It’s Official, we will Not be Supporting OS 10.3 “Panther” after Today
Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 5:43 PM by: Katt LindenBack in early May, we blogged to let you know that we were seriously considering whether Linden Lab should continue supporting Mac OS X 10.3, “Panther,” which was first released by Apple back in 2003.
As we wrote then, our tracking shows that very few of you, about 1/4 of 1 percent of all of you, the entire base of Residents, are still using Apple’s Mac OS X 10.3 when logging into Second Life.
The vast majority of responses from you confirmed that you agree, it makes sense to free up the Linden engineers from working to support an operating system used by so few Residents, and instead we should let them move on to other work which will benefit a much larger group.
We wanted to make sure there was plenty of time for the news to spread, and now, a little over two months later, it’s time to actually cease support of this relatively little-used OS.
What does it mean to “stop support”? Basically, it means we stop new development for the SDK (software development kit ) of that operating system, and also stop doing QA testing on OS 10.3.9.
What will you notice? If you are one of the few logging in with Panther, OS 10.3.9, you can still do so today, even though we are officially now not supporting it — and that may be true for some time.
Exactly how long we can’t guarantee, because Linden engineers will no longer be testing to make sure that new releases will work with Panther (OS 10.3.) So, eventually, there may be a time when some new element will interfere significantly enough to result in folks who will not be able to log in with OS 10.3 on their hardware. At that time such folks would need to upgrade their OS in order to do so.
What if you plan to keep using OS 10.3? We will continue to support the 1.19.4 viewer, which does work with Panther, (OS 10.3.9), and we will do our best to give reasonable notice before we stop supporting 1.19.4. So to be clear, stick with that viewer if you don’t plan to upgrade from Panther. Residents still using OS 10.3 will be able to log in to SL with Panther, 10.3.9, using the 1.19.4 viewer, they will just not be able to update to new Second Life versions, as new versions of the viewer which will continue to be released with improved stability and additional features will not support OS 10.3.
Please be careful to note, as we blogged yesterday, that the most recent optional Release Candidate will not run on a PowerPC running OS 10.3.9:
IMPORTANT: Known Issues with RC14
- It is a Known Issue that this Release Candidate will not run successfully on a Mac PowerPC that has the operating system OS X 10.3.9. It will only run on PPC hardware if you have Mac OS X 10.4.11 or higher.
- The current viewer, version 1.19.1, still supports the Mac PowerPC that is running Mac OS X 10.3.9.
At this time we’re not considering dropping any other operating system.
Our general approach to supporting older releases of operating systems on any platform is to fully support the current and most recent OS for each platform. For example, we will actively support both Vista and Windows XP until such time as Vista is replaced with Microsoft’s next major operating system release. Similarly, we all support the most recent releases of Mac OS 10.5 and 10.4. Again, in all cases, we will attempt to provide at least 60 days notice prior to dropping formal support for any operating system, as we did in this case.
I’ll note that I personally run Second Life on one of two MacBook Pro laptops, one running Tiger (OS 10.4,) and one running Leopard (OS 10.5.4.)
[To briefly recap the history of the last five years of Mac OS: Panther, OS 10.3, was first released in October 2003, and updated to 10.3.9 in 2005. Apple has followed Panther with two more recent versions of the Apple OS, “Tiger” (OS 10.4,) released in April 2005 and “Leopard,” (OS 10.5.4,) released in October 2007 and most recently updated in June 2008.]
July 17th, 2008 at 5:59 PM
Yay down with MAC
July 17th, 2008 at 6:06 PM
Lab makes the call: No Panther…
Back in May, Linden Lab said it was considering dropping support for Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther). Well, the deliberations are over, and the Lab has just announced that that is what is going to happen……
July 17th, 2008 at 6:07 PM
—————–Quoting————-
Again, in all cases, we will attempt to provide at least 60 days notice prior to dropping formal support for any operating system, as we did in this case.
—————————————
Did I somehow miss it? On May 5th there was a blog post that LL was *considering* dropping support for 10.3 and wanted feedback from the user community.
Was an official announcement that support *was* going to be dropped made 60 days ago? If so, could someone please provide a URL.
July 17th, 2008 at 6:11 PM
oh, grow up, boy
July 17th, 2008 at 6:12 PM
°sighs° that was pointed at #1
°growls at fast growing comments°
July 17th, 2008 at 6:13 PM
oh, and can someone of you at the lab maybe consider also prohibiting those unneeded bot-comments? ( referring to #2 )
July 17th, 2008 at 6:17 PM
Less work for the viewer team.
July 17th, 2008 at 6:21 PM
@6: That was manual labor, actually. Not automated.
July 17th, 2008 at 6:27 PM
@6 and @, Tateru,
You’re fast Tateru, but I knew it wasn’t automated, your post at Massively was a good summary of the key elements — clear thinking especially appreciated after I wrote out the long version in the post above, with all the lengthy details.
July 17th, 2008 at 6:29 PM
@3, Ric, I’d appreciate it if you’d take that first post as notice! Thank you!
- Katt
July 17th, 2008 at 6:32 PM
A time for all things
July 17th, 2008 at 6:57 PM
this is a bit disturbing tho, Im already stuck using the 1.19.0.5 cause nothing else works right for my laptop. Just wondering how long b4 part of my system is no longer supported. BTW, i just bought the laptop last year and paid almost 1000 for it. Sounds to me that soon enough, more and more of us will be phased out. Like i said, i have to use an older viewer cause the graphics on the new viewer has a major bug related to bump mapping, which renders the viewer unusable. Unless i want to not see the shininess on things. I make stuff tho so that is not an option.
