The Leopard upgrade, and the stuff I still can't live without
Published 17 January 08 by Justin French, 3 comments
I finally dusted off that Leopard disc on my desk and installed it yesterday. Rather than an upgrade, I choose to clone Tiger onto an external drive with SuperDuper!, then installed Leopard on a clean hard drive.
Much like renting (where you’re forced to contemplate the value of everything you own every year or two as you move around), I really love the opportunity to start fresh with a new OS, ensuring that (at least for a while) everything you install is something you really need.
The results are pretty interesting after 24 hours.
- my Applications folder is just 499mb, down from 2.3GB (!) with at least 20 fewer apps installed
- my Library is less than half it’s original 3GB of bloat
- the system Library is nearly 5GB, but it’s dropped down from 14
- in total, I’ve got an extra 50GB of disk space I didn’t have yesterday
What survived? With some obvious exceptions, it’s mostly stuff from indie developers:
Installed within 5 minutes:
- Quicksilver
- TextMate
- Little Secrets (it holds all my usernames, passwords and miscellaneous details for pretty much everything in my life)
Installed within an hour:
- Things (it now rules my life)
- AppZapper (it was handy for tracking down files on my Tiger install that my favorite apps depended on, like preference files and bundles)
- iLife 08
- iWork 08
Installed within 24 hours:
- CocoaMySQL-SBG
- Linotype FontExplorer X
- NetNewsWire
- Adobe CS3
Predicted installs in the next week:
Some other things I had to do really quick:
- I don’t even use the scroll arrows much, but I still had to move them to the top and bottom (rather than both at the bottom) because even after all this time, they still distract me
- Allan’s tips for getting option-left and option-right to act like the rest of OS X when using Terminal (skipping back and forward one word) is pretty much all need to do to feel at home in Terminal
Before you go…
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