[jyl]

I just did an upgrade on top of Panther. Mind you, the G5 iMac was brand new. It was a refurb from the "special deals" part of the Apple.com store, so it came with Panther pre-loaded and a Tiger upgrade DVD. I plugged the Mac in, booted up in Panther, and installed the Tiger upgrade, before migrating my old apps/data/etc from the old iBook.

So even though it wasn't a back-up/clean install, it was the "cleanest" possible upgrade - none of that pesky user stuff in the way.

But I've had no crashes, freezes, or other reliability issues whatsoever with Tiger.

I find the widgets pretty useful. I haven't used Spotlight much yet.

I do have a short list of complaints, though. iSync is finally useful enough that I bought .Mac, but it would be really useful if it also sync'd mailboxes in Mail, and I don't see why that would be too hard. The process of printing photos from iPhoto could be improved.