July 17th, 2008 at 7:17 PM
#12, you paid $1000 for a mac laptop with a 5 year old operating system on it? You could have easily found something with 10.4 on it for the same price or less and 10.4 runs the new RC just fine. You bought yourself a door stop or a paperweight. No offense.
July 17th, 2008 at 7:17 PM
OK, fine! I hope the freed up resources will be reallocated to support mac issues of the supported OS X versions. That would at least be fair. Especially, long standing movie making problem in SL on a mac viewer.
lest LL should forget, let me remind Mac is future; and that future is now already in movie making, photography, music, multimedia and other creative fields would soon be waking up to Mac. It deserves attention.
July 17th, 2008 at 7:24 PM
no magnus, i didnt say that. Its a sony vaio, with vista on it. Just didnt realize that graphics cards are not really replacable on laptops unless u spend over 1500. Windlight is a major problem on my system now. B4 windlight, i could turn most of the settings way up. Even runs Hitman (blood money) with np. Just sl that my laptop has a problem with. Actually, the problem is fixable, but i guess not enough people have the same problem. So, Im sol. And yes i have an issue for it. Looks like LL gave up on it tho.
July 17th, 2008 at 7:26 PM
And on this corner, WindowsXP, released in 2001, still supported. XD
Take that, Steve Jobs.
July 17th, 2008 at 7:26 PM
[...] I couldn’t even get in if I wanted until they lifted the restrictions on NPIOF. SLU is much better . __________________ Strenghtened by fury, I feel no fear Fire inside, it keeps me awake For no [...]
July 17th, 2008 at 7:37 PM
That’s what reproducible bugs are about, Medhue. Even with the vaunted Mac, *every* system is unique and there’d have to be many times more Dev Team than residents in SL to debug them all. I help many get their “obsolete” systems up to snuff and able to use SL, despite it all, but it does get harder as OSes keep getting replaced. All you can do is explore new avenues to keep your system up to date. Problem is, unless you are doing word processing and e-mail, every new app makes old machines more and more obsolete. There isn’t all there, Lively isn’t all that lively and even OpenSL isn;t all that open if you’re hardware can’t handle SL.
Don’t give up hope.
July 17th, 2008 at 7:37 PM
Well I’m on a normal MacBook Laptop with Leopard installed on it, I may have to have the ‘Graphics’ set a bit lower for ‘Lag’ reasons, but works fine!(touches wood)lol. I’m Happy that Second Life/Lindens still supports this, and to me their doing a fine job.
Keep up the good work!
July 17th, 2008 at 7:42 PM
LOL, Crocodile.. that’s because the best Microsoft could come up with was an ill-planned version called Vista while the mac has had oodles more updates
Meh,.. updated hardware or OS.. Mac or PC. They all have their quirks 
July 17th, 2008 at 7:58 PM
Well, I have a Vista PC running Ultimate x64, and a Vista laptop with Home Premium x86, and SL runs like a charm on both. Those who diss Vista probably tried running it on 5-year old hardware and complain that it is useless. Same would be for a Mac. I bet running Leopard on a 5-year old iMac would not be optimal.
July 17th, 2008 at 8:18 PM
If I may offer an alternative solution to folks too…
These days you can purchase a reasonably nice desktop PC completely with monitor, significant hard drive and graphics card for around $500. I know that’s not a tiny chunk of money, but most working stiffs can come up with it, even if they have to finance it.
I also realize it’s not a Mac, but I’ve known a number of people who purchased cheap PCs just to run a specific program they wanted to use that wasn’t available on a Mac. They had a Mac on one desk, the PC on another, and they did fine.
So users of Macs that are so old your OS is being unsupported… a viable option is to buy a cheap PC. You can even buy used PCs that are in good condition, from those who are upgrading to power PCs. So there are available options that will still keep you online. Hope that helps some. Most folks don’t realize that a relatively inexpensive solution exists, but there it is. PC isn’t Mac, but it will run SL and keep you online.
July 17th, 2008 at 8:22 PM
Oh and Crocodile, no offense, but no, most people who dis Vista are those in the industry who realize what a pile of manure it is. Now I am in full hopes that Vista II, whatever it may be, might fix some of the problems of Vista, but when you have corporate techsperts that are blasting Vista clear across the U.S…. there’s something wrong, and it’s more than just an old system. Twice I have given Vista a good chance, putting it on a brand new Quad-Core computer with a terrabyte hard drive and a killer graphics card. Both times, after 2-3 weeks I switched back to XP and heaved a sigh of relief. Ahhhh…
I know there are die-hard Vista fanatics who will disagree and stomp and rant. But there are valid reasons that people don’t like Vista. And a whole lot of those people have killer computers and know exactly what they’re talking about. Vista just plain has problems that I expect it will take Microsoft several years to iron out.
July 17th, 2008 at 8:32 PM
None of our machines have Panther running and so it has been for a very long time.
We have 2 machines running SL on Leopard.
One of these machines, a Mac Book Pro on nVidia 8600 GT 512MB, OS X 10.5.4, does not run SL reliably on RC 1.20.14.92115 because you have not been able to solve a freezing condition known as VWR-1715 albeit said condition is quite well documented and previously tagged as RESOLVED.
RESOLVED is not quite the case according to a large pool of residents on specific hardware.
VWR-1715 has been reintroduced with 1.20.14.92115 while being of very mild disturb on a previous release.
We would love for the best of our clients and their business to see this problem resolved once and for all, with the help of the Apple DEV Group or otherwise have the affected hardware, namely the Apple Mac Book Pro, labelled clearly and unmistakably as UNSUPPORTED by Linden Lab.
July 17th, 2008 at 8:39 PM
From my understanding from a nearby Best Buy Geek Squad,, XP is no longer available for sale–but will still be supported for a while. If there are any left, grab quick.
