I’m now running OS X 10.6 on two of my three eligible Macs (the fourth is a 12-inch PowerBook G4), and so far, I couldn’t be happier. I haven’t run into any nasty compatibility issues or really disastrous bugs (although Finder once auto-quit and restarted when I was fiddling with the menu bar), and general system performance seems noticeably improved.
All that said, if you’re looking for big flashy changes, look elsewhere. Snow Leopard is exactly what Apple said it was all along: a nice collection of system refinements and improvements, with a few experience-enhancing features thrown in for good measure.
Installation
OS X users will find the installation process very much simplified. For advanced users, probably too much so, in fact. Running the installer from the Snow Leopard disc off of your desktop gives you only one install option: a simple upgrade. In the interest of time, and because I was curious to see how well it would work, that’s the option I used on my MacBook Pro, though I generally prefer doing a clean install with any major point OS change.
To run a clean install, users can boot from the Snow Leopard disc by holding down “C” during startup. From there, you can use Disk Utility to format your target drive and perform a fresh install.
Installation time was surprisingly fast, taking less than an hour start to finish. Apple has streamlined the installation process by removing a lot of drivers that used to be packaged with the OS, since Snow Leopard is programmed to go to the web to find those later if and when they’re required.
You mean 10.6 not 10.5.6.
You can run 10.6 on PPC? You said you were running on a PowerBook G4, they use PPC G4 processors, not Intel. You Intel to run 10.6?