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For reasons beyond anyone's ken, loyalty to computer operating systems arouses jihadist passion, and the arrival earlier this year of Microsoft's Windows Vista and last week of Apple's OS X 10.5, code-named Leopard, has been no exception.

But there's a new wrinkle: OS X and Windows now have more in common than ever before, sending loyalists scrambling to understand. And that includes the good as well as the bad — not only have both become much easier to use, they share problems such as software bloat, buggy interfaces and embedded applications not everyone wants.

But Leopard's good features are much more interesting. Two stand out: Leopard now includes the final version of Boot Camp as part of its innards, allowing Intel-based Macs to install Windows as a dual-boot system and lets you restart current Mac models in Windows (Windows XP service pack 2 minimum). And the Leopard network connection setup is so easy it makes file-sharing with mixed-system home and business networks more an essential feature than a chore.

Apple says there are 300 new features in Leopard, though not all will be regarded as revolutionary — a Braille font, a Danish spell-checker and a word-of-the-day screen saver are among the less-than-seismic additions. Among the major changes, however, appearance is near the top. It offers see-through menus, icons that are exact miniatures of the files they represent, an iChat program that allows you to use a photo or even a movie as a backdrop and clicking on a folder shows its contents in a "fan" display.

Features like these have offended a number of Mac reviewers, much like the arrival last year of similar eye candy offended Linux polemicists. But Linux suppliers and Apple have made a wise choice in this respect: Eye candy attracts more adopters, and both Linux and OS X need more adopters.

Debates about this are really internal dialogues, and seem irrelevant when considering other aspects of Leopard. Among them:

Leopard is fat. It chews up about 6.8 gigabytes of disc space, which ironically makes it vulnerable to the same accusation of bloatware that was hurled at Microsoft by many Mac users in the past.

It can take a long time to load. It took about 85 minutes and three reboots on a PowerPC-based PowerBook G4, and about three and a half hours on a colleague's a four-year-old dual-chip desktop Mac. With variants of the processor, disc speeds and memory, there is no definitive way to determine how long installation will take for any single machine — especially when one adds to the mix the four ways to load the system — install over Tiger, without removing any files; Archive, which replaces Tiger but makes a copy of your old Tiger install; Erase, which clears everything else off and reinstalls from scratch; and Erase and Migrate, in which you back up your system, erase the disc, and then run Migration Assistant to import your old settings.

It wants few hardware resources. Its minimum requirements are a G4 processor or later running at 867 megahertz or better, 512 megabytes of memory and 9 gigabytes of disc space. But those who want a dual-boot Windows/Mac system with the Boot Camp program will need a new Intel-based computer.

It comes in only one package, selling for $129 (Cdn.), unlike Microsoft's Vista, which comes in six versions, all at different prices. Well, make it two Apple versions: There is a family pack for $199, which allows users to install Leopard on as many as five machines.

It has kissed Mac Classic — the operating system once known as Mac OS 9 — goodbye. That system is no longer supported, an important consideration for some people wishing to upgrade.

Not all applications run smoothly. There are reports that Cisco's virtual private network doesn't work properly, and some applications that change the kernel of the operating system (Unsanity's Application Enhancer, a popular utility, should be uninstalled and a Leopard-compatible version installed; some Logitech drivers include APE, which installs without notifying the user, will cause a problem too).

Installation might be a problem. There have been reports online about system crashes, resulting in (gasp!) blue-screen failures, once derided by Apple fans as the most howlingly funny Windows behaviour. Other people have run into kernel-panic warnings, a classic Linux/UNIX issue. These reports are anecdotal, though, and not shared by a significant number of users.

Security has become an issue. According to some security experts, the Leopard firewall turns itself off by default on installation and, when it is turned on, it fails to distinguish between trusted networks (your office network, for instance), and malevolent ones (Wi-Fi and open networks). This kind of criticism will bore Windows users, who have grumblingly lived with similar security issues for years, and strike them as an over-reaction by users unaccustomed to life in the popular lane, where Macintosh machines are now driving.