It would be great for improvements to be made for VISTA and have it function better and as a result have SL work better on it.
Thank you Linden Lab for keeping VISTA and improving the functionability of SL on it. Good job
July 17th, 2008 at 9:01 PM
Blinders,
That is strange, since my main PC is an Athlon64 X2 with a rather wimpy GeForce 7600GT, and Vista and my programs run great with it.
July 17th, 2008 at 9:19 PM
How about supporting 10.5.4 better. I’m sick of the graphics glitches and crashing. SL works 10000000 times better on 10.4.
July 17th, 2008 at 9:37 PM
I hope you will continue your support for Windows 2000 Professional (you forgot to mention this, it’s not just Vista and XP you support, but 2000 as well) for as long as possible, as I am planning to stay on it until 2010 at which point Microsoft will no longer provide security updates for it, and at which point I will be switching to Linux.
Windows 2000 is not a difficult operating system to support when you still support XP, as they are very similar, except 2000 is less bloated.
July 17th, 2008 at 9:40 PM
weird… SL runs great on my install of 10.5.4 ….. even better than 10.4 ever did
July 17th, 2008 at 9:40 PM
i have a computer with a hand crank on the side will second life run on that?
July 17th, 2008 at 10:07 PM
I’m kind of sad about this. I’ve only been playing for two days, on Panther, and now this… granted it’s pretty slow, and I have another computer I can use at hand…
July 17th, 2008 at 10:38 PM
I can’t believe there are still people saying, “Well, how come you still support XP then, huh? huh?”
1). If you’re still using *10.3*, chances are _high_ that you’ve got a WHOLE lot of other compatibility problems going on than SL. OS X 10.3 has been old for a LONG TIME, and a lot of things won’t run on it anymore.
2). Comparing 10.3 to XP as far as ‘longevity’ goes is not valid. It’s not like XP is at “XP 1.0.00″ still. XP is on SP3 now, and OSX is on 10.5 now. Yeah, Apple takes a different approach to versioning and what upgrades they charge for.
3). A major architectural overhaul happened along the way from 10.3 -> 10.5, and this is not the case with XP. Changing from PPC to X86 opens up an entirely new can of worms as far as development streams and compatibility goes. XP hasn’t had to endure this, so compatibility with the old systems are less of an issue.
SL doesn’t support Win98, SL doesn’t support 10.3. A lot of upset people have had to upgrade from their GeForce MX200 with 32mb of VRAM in the past five years in SL, too.
I don’t know how anyone can fault Linden for this. Yeah, you might have to shell out for a copy of Tiger or Leopard. But come on.
Can anyone here actually state an actual *valid reason* as to why they’re still running 10.3? If you’re running hardware that can’t muscle 10.4, then I can’t imagine how you can even get around in SL.
Dev teams have to dilute their resources less. It’s obvious that nursing 10.3 compatibility along has *hurt* the stability of the mac client.
Chances are, freeing the devs from these constraints of “No, we can’t do that — it’d make things faster but it’d break 10.3 compatibility” will make for a much better mac client in the end.
July 17th, 2008 at 10:44 PM
Hi Crocodile. Yeah, some folks like Vista. Depends on the person and their applications. If they’ve never used XP or XP Pro, chances are they won’t figure out the problems with Vista, cos they’re deep down. But for one thing, Vista gobbles more RAM, more hard drive space (significantly more) runs slower, and the permissions / security prompts are a pain. I’ve seen Vista block legitimate programs due to some supposed “copyright issue” (which was total bogus) and I’ve seen Vista refuse to run several major programs (including some belonging to Micro$oft itself). People new to computers probably won’t even notice, but I’ve spoken with several techs from major computer stores… and they absolutely hate working with it.
Likely eventually Micro$oft will get the bugs ironed out, just as they did with XP. But until then, the sales records say that Vista has had poorer reception than any version of Windows to date, and the vast majority of corporations are sticking or even reverting to XP. In fact, several major computer manufacturers are still offering versions of XP to their corporate accounts. That should tell Micro$oft something. LOL. Maybe they’ll get their act together and fix it. I know for me, I get really tired of pressing 12 keys to run a simple Windows functions as opposed to the 2 or 3 I’d use in XP. I gave Vista a fair chance…. twice… and like the business world, switched back to XP.
I’m not dissing Vista mind ya. I just don’t like it. And so far, every tech I’ve asked in every computer store I’ve visited has said the same thing. Resource hungry, excesively protective to the point of paranoia and user-unfriendly, and doesn’t do a single thing that XP can’t already do (at least, nothing that’s needed by the average user). In most folk’s mind, Vista was totally unnecessary. XP works just fine.
July 17th, 2008 at 10:58 PM
@blinder: vista runs smoothly nowadays, and NOT slower. the security function aren’t a pain at all, they are there for security. running xp on a low rights account is more of a pain, running it on an adminstrator account gives you no security.
almost every MS os needs about a year and one sp to run smoothly, as you said “just as they did with xp”.
so stop dissing vista (you ARE).
I run SL, blender, photoshop cs3 and a ton of other programs I need for SL. So from the SL user’s perspective there’s nothing bad about vista, really.
July 17th, 2008 at 11:18 PM
I agree that plenty of notice and information was given by LL on the plans to drop support for Panther. Don’t forget - this was an OS for the PPC processor, not Intel, so we cannot compare like-for-like with other OSs. Besides, OS wars are silly and I hope we can move beyond that
I sincerely hope that LL re-assign these freed up resources to other OSX issues that need attention.
Looking forward to more
July 18th, 2008 at 12:27 AM
quote:
For example, we will actively support both Vista and Windows XP until such time as Vista is replaced with Microsoft’s next major operating system release.
