I was enthusiastic to try Tiger, and then I realised that I can actually get a copy under work's site licensing scheme. I decided to go for a full format & reinstall combo, so I dutifully backed up all my important data (except my bookmarks - bugger) on the file server at work.

Tiger is pretty. It looks and feels almost the same as Panther, but it's fixed a few annoyances that I had. The extra feature are very nice too (I'm already using the improved Spotlight), and it has a lot of polish on it. Unfortunately, there is one major show stopper: you get authentication errors trying to mount samba shares. This is a big problem in our networked environment around here, and was especially annoying because all my backed up data was done on a samba share.

Work arounds include:

• use smbclient
• use some other file transfer agent, like scp or ftp

Very annoying, to say the least, because I can't transparently mount my samba shares and access the files directly. There's a bug report for it, but there's no solution yet. The suspected belief is that when Apple introduced NTLM authentication support, they broke plain text password support (a la windows world). There's no easy way to test or fix this though. Most annoying.

So, overall it's good, and I haven't encountered any other problems (yet). I reckon if you want to install it, as long as you don't need Samba, you should be ok. If you do need it, stay with Panther until it's fixed. There's no pressing need to upgrade in any case.