More specifically, Leopard's new features are plentiful, but none seems to be overwhelming enough to cause a stampede to the Apple Store all by itself. These include:

There is a lot of new eye candy, such as the "glass shelf" on which the application dock's icons appear to sit. Calling Apple's visual enhancements such as this "excess" or "eye candy for the sake of eye candy," as a number of reviewers have done, is beside the point. This criticism smacks of asceticism, which many computer snobs confuse with attractiveness. It's purely a personal preference, hardly worth the endless digital hand-wringing wasted on the matter. Besides, Leopard's eye candy is very tame and quite attractive.

The Finder has received a major facelift. The application that manages files (copy, delete, rename files) and controls desktop icons, windows, Clipboard and Scrapbook as well as the application startup interface, has been given a major overhaul. Taking a leaf from iTunes, where a feature called Cover Flow displays album covers, Finder offers computer contents and data in easily flippable Cover Flow form.

It also displays network connections, the devices attached to the computer, shared drives on the network, applications, documents, movies and music, as well as the search function all in one place. A section called Places allows users to add bookmarks to their hard discs for quick access. A Search function allows users to store searches. If there is one thing about Leopard's interface that Windows users should drool over, this is it.

Another interesting feature could be called either eye candy or a necessity — called Quick Look, it gives users a view of the data without having to open up the document or spreadsheet. It's not one of those blazingly brilliant ideas that revolutionize the computing experience, but it's surprising how quickly one learns to rely on it.

Apple has also revamped its backup program and renamed it Time Machine, which has its own animated wallpaper: A star field, the kind seen on the deck of Star Trek's Enterprise running at full impulse speed. Time Machine will repeatedly take snapshots of Leopard's operating system, programs and data, and allow users to go back in time to the last reported good appearance of whatever had been lost. The whole thing appears in a modified Cover Flow manner, a nice visual way of letting users figure out the mysteries of backing up their data.

Another interesting organizational feature is called Spaces, essentially the Apple answer to Linux and UNIX multiple desktops, which have been around for some years. Each desktop "Space" can house separate application groups — say one with Mail and an RSS reader, another with a browser and website creation tool on another, and Photo-editing tools and viewers on another. One click brings up each application group, and users can drag links from one space to another. Leopard can handle up to 16 of these spaces.

The embedded Mail program has added stationery and can create HTML mailings, once purely the province of more sophisticated mail applications, and it now supports RSS feeds. There are three really cool features here: First, a Data Detector will identify a correspondent's contact information just by running the mouse over it, and a click will add the data to a contacts list. Next, the same can happen with invitations, which can be imported from e-mail into the Calendar application. Finally, people who like to e-mail themselves notes can now do so without having to send them through the Internet — they can just appear in the inbox.

The iChat has a kind of blue-screen feature that will allow video-chat users to change their backgrounds or run movies behind them as they talk. It's surprisingly easy to do, but one must know it's difficult if the background is very busy — say, a bookshelf — or it's moving by itself — say, importing a feed from a live webcam. Still, it's an astonishing effect when it works.

The iChat feature also allows for screen sharing, or even remote control of the other's desktop.

There is another nice feature for hardier souls called Create Web Clips, which lets users capture a rectangular region of any Web page and save it as a self-updating fixture on your desktop as a Dashboard widget. Applications such as streaming news or sports scores can be made with a few clicks of a button from pages found on the Internet.

The bottom line for Mac OS X Leopard is that while it contains not a single overwhelmingly compelling feature, it has made great strides in boosting the friendliness and appearance of the ones people are accustomed to, and makes OS X even easier to learn from a Windows-hardened point of view.

But it wouldn't necessarily be an unavoidable upgrade for those who are happy with the previous OSX, Tiger. By now, most Tiger users should have figured out how to network computers without the ease of Leopard, those who do not use iChat will not want its improved features, and those who have found and installed a good back-up program won't need Time Machine.

On production computers, it might be wiser to take the old if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it approach. On home machines and student laptops, it's a great improvement.

The one really persuasive factor, however, is the price of $129. That should be reason enough to get it.