XP will always be a pinnacle of Windows, Vienna (windows 7) is a shot at remaking Vista, it is not a “new” operating system. Win7 will also not support backwards compatibility, so it will be like SL 1.0 all over again for Vienna. Itruely hope XP will be supported for almost forever, because I personally ill be continually using it for as long as I can. Vista is a joke of an os, and 7 will be no better.
July 18th, 2008 at 12:50 AM
@34
there are plenty of things wrong with Vista, and whoever made the comment about 5 yr old hardware. my PC is less than a year old and Vista has never run smooth, even AFTER SP1. Xp runs like a dream. oh.. and for the record:
CPU: Intel Core Series Processor (1866 MHz)
Memory: 1015 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 (Build 2600) / Vista SP1 (build ????)
Graphics Card Vendor: Intel
Graphics Card: Intel 945GM
OpenGL Version: 1.4.0 - Build 7.14.10.4926
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.16689 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)
July 18th, 2008 at 12:53 AM
Well, personally I’m glad to see that Linden is shifting it’s focus when it comes to very old Operating systems. It’s true that supporting those can drain resources. Especially on a Mac, with the multitude of OS versions that’ve seen the light in the last few years.
Where this is troubling is with Windows. We know that Microsoft won’t stop with Vista (can’t take any money from us if they don’t have a new, shiny OS for us to buy). But, what that also means is that the day is looming that XP itself stops becoming supported.
For me, that day will mean SL will not work for me any longer. I already have daily problems, serious ones, with SL. I have an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro, also a Radeon All-in-wonder 9800 pro. In an Athlon XP 2800 computer. Multiple gigs of ram. An with that, I still get some kind of strange freezing problem. Every roughly 30 to 90 seconds depending on surrounding enviroment, my client freezes.. as does the whole computer.. for a period sometimes up to 30 seconds long. It then unfreezes and operates normally until the next freeze.
I’ve fought for a long time to figure out what’s to blame.. but I can’t yet. However.. this is all on a 1.19.1 release of SL! I don’t really have anywhere -to- go, as I’m sure the RC versions right now will make the problem worse.. as they usually do. So, while I’m not removed yet, I sit waiting to see how long I can be a member of an otherwise wonderful community, simply because of software errors and lack of support.
I don’t care for new features, new devices.. any of that. I just want SL to Stop Freezing! If that could be overcome, I could care less -what- they did to the client. 
July 18th, 2008 at 1:01 AM
@38
There are plenty of reasons it could be, if you find me in world, with an email address, or a messenger addy I will gladly help you out as best I can. I know Windows XP inside and out, quite well. so I might be able to offer some assistance in that regard.
July 18th, 2008 at 1:22 AM
/me takes out her tiny violin and begins to play…
“So long Panther!” (ya big pussy!)
@38 My bet is the vast majority of residents are using XP followed closely by Vista then Mac then Linux, so I wouldn’t panic about LL dropping XP anytime soon.
I suggest you check (a) your ISP connection (do you get timeouts on long downloads?) and (b) bring up TaskMan and check the memory usage of the SL client.
@Blinders - I’m another XP to Vista and back to XP refugee. It’s not a perfect beast but it runs SL RC 20.14 like a dream. (I’ve been trying to crash it and I can’t!)
/me plays a happy jig.
July 18th, 2008 at 2:59 AM
Zulqadi Saarinen Says: “lest LL should forget, let me remind Mac is future; and that future is now already in movie making, photography, music, multimedia and other creative fields would soon be waking up to Mac. It deserves attention.”
Maybe it does deserve attention, but Panther is not the future
Crocodile Says: “And on this corner, WindowsXP, released in 2001, still supported. XD Take that, Steve Jobs.”
Well 2 latest versions of Windows supported and 2 latest versions of Mac supported, sounds fair to me
Phantom Ninetails Says: “I hope you will continue your support for Windows 2000 Professional (you forgot to mention this, it’s not just Vista and XP you support, but 2000 as well) for as long as possible, as I am planning to stay on it until 2010 at which point Microsoft will no longer provide security updates for it, and at which point I will be switching to Linux. Windows 2000 is not a difficult operating system to support when you still support XP, as they are very similar, except 2000 is less bloated”
Umm, hate to tell you but they announced they are no longer supporting Windows 2000 nearly 12 months ago. People running bot clients can still use it apparently, but they never see inside SL anyway.
So you planning on still using a 10yo computer in 2010 too?
July 18th, 2008 at 2:59 AM
Actually I think @3 has a point.
Saying that you’re “considering dropping” an OS and would welcome user feedback is hardly the same as giving 60 days “formal notice”. In fact the title of this blog post begins “It’s Official…” which rather suggests that this is the first official announcement you’ve made about it, doesn’t it?
Not that I use, or care much about, Panther. I do however care about the cavalier way that LL communicates things.
July 18th, 2008 at 3:18 AM
You had stated we would have 30 days (or was it 60, I need to reread the announcement before) notice from an announcement of dropping support to actually doing so and I was counting on that. Why the sudden change? My 10.3 machine is unable to be upgraded.
Oh, and I know you do not care about premium account, but one guess which of my 2 machines my premium runs on?
July 18th, 2008 at 3:19 AM
Wouldn’t it be far more profitable for Linden to support Xbox360 with the optional keyboard ?
July 18th, 2008 at 3:20 AM
@ 10 ‘10 Katt Linden Says:
July 17th, 2008 at 6:29 PM
@3, Ric, I’d appreciate it if you’d take that first post as notice! Thank you!
