The main thing people are missing about this upgrade is the thing people have been complaining about... speed!

A friend of mine has the dev release of panther, and she wrote me this letter (oh yeah, and she's mainly a Windoze XP user.. she wont use OS X full time because it's too slow):

"It'll be sweet on your G4. My G3 350 with Panther runs faster than L's G4 450 with Jaguar. It's nice. I'm jealous of your G4. =] It's gonna be *quite* nice with Panther.

Yeah, we got the dev release. If I had a laptop I'd offer to meet you for coffee and let you play with it. =] It's got some issues, but is fun overall. (It won't let me copy files from my non-stock CD-RW drive without using the command line.)

Whee! I can't wait for it to actually come out. =] It'll make one of those 1ghz G4's fly, and it'll be *quite* nice on the G5's. Almost enough to make me wanna switch. =]

The expose thing is nice--better than the images make it out to be. (The images make it out to be a little more complex than it is, and give no indication of the speed. This is one of those areas where Apple made the right decision and skipped a lot of the takes-forever-eye-candy-animations. You press F9 (or another function key--fully configurable) and you've got all the windows of a particular type laid out on your screen almost instantaneously.

It's *nice*. And fast even on my G3 with a cruddy little video card. (Much better than Windows' alt-tab) I think you'll like it. =] Almost makes up for the lack of a Linux-like-pager! =] And makes up for the Dock's evilness. (There's a slight animation- the background gets a darker overlay that comes in from the sides of the screen to the center, and the windows re-size and re-organize themselves to fit onto the screen.. but that's fast enough to almost miss. And when you mouse-over each window in expose, it has a roll-over that consists of a transparent color overlay and a rounded box with the name of the window. It's really nice. I love it.

Tabs look different now, as do the login dialogs and some other windows. The design is starting to feel more solid and less eye-candy like. (Although it's still got that gorgeous aqua look)

Let's see.. what else.. Networking is a lot faster--accessing an actual Win share no longer causes the OS X equiv. of a BSOD if I try to disconnect without first double-clicking the icon to open the share (Yes. I've gotten those. I took a picture of one for proof, too!) (I used to BSOD whenever I'd mount a share then un-mount it without viewing its contents. Why? No idea.) I also no longer have that issue with it trying to default to 10-BT instead of making use of the entire 100BT bandwidth avail. To it. Copying to my Win box is a LOT faster. It also seems to be better about just copying things over and manipulating the names of most of the files to make them windows-compatible (ie: no non-windows characters.) Just a bunch of old problems I used to have..

Oh. The mouse-speed-up app you have to download to boost the speed of the mouse under Jaguar? No longer necessary. They give you more headroom now and you can make your mouse zip around quite speedily."