We can say this for Mac OS X: it may not have a whole lot of application support yet, it may scratch its head in befuddlement when introduced to most peripherals, and it may still feel slower than molasses on quaaludes in January-- but at least it's rock-solid stable. In two and a half months, we've experienced exactly two kernel panics, and they both occurred when waking our PowerBook from sleep after disconnecting it from an Ethernet LAN. (It hasn't happened since 10.0.3 came out, though that may just be a coincidence.) Overall, we're enjoying stability the likes of which we haven't encountered since... well, since using other versions of UNIX.

However, that's not to say that Mac OS X is truly uncrashable. (Yet.) We appear to be somewhat lucky on the stability end, whereas some other hapless customers are not. For instance, take Tony Smith over at The Register; the poor man nearly reached his wit's end trying to keep his Mac OS X-loaded blue and white G3 from taking frequent and unplanned trips to Crashville. (Spookily enough, Tony's crashes left him with "nothing but a blank, mid-blue screen"-- is Apple hard at work reverse-engineering Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death?) After multiple reinstalls, he eventually figured out what was causing his grief: an aftermarket PCI ATI Radeon graphics card, which he determined was not supported. Replacing it with his original OEM Rage 128 card left his system solid as a rock. Or so he thought.

Once he got around to reinstalling his third-party fonts, his crashes came back. And so, by adding one font at a time, he was eventually able to isolate the real cause of all his woes: "a single Star Trek symbol font... OS X doesn't like it one little bit." So while Mac OS X is able to use his zippy Radeon card after all, Tony will sadly have to boot back into Mac OS 9 whenever he wants to stick the Starfleet Insignia into one of his party invitations. Now that's a problem that Apple's really going to have to fix before Mac OS X will ever catch on as a mainstream operating system.

What concerns us about this whole sorry tale-- well, aside from Mac OS X's devastating lack of support for science fiction-themed novelty fonts, which will surely be the operating system's downfall in the long run-- is that a bigwig at an IT web site endured multiple reinstalls and hardware swaps before he finally isolated what was rendering his Mac all but unusable. That doesn't sound like an operating system that's quite ready for prime time or the "mom test." But hey, Apple's still got over a month before it starts shipping iMacs that boot right into Mac OS X; hopefully that's enough time to smooth out most of the rough edges and add support for Star Trek typefaces. If not, well, it's going to be a bumpy summer...