- Katt
‘
since when has the word ‘considering’ meant ‘we are’??.. hmmm
does your use of the word ‘appreciate’ mean ‘we make things up as we go along, you know this so stop taking us so literally!’
July 18th, 2008 at 3:37 AM
Lmao. So when were you going to work on stability and performance again?
July 18th, 2008 at 3:57 AM
@40
Regarding memory usage under XP SP3:
110Mb before login, bloats tp 500Kb+ after a few minutes online and goes on increasing. I know that a lot of that will be due to downloading world info, textures, etc., but I suspect there is still a memory leak somewhere.
July 18th, 2008 at 4:04 AM
@22
“These days you can purchase a reasonably nice desktop PC completely with monitor, significant hard drive and graphics card for around $500.”
500 Dollars for SL only? Only for logging in with a maximum performance of 15 fps (which 500 dollars will deliver)?
This reminds me of some people lurking in the shasows of the red light district waiting desperately for the man to come…
July 18th, 2008 at 4:10 AM
Katt, I giess those with tiger can channel their old viewers and stay online,,,
however to do you realise that those with channeled viewers and self-compiled viewers as well can’t see the status blog?
It is hidden by the “You must upgrade” box.
Bad web design. How about merging the blogs? You know, one for both statuis entries and announcements. All the news in one place would be so cool!
July 18th, 2008 at 4:19 AM
@35
“I sincerely hope that LL re-assign these freed up resources to other OSX issues that need attention.”
Exactly. There seem to be a lot of problems with the PPC and the 1.20 clients, especially Atmo Shaders and AA, which are not resolved, as well as with some intel powerbooks.
Anyway, compared to the windoze platform coding something successfully for the Mac cannot be SUCH a task at all, once one has done the basics. There are only a few common hardware configurations in usage and neither ATI nor Nvidia altered the basical video drivers dramatically.
July 18th, 2008 at 4:27 AM
Um, Katt… run out of coffee lately?
I believe you meant 1.19.1.4 when you kept writing 1.19.4 …. 
July 18th, 2008 at 4:38 AM
Its time to upgrade your machines if you haven’t second life users. No more using old systems that even Microsoft or Apple don’t support anymore.
I am a xp/vista user on different computers both have the same memory in terms of graphics card and same ram. They both run smoothly and perfectly! I will be upgrading my XP to vista soon and will have no problems. If people stop buying the cheapest PC out there with Vista on it then they wouldn’t have any problem with using photoshop, second life, day to day applications. I sure don’t. You have to SEE what you actually purchase in terms of RAM space and graphics. You cannot run vista on a gig of ram. It is TOO slow, it should be at least 2 gigs and your graphics card should be at least 256 MB.
Also @ 49 Linden lab put the grid status on a different place so they wouldn’t have to hear us wine about something going wrong with the grid
July 18th, 2008 at 4:38 AM
Running Mac 10.4.11 on Mac Book Pro never had any issues tbh…. My newer Mac Book Pro eats SL, so it isn’t allowed to come out to play.
Out of interest, none of these “other” new platforms popping up *coughs* Google even support or let Mac users near them - so hugs for Linden Lab.
July 18th, 2008 at 4:46 AM
@49: I think they took the status updates out of the blog because they wanted it to be more upbeat. Firstly because the blog is the only form of web-based public dialog remaining, and moving the status issues out of the blog avoids having hundreds of negative blog comments about them. And secondly because media types and bloggers read it and link to stories in it via trackback. Lots of links to a negative status report in their blog about something being borked = high search engine ranking for the story = bad publicity.
So a decision was made to separate out the news which LL would like people to talk about (the relentlessly Panglossian blog), and the news they’d rather they didn’t talk about (the status reports). The status reports got moved somewhere else where they can’t be commented on, or so easily linked to via Trackback etc — and they appear in small writing up in the corner of the main blog page, which of course makes them less bad
July 18th, 2008 at 5:35 AM
@32: I can’t believe there are still people saying, “Well, how come you still support XP then, huh? huh?”
Um, probably because nobody is saying that. Most people here realize that, regardless of what Microsoft says, XP is still Windows users’ primary OS. Most of them have not switched to Vista, and many of those who have are quickly switching back after they discover that half their software no longer functions.
The closest I’ve seen to your assertion is a joke about how long it took MS to come out with a new OS release and how they still managed to bork it. And that’s just stating facts, albeit with a little schadenfreude.
July 18th, 2008 at 5:37 AM
@12 I have the same issue. My 1 year old MacBook Pro has lots of problems with Windlight, and LL refuses to acknowledge this. They’ve bloated the graphics requirements past what these new machines can handle unless they’re parked. I just hope they don’t force us to leave 1.19.0.5
Marcus
July 18th, 2008 at 6:04 AM
Thanks for the care that went into this announcement: entirely reasonable, too.
I just wish that the same amount of care and reasoning went into getting rid of the ‘freezing’ that happens every 15 minutes or so with the latest SL viewer running on the latest Mac OS, graphics driver upgrades downloaded, on the latest MacBook Pro. All control freezes for 20 seconds or so, and the Spinning Beachball of Death appears, showing that the OS is struggling to prevent a crash.
So okay, under previous SL viewers SL would in fact crash. But it’s not much of an improvement if you’re doing sailing, combat, car-driving, or even ordinary movement within SL.
July 18th, 2008 at 6:09 AM
And to Tarran Aeon, whose response no. 1 in this thread was ‘Yeay down with Mac’ I can smugly point out that on the Mac, even the error icons (e.g. ‘The Spinning Beachball of Death’) are attractive and lively. Back to your grey-suited PC, Tarran *grin*…
July 18th, 2008 at 6:27 AM
Well as a Panther user who can’t upgrade to a Higher OS because I’m on an older machine, I think this SUCKS. You’re basically telling me, “get a new computer or don’t use SL”. Yet another slap in the face from LL. Thanks.
