OSX Lion

The Black Oil

I'm thinking about moving to Lion. How's it looking now a few months after being released?

silvine

There's still issues with it occasionally dropping wi-fi connections, I definitely experience this. It also uses up more RAM and has slowed down my 2009 Macbook Pro. I also find the graphical UI features e.g. mission control a little redundant. That said I haven't had any other major issues with it and the full screen app feature is pretty useful.

Talisman

Presently I'm strongly considering going back to Snow Leopard but project wise I'm too busy to have the luxury of a day of downtime.

My main issues:

Sound has stopped working.

Bluetooth headsets have stopped working.

From my research both of these issues only happen on laptops that have a non-Apple SSD which is crazy and the only known working fix is a clean install of the OS.

The other stuff like the sleeping wi-fi connection I can live with for now.

The single greatest feature of OS X Lion is that they updated the Finder. It can merge the content of folders with the same name when you do a copy instead of chucking out the existing folder and replacing it with a new folder of the same name. It's also possible to access the folder while the copying is taking place.

They improved Screen Sharing but the sleeping NetAuthAgent bug is still present though not as common as before.

If I rollback to Snow Leopard I will miss the improved Finder but the rest of the stuff is pure fluff as far as I'm concerned.

Colonel Panic

And from the other side of the coin, I haven't had a single hitch with Lion despite upgrading over Snow Leopard instead of doing a clean install.

It always boots and wakes from sleep quickly, it always goes into idle sleep when expected and generally just feels snappy to use.

There are some things about Lion I don't use. I'm not a fan of the inverted scrolling, but Mission Control is great, fullscreen apps work way better than I expected.

If you have a spare external HDD, why not clone your Snow Leopard install and try Lion, at least that way, you can go back if you run into problems!

The Black Oil

Interesting, thanks.

Creating a clone of SL, do you mean through Carbon Copy Cloner or some such? My SL DVD is 10.6 and it's generally a gigabyte to bring it up to 10.6.8. I take it you mean a clone would eliminate this, if I made a copy of what I'm running at the moment 10.6.8, should I wish to revert back to it.

Colonel Panic

Yeah, I usually use Disk Utility to make one off bootable clones, but CCC and Superduper have way more features.

A clone of a fully up to date system would indeed eliminate the need to install 10.6 then bring it up to date if you didn't get on with Lion.

bertie4evr

I find its defiantly more sluggish than Lion and waking from sleep can take a while. (On a 13" 2011 MBP btw)

depends on how you use it,
if there are programs that you absolutely must have, ensure that they are 100% compatible with updates etc etc.
it's worth taking the time to make sure about this.

Otherwise, from a normal everyday usage there's no great difference,

I dont use launchpad - i have the dock for the programs i use and i can find the applications folder for the rest.
missed expose at the start, but have now gotten used to mission control.

There's no Front Row either, which i used like, even tho most peoples seemingly use Plex..

I havent found any great reduction/increase in performance from snow leopard, although if i went back now i'm sure i'd notice some stuff.

The Black Oil

Thanks, I'll hold off for the moment...doesn't seem terribly advantageous to take the plunge.

opinion guy

Is Lion more stable on new machines versus an upgrade to an older machine ?

Still on Snow Leopard myself and happy with it - not intending to upgrade. But considering a new machine later in the year as i want to move from 13" to 15" and one thing putting me off are these issues with Lion

Sad Professor

opinion guy wrote: »

Is Lion more stable on new machines versus an upgrade to an older machine ?

Makes no difference, except the new machine will obviously have a clean install of Lion, where as if you upgrade from SL on your current machine you may carry problems from your old install over. I'd estimate that this accounts for about 90 percent of the stability issues people have experienced with Lion.

The only problem I'm having with Lion at the moment is that my Air (which came with Lion pre-installed) occasionally drops Wi-Fi after waking from sleep.

LH2011

i find lion a lot more slick now since i did the clean install, ( originally had snow leopard and then upgraded to lion , mid 2010 MBP i7)


boots a lot faster, and more slick to use, and all my programs came over perfectly after the clean install,

opinion guy

Sad Professor wrote: »

Makes no difference, except the new machine will obviously have a clean install of Lion, where as if you upgrade from SL on your current machine you may carry problems from your old install over. I'd estimate that this accounts for about 90 percent of the stability issues people have experienced with Lion.

The only problem I'm having with Lion at the moment is that my Air (which came with Lion pre-installed) occasionally drops Wi-Fi after waking from sleep.

Could I buy a new machine and 'downgrade' to Snow Leopard ?

aidan_walsh

Unlikely. There won't be a build with relevant drivers for older hardware, so the installer will likely block it before the installation starts. If it does go ahead it could prove unstable.

Sad Professor

No. The drivers for the new machine wouldn't be in SL.

Wibbs

Sad Professor wrote: »

No. The drivers for the new machine wouldn't be in SL.

Or yes. Depends on the machine. Macbook airs and Minis no, the drivers aren't present in any snow leopard install disks. That said the others should work. Mac pros will and I've downgraded a brand new iMac with Lion to snow leopard before xmas(and a mid 2011 MBP 15"). http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2389334,00.asp You'll need the last iteration of the Snow Leopard universal install disk, above 10.6.3/4 anyway.

