Eggy......

I confess.

I was "raised" on Macs. I love Macs. I have a love/hate relationship with my PC.

My Mac has my heart because my Mac has my *music*!

Can't you overlook it? It's my only personality flaw. Other than this one thing, I am perfect.

Maggie

Maggie, Panther is pretty darn cool. Expose is very, very useful, and OSX just runs FASTER in general! The last Jaguar release, 10.2.8, was extremely buggy, and it caused lots of big issues for me. Panther has cleared up every single one, PLUS gave me tons of cool new features, AND lets SL run.

For a really GREAT deal, go to MacConnection.com. $99.95 USD after mail in rebate -- act now!

Do the overnight, it will seriously be there the next day, even if you order at 1am.

Maggie, if you are upgrading to Panther just to play the alpha, I would recommend against that.

I currently have 10.2.8, and have been planning to upgrade to 10.3 at some point in time, and now the alpha has pushed me (especially after playing on my cousin's iBook I want to see how it is on my slightly better Powerbook).

OS X is what allowed me to make an easy jump from Windows. About the only major time-consuming thing I do on Windows now is play SL.

I am told that OS X is faster in general than OS 9, and more stable, and runs longer, and whatnot. All depends on what you need to do.

And while it seems that a few of us are able to run SL on sub-minimum spec machines, it can border on excruciatingly slow.

Right now, the Mac client is VERY much an alpha. It's loaded with bugs an inefficiencies that result in screwy textures and horribly slow frame rates...

That said, I'm using it a LOT because my personal Mac laptop sits next to me at work, and now it can be connected to SL!

I don't enjoy building anything in it, though. Not yet. It IS very much on it's way, however!

I am generally pleased with the performance most of the time. I have not compared to a higher-end PC yet but on a 1GHZ / 1G RAM machine it works pretty well. Sometimes (I think this is the state of the Mac SL version) things just go into lala land and you have to quit (sometimes it crashes for you )

I went into the "Apple Store" and tested on a number of machines and it really sings on a G5. We block the SL ports at the office or I'd run it on my G5s there.

Go with the Mac, you'll like it!

I'm running on a 800Mhz/1GB Powerbook with 32MB Graphics RAM, which is atmittedly below the minimum specs. I find my framerate is horrible and texture are slow to load, and it not uncommon for the textures to never clear up. That said, we aren't talking about a trigger/flinch game, and the above doesn't cause too many problems. My biggest complaint is the association between framerate and minimum move distance.

Nevertheless, I find it more to stable than my Wintel (Athlon 2800 w/ Radeon 9600XT). And playing on my couch with the laptop is just more comfortable.

And lastly, every Mac user testing it out is another data point for the programmers to help figure how to fix the bugs.



Anm

OK, storytime, kids....
Once there was a geek who went by the name of StarManta. Sometime last summer, he was invited to join the There beta. And it was good. It also happened to come about the same time that StarManta got a job, so StarManta wound up buying a lot of Therebucks - $130 worth before it was all over.
But, poor StarMAnta was forced to buy a Mac for school, due to being in a design field. He was sad. But then he actually USED his Mac. And he was happy.
Until he realized that There had no Mac client. A little while later, he saw on a forum that Second Life was experimenting with a Mac version. Earlier this month, StarManta finally got Panther and ran SL.
And life was once again good... although it DID run at about 4 frames per second

So, um, that's my story.