July 18th, 2008 at 6:29 AM
And to the “Down with Mac” guy…How you enjoying all that spyware and viruses on your old PC? When’s the new OS that people will actually USE coming out? Wake up dude, it’s not the 90’s anymore. Macs are on the rise, PC’s are on the decline.
PS: When will LL stop supporting Vista? Since so few PC owners actually use it. lol
July 18th, 2008 at 6:41 AM
Better shift to a Mac then:
51% unit growth year on year:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/04/23results.html
While Windows dropped 24%:
http://www.computerwire.com/industries/research/?pid=EF8994D8-D4A3-46EA-918B-92FAAF485269
But yes, get rid of that stupid Viewer Update window. There is no newer version apart from the RC, so you are blocking the Status Reports window.
Or is this the new policy of smoke and mirrors at LL, to hide everything, like chopping out the user numbers from Key Metrics, so we can’t see how quickly SL is going down the pan because of focus on unwanted shinies instead of core functionality?
All we get instead is land up 44%, rather than active users static for 14 months (actually not static, they have dropped).
The Key Metrics used to be mentioned on the blog, now they are just pushed out quietly, because every month they are worse and worse. New Premium bonus is down to L$4 million from L$9 million a couple of months ago.
Phil and M Linden should go back and look at the Open Letter from over a year ago, and see that despite promises to do something, not one item on the list has been fixed.
All we get is more useless shinies, and a slower world that is borked more of the time. There are so many worlds coming online now, you probably have a maximum of 6 months to fix things before SL is in terminal decline. After all, users have not actually grown for over a year. Just land, which is what, L$2.5/m2?
But I expect LL will continue ignoring everything as per usual. The Tao of Linden. lol. There’s a reason why everybody else does things differently boys, their way works, your way doesn’t.
July 18th, 2008 at 6:54 AM
Hey all just skimmed through the postings on here.
Sorry but why are so many of you bashing Vista on here. You can turn UAC off on the control panel if it annoys you I can’t remember off hand but there is a way to do that. I am also sick of people saying it consumes more Ram and more resources and what ever else. That’s really hypocritical and also the other thing is everyone’s all up for XP well XP was just as buggy if not worse when it first came out.
I have had Vista since Feb and it is Ultimate and my machine runs fine it’s never slow and the only issue that persistently is a let down is SL all my games run fine on here in fact everything I ever have had on here is okay. I just hate the way on which some of you attack Vista for faults in had when it came out originally and that is not fair when it has not had the time ie 7yrs or whatever it is like XP to mature and improve.
I know Windows 7 is not that far off the agenda but it could be put back months even years if for once MS does not pander to the public needing the OS out with out it going through proper QC and making sure everything works properly. I hope MS makes people wait this time around and does not fall into the trap it did with Vista with Win7
I also understand the need to remove the old OS’s so the engineers can work on the more current one’s if it is Mac or MS. I apologizes if the things said herein are off topic but I am sick of reading comments by the Anti-Vista crowd. Some of us like it and for some of us it has never been an issue in the first place. Give it a rest it’s pretty boring now!
July 18th, 2008 at 6:56 AM
Oh Grow Up!! I am soo tired of the whining of the Mac?Widows people…
you want to run the latest of every thing on one machine?? Fine up date your hardware..including your wireless and broadband speed.
I run Vista Ultimate X64…not a bit of trouble but…I run it on high end hardware
Intel quad Core Extreme
dual Nvidia1 gig graphics cards in Sli\
16 gigs pc 6400 ram
1 gig NIC
6 gps DSL
so…..upgrade or hush!! Y’all still drive around in a ‘28 Chevy and expect it to be the same as a 09 Lamborghini!!
Snort!!!
*slides out her claws for the attacks*
*snicker*
July 18th, 2008 at 7:16 AM
Yay down with Tarran Aeon.
Pfft
Thank you, Katt. I specifically noted this mention on yesterday’s announcement about the release candidate viewer and suspected this to be the case, and also why Linden Lab (wisely) has no intentions to make this new version a mandatory update.
Thank you for your quick official clarification on this matter.
Unlike the bonehea…er… ‘misinformed individual’ whose name I mention above, there are those of us who love both (and some all three) platforms and it is good to see Linden Lab stepping-up to deliver clear, concise communication with this regard.
In truth, I am quite surprised any Macintosh that will run the Panther OS is powerful enough to run Second Life viewer and still have what I would personally consider an acceptable user experience.
And if those machines are in-fact capable of running the viewer with an acceptable user experience, then they certainly are capable of utilizing the most current Leopard edition of OS-X, or at the very least: Tiger.
Again, thank you for your clear announcement, and thank you Linden Lab for moving forward. And also for allowing the freedom of fools to open their mouths, removing all doubt as well.
July 18th, 2008 at 7:31 AM
I think that the important statistic that seems to be missed in most of these comments is the portion of the user-base who are connecting using this OS: 0.25%
To figure out how many users might be online using this operating system at any given time, take the number of users currently online (visible in the login screen) and multiply by 0.0025. So right now, as I write this, I see 47,677 users online, of whom statistically speaking about 119 are likely to be using Mac OS 10.3.
Now, mind you, those 119 people are able to connect to SL using the current client, 1.19.1.4. Linden Labs has said that even when 1.20 becomes the current version, 1.19.1.4 and 1.19.0.5 will continue to be supported for the near future. Currently 1.20 will not work with many systems that are running Mac OS 10.3.
Should those other 47,568 people be forced to wait for Linden Labs to make 1.20 compatible for the remaining 119 people (and who knows how long that will take), thus pushing back considerably the upgrading of the Mono viewer from Beta to Release Candidate?
