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Panther, billed as "the evolution of the species" and built on the open source Darwin project's version of BSD 5, really is an evolutionary step -- not a revolutionary new operating system. Panther does offer admirable user-interface consistency and ease-of-use, but its new Finder is bound to draw complaints from died-in-the-wool Mac users, particularly the large base of users who still cling to Mac OS 9 "Classic."

*NIX users will find this one of the most polished GUIs ever bolted onto a UNIX-like OS and probably won't have issues with the file browser. Mac developers groaned audibly when Steve Jobs presented an OS X Finder based on the NeXT columnar file browser at the ADC conference in 1998, and Mac OS Classic users continue to resist it in favor of traditional Mac windows, icons, and folders. In Panther, columnar view is the default window behavior.

Apple has taken the sleek, brushed chrome interface featured on apps like iTunes and Safari and applied it to the new version of Finder, the always-on application that provides the Mac desktop and handles chores like connecting to servers and other shared resources. Gone are many of the shiny, translucent Aqua interface widgets and light gray pin stripes that debuted barely three years ago.

Finder windows offer a new pane, called a Sidebar, that weds the NeXT-like columnar file hierarchy view with a Windows XP-like list of storage devices and common sub-directories in the user's home folder. Buttons on the customizable window allow users to select iconic, list or column views and turn the Sidebar on and off.

While this will be handy for people who are at home with hierarchical file systems, it has potential to confuse others because it can mask parts of the hierarchy, particularly when the list or icon views are selected. At first glance, files appear to live at the top of whatever directory is selected in the Sidebar -- intervening folders and subfolders are not shown. Sidebar does not have an option for the tree view common to Linux and Windows desktop windows.

ExposZ allows for one-click tiling of all open windows.

Panther continues Apple's commitment to making it easy to use Macs in heterogenous network environments. Mac OS X 10.3 offers easy one-click access to network servers in the underlying BSD 5 subsystem. A click-to-start list in the Systems Preferences Sharing panel turns on ASIP (AppleShare over IP), SMB, Apache, FTP, and printer sharing via LPD/LPR and CUPS. NFS, surprisingly can only be turned on using the command line or a GUI config app like Marcel Bresink's NFS Manager.

Panther also discovers and connects to virtually any Windows or *NIX server, although, in practice, the process didn't always work smoothly, and occasionally not at all. Panther generated username/password errors and refused to connect to a Red Hat Linux 9 box running NFS on a local subnet. For its part, the Red Hat box could see the Mac in its UNIX network browser, but returned an error when attempting to open a directory. For some reason, SuSE 8.2 worked fine, in both directions, and the Mac happily connected via ASIP to the netatalk server on the RH 9 box.

Panther also features Rendezvous, Apple's version of zeroconf, that does a good job of discovering supported server and printer shares on the subnet. Panther's new Finder doesn't cure one of my pet peeves: Finder still stalls while network processes like trying to connect to servers are in progress. The time-out seems to be shorter than it was in Jaguar, and the dread spinning beach-ball appears more quickly to let the user know the machine hasn't locked up.

And Panther does lock up. While I was investigating the screensavers, I clicked on the .Mac option that downloads and displays a high-key slide show of gleaming Apple products using the features of Apple's Quartz graphics system. Not only did the screensaver not load, but the GUI locked up completely. The mouse cursor would move, but everything else, even the clock, froze.

A quick ssh from my Linux machine revealed that only the GUI had frozen; BSD/Darwin was chugging along fine underneath Panther's hood, and I was able to do a safe restart from the remote terminal. Lacking another machine and a network, I would have had to do a hard reset on the Mac. For $129, you would hope to get a well-debugged product.

The Mac's distinguishing Finder app may not win many plaudits from longtime Mac users.

Panther's predecessor, Jaguar, was quite stable -- the Finder and apps would sometimes blow up, but they normally exited gracefully. This is a dot-zero rev of Mac OS 10.3, so we'll have to wait and see if Panther really is "Solid as a Rock," as Apple advertising claims.

Panther comes with a ton of Apple "iApps" that handle everything from multimedia chat to photo collections to music downloads to movie making, and Panther integrates them well into the operating system. For example, iPhoto slideshows are listed and available from the screensaver tab of the System Prefs control panel, and the Finder has an iChat menu that lists currently available buddies and user status. Apple's Safari will play back streaming music in iTunes, and QuickTime Player plays video in Finder and Safari browser windows.

Apple's Mail app has been revved to include better topic thread management, including a nifty e-mail summary feature, but its bare bones look and feel have evolved little. Mail's trainable Bayesian spam filters work quite well with a bit of training, and Mail integrates nicely with the Apple Address Book, which now supports syncing with Exchange servers as well as LDAP.

Mail integrates only minimally with iCal, Apple's calendar app, though it (or any mail program) is available from other apps to handle chores like emailing photos. Apple's integration is nice, but Ximian's Evolution is a better email/calendar/contact bundle, in my humble opinion, especially when teamed with SpamAssassin.

Notable additions to Panther include Font Book, a new font management app, integrated fax sending and receiving (long a Mac OS X weak spot), FileVault, which offers 128-bit AES home-directory encryption/decryption on the fly, a personal firewall and a XFree86 4.3-based X window system as an option of the installer package. There's also fast user switching, built-in 802.11 and Bluetooth support and revved versions of the DVD player, iSync and more.

Indeed, Panther comes with so much software it's hard to believe there will be much incentive for commercial developers to embrace the platform. Long-time Apple partner Adobe Systems recently dropped the Mac version of its Premiere movie-editing package and has chosen not to develop Photoshop Album and other new applications for the Mac.

Open source developers, on the other hand, will be interested in the tighter integration of X11 with Aqua. Many X11-based apps will just compile and run on Mac OS X, and features such as cut-and-paste between Aqua and X apps are supported. Apple apparently believes that open source, rather than commercial development, represents the future of Mac software.

Performance on my 2000-vintage 500 MHz G4 Power Mac was acceptable, if not snappy. I should note that the upgrade install took more than two hours; my last Red Hat install took 30 minutes. Performance on a single-processor PowerMac G5 was another experience entirely; even 32-bit apps displayed performance I can only describe as immediate -- owing, no doubt, to the G5 board's massive bandwidth and CPU power.

Will Panther tempt Linux users? Sure! But I don't think there will be widespread defections, given the price points of the Apple hardware required to run it. A bigger question for Apple will be whether its own faithful, the millions of users still on Mac OS 9, will find Panther compelling enough to make the jump to the future of Mac OS.

Chris Gulker, a Silicon Valley-based freelance technology writer, has authored more than 130 articles and columns since 1998. He shares an office with 7 computers that mostly work, an Australian Shepherd, and a small gray cat with an attitude.

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