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I've been holding off on installing Snow Leopard for a while now after hearing about how awful it would be: crashing, freezing, and just plain not being friendly to a lot of [especially developer-focused] applications. I'm a programmer and I need to make sure that stuff like MacPorts, Ruby/Rails, etc. will all work ok - and I heard there were issues when it was first released.

I was wondering if you all consider it to now be 'safe enough' to install Snow Leopard after it's been patched (I hope) for the past few months.

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  • @DJDavid98 be careful about flooding the front page with your edits.
    – James Mertz
    Jan 25, 2013 at 17:15

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I'm a developer and I do think it's safe.

If you're using things like php, python or ruby/rails, it's always safer to download and build versions which match your production environment. It may be more of a headache than just using the stock stuff provided by MacOS, but your production site will be more solid that way.

Alternately, you can do what I do -- I use the Python (2.5) provided by MacOS for initial development. I deploy to a testing environment on my Linux server which has software versions exactly matching my production environment.

Finally, the gains from Snow Leopard far outweigh any concerns for me. The built-in Cisco VPN client and MS Exchange connectivity in Mail and iCal make things so much better for me.

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  • BTW, Snow Leopard comes with Python 2.6; not 2.5
    – Steve Folly
    Jan 1, 2010 at 23:20
  • Snow Leopard comes with 2.6 and 2.5. Look at the man page for python to see how to change the default Python.
    – Doug Harris
    Jan 4, 2010 at 3:43
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I had the same fear you have. I waited for some time and finally did the upgrade.

Altogether it has been pretty smooth. Still I experienced some issues with php + mysql. I fixed it by some quick research on the net and ended up upgrading both. For me it was ok since this is a dev environment and version doesn't matter much, except for newer is better. Also I am now experiencing some issues with my external monitor that loses sync when being unplugged, shut off and replugged.

In the end, if you don't feel the "need" for Snow Leopard, there isn't much to speak in favor of the upgrade. I did it so I would finally have Exchange support in Mail.app and iCal but apart from that, I didn't notice much improvement. I even have the feeling my system is a bit slower, but that is just gut feeling.

Short answer: I personally don't think it is safe for developers.

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I moved to Snow Leopard because I wanted to use some programs that weren't available for Tiger. For the most part my system seems faster with Snow Leopard. I don't have any regrets about upgrading.

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The Snow Leopard Compatibility Wiki is worth looking into to make sure that all of the apps that you run will be compatible with SL before making the plunge.

Personally, I didn't need to upgrade to SL - as I don't need to use an Exchange environment. The only thing I've found that requires me to use SL, so far, is XCode and some iPhone dev applications.

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Usually when 10.x.2 comes out it's ready for prime time, not sure what you've been reading but there was some app incompatibility in the first month after SL was released but they've all been fixed now. SL really was pretty good as far as breaking things - better than Leopard and its faster, I'd go for it - do you have a laptop or similar as a test machine?

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