The priority here ought to be very clear: If the Release Candidate viewer (1.20) being developed is compatible with the operating systems being used by 47,568 of the users currently online, and is not compatible with the operating system being used by 119 of the users currently online, then let’s move forward with it.
The reason for posting this announcement now, I suspect, is related to the recent announcement that the latest iteration of the RC 1.20 viewer will likely be the final rollout before it becomes the current client. It is also probably a not-so-subtle hint that while 1.19 viewers will continue to be supported, there is no guarantee that this will last longer than 60 days.
July 18th, 2008 at 7:32 AM
I’ve used my little iBook [panther] with SL. It is barely able to handle the SL. But, I also have an iMac with the big ram [tiger]and it runs like a champ. I am not a tech type. With new required updates, will the SL look at the OS or at my SL name? I would still like to use the iBook on ocassion. Can I have two SL operating systems under one logon name?
July 18th, 2008 at 8:05 AM
The reason they still support XP is because Vista sucks a big one.
July 18th, 2008 at 8:06 AM
When I started playing SL, I was on an older Mac with the soon-to-be unsupported operating system. The world was a strange, slow, gray place.
That was 2007 and I had bought the computer in 2002 when they first came out, so got a new Mac running Tiger and with a few crashes and the occasional annoyance, SL runs fine.
In fact the new release candidate is the best SL experience I have had so far.
I strongly disagree with #22 above; a $500 cheap Windows box is in no way a substitute for any Mac no matter how old.
At present a very nice Mac starts around $1100 and will last the user five to seven years. Assume five, that’s $220 per year or **Less Than $1.00 per Day**!
Pretty much figure out some way to earn $300 Linden every day and your computer will pay for itself!
And no, #22, once you’ve gone to Mac, there is no turning back ! No crashes, no blue screen of death, no tech support, no hours and hours spent pulling out hair and gnashing teeth when all you wanted to do was print a file.
I’m reminded of the old days when cars were new and bystanders told early automobilists “GET A HORSE,” without realizing how ridiculous they looked from the Driver’s Seat!
Y’all have a nice day, huh? Play nice! Linden Lab does a lot of work so we can have fun and some people who post here don’t seem to give them credit for their efforts on our behalf. There is no incentive for Linden to fail, suggesting that some cabal exists to deprive us of our non-existent “rights” in this situation is simply ludicrous.
If Second Life (may the gods forbid) declines or fails, some or all of the Lindens be out of a job. Where’s their incentive **not** to perform at peak?
Again, thank you for all your hard work. Thank you for the increasing communication with the community and looking forward to even more of same in the future!
July 18th, 2008 at 8:32 AM
It seems like a reasonable announcement. Other companies dropped Panther support long ago.
Yes, I have a mac. Freeing up dev team members for other things sounds good to me!
July 18th, 2008 at 8:50 AM
good i dont have a mac, & for everyone that says vista sucks. it really doesnt if you have a high spec pc
July 18th, 2008 at 9:12 AM
@ 34 TheTree… and other Vista supporters. Hey, as I said before, I’m glad you like Vista. Some people do. You have every right to say how great Vista is and you have every right to enjoy it. What you don’t have a right to do is tell other people they can’t voice their opinions on Vista. Freedom of speech and all that, y’know.
In regard to the guy who said Vista uses the same amount of RAM and hard drive space as XP… LOL LOL LOL. Dude, been there, checked that, as has every tech magazine in the world. No matter what ya claim, Vista gobbles resources and it does not run as fast or smoothly as XP. You’re entitled to your personal opinion, but the benchmarks disagree.
I appreciate hearing there’s a way to turn off the security issues on Vista. Not surprised to hear ya “can’t remember how it’s done”. After all, a security system that can be easily and arbitrarily turned off by the end user isn’t much of a security system, is it? Show me how to shut that puppy down, THEN we’ll talk, and I’ll even thank you.
And again TheTree, I and others aren’t “dissing” Vista. We’re stating facts. And the reason we’re stating those facts is in reply to those who say that eventually SL will cease support of XP. Yeah, maybe eventually. What, 5 years from now? There’s no evidence SL will even be around 5 years from now, so not really a valid issue there. Like someone stated above, regardless of the existence of Vista, XP is still the primary system of choice by most businesses and households in the U.S. Vista sales have been dismal. So trying to confuse the Mac OS issue (an ancient, outdated version) by bringing up XP really is just clouding the reason for LL’s decision.
I use XP. Most businessmen I know still use XP. All the techs with whom I regularly do business still use XP. And that fact is so solid it’s been published in magazines. The computer community has not yet embraced Vista. Glad some of you think it’s hot stuff but tell ya what: it’s not a personal issue and ya don’t have to get on the bandwagon and rant at everyone who doesn’t like Vista… and you sure don’t have the right to tell us to shut up. ; ) If you like Vista, great. Have fun. Doesn’t alter the facts.
No one intended this to turn into an XP vs Vista debate. All this is about is the simple bottom line issue: like it or not, XP is likely to be around for years. It’s functional, it’s mostly debugged, and again, most people are failing to see any real advantage in switching to Vista. So… in regard to Second Life… no, despite the alarmist posts, Linden Lab is not going to cease support of XP– at least not within the next half decade. ; )
July 18th, 2008 at 9:15 AM
Well guys I love my Mac. But running SL on my MacBook pro is a pain with crashed and freeze outs - so I have switched to that ‘other’ system (yes even the V one) and whilst I hate to say it I have only crashed once in the last four weeks - tempting fate - but leaving the Mac - for more important… no sorry … more business related work.
