I upgraded to MacOS 10.3, aka Panther, yesterday. Overall, it is a worthwhile upgrade, and I'll be upgrading my home machines at some point.

Things I like about Panther:

1. Everything is much faster. They did some serious performance tweaks in the graphics and user interface.

2. The mail program is way way better. Faster, adds threading, and better management of multiple accounts.

3. Fast user switching is a must-have if you have multiple accounts (at home, everyone in the house old enough to move a mouse has a different account). Besides, the spinning-cube effect when switching users is so delicious, I'm tempted to add accounts just to I can switch between them.

4. Expose is cool. This is probably the best way ever devised to switch between windows.

5. A lot of the interface stuff has been cleaned up, especially in Finder and managing accounts.

6. The "Special Characters" panel is really nice, especially if you're the sort of person who tends to drop mathematical symbols or currency signs into documents a lot. Beats the pants off Word's "Insert Symbol" function.

7. Safari now supports the "Shadow" attribute in CSS. This is the only web browser to do so. I'm thinking of adding shadows to all my text styles just so Safari users have something to look forward to.

Things I don't like about Panther:

1. The installation takes forever. On my two-year-old G4 laptop, it took well over two hours. That's without any problems, and without any extras. The "estimated time remaining" counter was almost laughably wrong.

2. Some of the programs have been moved around without warning. For example, I used to launch Clock on log-in, but that program is now gone. The equivalent functionality is accessed through the System Preferences. This is a better way to do it, but I wish they'd mentioned it somewhere.