i feel like steve jobs is playing a cruel game of punk’d on me.

so here’s the deal.  i have a macbook.  many applications that i want to use don’t work or don’t seem to be entirely supported or have weird issues in tiger (such as the bizarre instance of photoshop not being able to open .psds).  plus, spore requires 10.5.3, and spore on the mac would be awesome.  so i finally decide to try to upgrade from tiger (10.4.11) to the latest leopard (10.5.5).  

that’s when i started reconsidering suicide.  or at least technocide.

leopard installed okay the first time around. in fact, better than — it was more responsive and had a faster boot time.  so i did the software updates…which proceeded to kill everything.  after the 10.5.5 combo update, the laptop would no longer boot.  ultimately, i had to start over from scratch — erase everything i had installed and do a new install.  here’s the summary:

for some reason, every install directly from the 10.5 disk failed.
trying an archive & install (that keeps all your old settings and applications) didn’t boot after it got trashed from the update.
which means i would need to install 10.4 first and upgrade.
the 10.5.5 combo update, according to various mac forums, seemed to have issues for some people, so I did each incremental update separately, but I only got as far as 10.5.1 before i started having more issues.

so here’s my dilemma.  i love osx, i really do.  if i had a choice, i’d use it as my de facto operating system.  but i don’t want to spend another 2-3 hours hacking away at the laptop to try (and possibly fail.  again) to get it up to 10.5.  i thought about running time machine, and making a backup as soon as i have a successful install of 10.5 so at least i have a restore point when it fails, but that just means that i’m expecting to fail when i install the updates.  i’d rather not just expect to fail.

so my options are:

install tiger again and leave it.  possibly funky-acting programs and no support for current/next-gen applications (making the laptop dated).
install tiger again and sell it.  possibly using the money to buy one o’ dem fancy schmancy asus eee pc’s which i read have had osx86 successfully installed on them.
install something completely different.  i downloaded and was this close to installing the google linux distro, gOS — the biggest detractor was, a) no app support for what i wanted, i’d have to find possibly lesser-quality equivalents of what i want and expect the adobe suite to not work 100% (so back where i started with that), plus, what’s a google OS without chrome?  seriously.  considering waiting until they finish chrome for linux and inevitably release a new gOS with chrome out of the box.

ultimately, installing something completely different doesn’t solve anything, but the install process would be like 15 minutes vs. 2 hours.  and my sketchy cd-rom drive just keeps getting worse everytime i do this, so by the end i’m kind of expecting that it won’t accept any cds anymore at all, which doesn’t help things.

so i’m at a loss.  what do y’all think?

in other news of simplifying things, google chrome…

i have been a firefox=aholic for a good long while.  way back in the beginnings of the internet, i wasn’t ever totally satisfied with internet explorer, and netscape was always too bloated, so i tried every browser i could get my hands on.  i settled on opera for a long, long time — mozilla always seemed to embody the bad things of netscape — until i got introduced to firefox.  now there’s google chrome and it changes everything.

i knew google was working on something, saw a couple of hits from “chrome” in my analytics and thought that it was a new beta mozilla browser (the folder that contains application and user data in firefox — as well as the mozilla browser, i believe — is chrome), but it wasn’t until i saw some mention of google chrome in wired and slashdot and various other tech blogs.  of course i installed it — i like google gadgets, a google browser?  sure, i’m game.  i went to look for more information and found this: a web comic by scott mccloud that talks about how chrome is different.  one of the important differences is that each tab is a separate process.  so if one tab gets hung, your whole browser doesn’t suck up all your resources and kill your computer — and if it starts to, you can kill that tab and then you’re fixed.  chrome apparently (and i haven’t tested this yet because i haven’t gotten a stuck process or memory leak) identifies the bad tab to inform you which one is causing the problem.  or you can open the chrome task manager and find out who’s hogging the resources.

the downside is just that there aren’t many plugins yet, including the ever-necessary web developer tools.  but that’s okay, because i’d need to check in ff (and ie) for compatibility anyway.  check out the new chrome browser here.