July 18th, 2008 at 9:23 AM
@65 Jahar thanks for posting the real numbers here. I was going to make the calculations myself so that people understand how ludicrous it is for LL to support Panther (I did also vote on their survey, eons ago, and naturally voted to release resources from the Panther-testing team to support the more recent upgrades).
That will mean that my old 1996 Performa won’t be able to run SL any more. Ah well. I think I’ve lost that Mac anyway, I can’t find it at the office where I left it
On the other hand, very likely, 71% of all Windows SL residents are using Windows XP and will continue to do so.
July 18th, 2008 at 9:26 AM
Also notice that at least according to MarketShare, after Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, the major software platform out there to connect to the net is not any of the consoles, but the iPhone, and it outhines — by far! — any other PDA/Phone operating system
Guess where LL will put their resources next?…
July 18th, 2008 at 9:44 AM
No one I know in RL with a PC likes Vista, they revert back to XP if they can. The ones tooting the the Vista horn probably bought a PC with Vista pre-installed and the company that made the hardware don’t support installing XP. So they have to keep telling themselves, Vista is good. When in fact it’s not.
My brother has this problem, bought a laptop, and if you remove Vista they won’t help you put XP on it. You are on your own. A lot of people are not tech savy enough or brave enough to put XP on it and lose the support. So they suffer through it, like my brother. If it was me I’d of promptly returned the machine and bought some other brand that supports XP.
July 18th, 2008 at 10:10 AM
@41, “blah blah Windows 2000 sucks and your computer is old”
lol, another person who thinks the operating system determines the age of the computer itself. No. Just no. My computer is new, and I put Windows 2000 on it after buying it. The operating system does not determine the age of the computer itself. There is nothing wrong with this OS, either, it is a very capable OS (much like XP) and there is little to lose by supporting it.
Also visit this page to have Linden Lab prove you wrong about whether or not they support it:
http://secondlife.com/support/sysreqs.php
If you care about my specs:
Core 2 Duo E6550 (2.33 GHz)
nVidia 7900 GTO
2 GB DDR2 RAM
Second Life runs fine on it.
July 18th, 2008 at 10:15 AM
in response to,”38
i can tell you, that i had these card too before and, they really arent design for sl at all, got same problem than you, first the memory on board is to low for any animation,it freezze, u will be better with a card that has a lot of memory on board , some amd card are very well design for the 3d animation, look on there site.you got one of these…that just just dont fit…
July 18th, 2008 at 10:42 AM
I run Vista on a high end system as well and after a lot of pain for several months, it works well enough, but not enough to keep me from trying Kubuntu. Most of what I use is open source software now, and if you are using Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird and Gimp, there isn’t much reason to stay with Windows and the continual issues with the latest security problem. At least they stopped the immediate reboot thing that left me fuming.
July 18th, 2008 at 10:59 AM
I don’t know about you guys, but I have had a great experience with Vista 64 ever since I got it. I do have a very high end computer. You know, real high tech stuff, an 8800GT, a dual core processor… Real bleeding edge technology, ya know. Oh and 5 gigs of DDR2 ram which can be had for like $90 these days…
July 18th, 2008 at 11:28 AM
its simple, the client is opensource, so if people want it supported they cna do it themselves.
July 18th, 2008 at 11:34 AM
Ok, When I switched to vista, I was sceptical, very. But I started when the latest OS by microsoft was Windows 3.0 and realised quickly back with win95 that one of the biggest hurdles that any OS faced was, first, the ones who would bash the new system because it didnt run every little thing or didnt do this or that.
The truth was it was in some ways alien to them, things arent where you are comfortable with them. you are at first lost to find what your looking for. So it gets shouted down, especially by those who know the older system well, and the old comfortable system is re-installed.
XP. Great now, but was terrible in its earlier days
Vista. Not too bad once you know where things are, and if shown the attention XP was shown, it could really shine.
So lets drop the “this sucks” debate and focus on the main point. LL, stopping support for a tiny percentage is the right thing to do if it improves it for everyone in the long run.
July 18th, 2008 at 1:11 PM
No problem with not supporting OS 10.3, but when are you going to provide stable support for Windows, Mac, and Linux clients?
July 18th, 2008 at 1:26 PM
@24 Velouria, @57 Christi- You’re right, that we are still investigating freezing that happens on some Macs with the latest 1.20 iterations. VWR-1715 was marked Resolved because that issue was tracking one specific cause of freezing; but obviously it is not the only one. Please lend your voice/symptoms/system environments to VWR-7779 which is tracking the latest freeze problems.
@46 Fox- we are working on Stability, I promise! When the next Release Candidate cycle begins, we will again more aggressively introduce memory thread monitoring and fixes for crashes… (The best progress is made in these beta-series viewers, when active Crash reporting tells us where the code is failing, and we can iterate immediately with additional debugging information on that part of code.) Katt’s words ring very true: more time can be applied here that will be freed by not deep-diving into a problem, for example, that was very specific only to the Mac PPC only when running OSX 10.3.
July 18th, 2008 at 1:45 PM
As a self-described “Mac Evangelist” since 1984, I’d love to come in here and sing the praises of my favorite machines.
But, I’m sadly disappointed in Apple’s lack of focus on their OS (and QuickTime) these past few years, charging full upgrade price for what amounts to simple incremental updates, features that are slower than previously, and crippled functionality of previously useful functions.
I get the feeling that someday soon, even Apple will discontinue support of their own OS completely and focus entirely on their telephones and MP3 jukeboxes. User satisfaction has taken a back seat to money money money money.
That’s not the Apple way, and as a developer of easy to use shareware/freeware, it’s not my way either.
(if I had my way, the Macintosh Finder would have been an intuit