Being an early adopter is nothing to do with the quality of software and all about mindset.
From 42:
This fucking sucks, but serves me right for being an early adopter.
Nope. You’re not an early adopter. You made mistakes. You allowed Time Machine to access your cloned backup which thereby invalidated the whole point of cloning it. You made it “not a clone”. You may have removed a directory with a simple rm command but, yeah, it borked something up. The lesson here is don’t mess with things unless you’re sure AND always have a backup. I’m a bit dubious about this idea of zombie processes surviving a system restart. I mean….you what???
Being an early adopter is all about attitude. You have to be prepared for thing not working the way you assume. There’s a horde of people backing out of Leopard because their VPN doesn’t work. The truth is that we got rid of Internet Connect so the settings for a Virtual Private Network are now available in the Network pane of System Preferences and not in their own application. There’s other things that are bugbears for people and I use that term accurately.
A Bugbear is a legendary creature comparable to the bogeyman, bogey, bugaboo, hobgoblin and other creatures of folklore, all of which were historically used in some cultures to frighten disobedient children.
If you’re not sure, then hold off upgrading. Rely on your local AASP or the Genius Bar in your local Apple Store to advise you. Consider the applications you use most frequently and research whether they will break. There was a lot of FUD about Illustrator CS3 and Leopard with one local expert crowing about it (the way he’s crowed about every upgrade and indeed claims to have Mac OS 9 machines running because Mac OS X failing is inevitable). Turns out it works.
My own move to Leopard has been seamless and I’ve spent the last week helping people realise that different is not bad and in many ways can be better. They just need to unlearn some old behaviours. Beware of cottage wisdom from non-specialists. The same folk who would have forwarded the idea that zapping the PRAM and rebuilding the desktop database were the only ways to resolve issues will fill your head full of their voodoo (like one individual who invented a new six-key keyboard shortcut…)
Check your apps and when done, upgrade. Keep your backup untouched for a couple of weeks until you realise you’ve forgotten about it. Then move on.