That said if you're buying a brand new Mac and you don't need the facility to run older software*, starting fresh as it were then I'd stick with Lion. You can reduce, ignore or remove a lot of the new GUI stuff it it irritates** and hopefully they'll get their act together with upcoming updates. The battery usage has defo gotten better after the first update.






*Be careful if you you've built up an army of plug ins for things like Adobe Photoshop. You may find that one or two of your faves may not work/been updated for lion

** The default lack of scroll bars is IMHO daft and a step backwards GUI wise. Yes fine on the limited real estate of a phone screen, but on a laptop/desktop? It takes away the context. With scroll bars you can see at a glance the overall size of a file/pic/folder. Without them you can't until you actually move the content. Getting rid of the little button to show/hide a windows toolbar? Why? I dig new innovation, but Lion looks like a "brainstorm" where they thought "I know, we're running out of ideas, lets make it like the iOS".

opinion guy

Wibbs I had no idea you are also a mac expert!!!!
Is there anything you cannot write a book upon ? (still waiting for that by the way!)

The Black Oil

Snow Leopard's been a bit funny once or twice for me lately. Put in a DVD this evening, the machine went to sleep...another evening it was asleep, I put it in password, grand, only for it to go black and prompt for the password again. Nothing major, just odd.

Sad Professor

When I said "new machine" I meant any machine released post-Lion, such as the current MacBook Air, MBP and Mini. The current iMac and the Mac Pro were released pre-Lion, hence the reason you can still install SL on them. But once the hardware is updated this is will no longer be the case.

Wibbs

Just a correction SP, opinion guy asked could he buy a new Mac and downgrade. He didn't specify which Mac, but your reply was a blanket statement(since revised) about all new macs currently available. The current crop of MBP's will run Snow leopard(though you need the last version of the installer and it's a longwinded process, not for newbies). Like I say I've done it with a mid/late 2011 MBP 15" At the moment the only ones that most definitely won't are the air and mini, though some posts out there on the interweb suggest some Lion firmware updates break this ability to downgrade with other macs in the lineup.

opinion guy

Wibbs wrote: »

Just a correction SP, opinion guy asked could he buy a new Mac and downgrade. He didn't specify which Mac, but your reply was a blanket statement(since revised) about all new macs currently available. The current crop of MBP's will run Snow leopard(though you need the last version of the installer and it's a longwinded process, not for newbies). Like I say I've done it with a mid/late 2011 MBP 15" At the moment the only ones that most definitely won't are the air and mini, though some posts out there on the interweb suggest some Lion firmware updates break this ability to downgrade with other macs in the lineup.

Ah wibbs one thing SP knows that you don't cause SP and I were discussing by PM is that I'm planning on waiting for the new models before buying! In which case in couldn't downgrade. So you are both right. Everyone is happy yes ?

Another question. If I have a new machine running Lion, and I try to do a time machine backup from my other machine running SL as a way of transferrring files over - what happens ?

Sad Professor

Yeah, sorry, Wibbs, I should have clarified what I meant by new machine. I assumed opinion guy meant a new MBA or MBP as he PMed me about it a while ago.

Also, I thought you were referring to installing SL on an early-2011 MBP. I didn't realise it worked on the late-2011 models as well.

Wibbs

Yea it works SD, but it is longwinded and messy. For a start you'll need 10.6.8 which was never an official installer. Couple of ways to do it. Probably the easiest way, though you need two macs, is to clone a drive running 10.6.8. One way I found to find out if your mac will run SL is to get a recent enough one that does, try and boot from it in target disk mode. If it works you're good to go, if not get used to lion.

opinion guy wrote:

If I have a new machine running Lion, and I try to do a time machine backup from my other machine running SL as a way of transferrring files over - what happens ?

If I'm reading you right and are going to access the files through the migration assistant in lion, yea it should work, but will create a new user. Seems longwinded to just transfer files across though. Maybe cut out the middle man and target disk mode the SL mac and just drag and drop to your Lion mac?

Snowie

I have lion

Im happy with it the spell checker or predictive text is so handy for me as I have dyslexia.

as hole I can't really fault apple, I used windows vista before hand, it made me want to commit suicide on more then 20 million occasions.

I don't really notice any change other then the spelling/predictive word system which helps me so much.
I don't store any thing on my machine as it sit in wither cloud storage or one of my hard drives I don't back up because everything lives on my hard drives other then music. And burn it on to a cd so i always have my content...

I like the multi touch functions not the track pad and it really does make navigating threw an Os with ease..

Im a little confused about deleting programs of it, I don't know enough about the machinis to really throw some knowlagabe content down I would love to know is there a key short cut system were i could press cmd i to launch I tunes or cmd p to launch photoshop?

cornbb

Snowie wrote: »

Im a little confused about deleting programs of it, I don't know enough about the machinis to really throw some knowlagabe content down

In most cases you can simply send an application to the trash to remove it - either drag it to the Trash in the dock or click its icon in Finder and hit cmd-backspace

I would love to know is there a key short cut system were i could press cmd i to launch I tunes or cmd p to launch photoshop?

A handy way of doing this is using Spotlight. Hit cmd-spacebar, start typing the name of what you are looking for, and hit Return.

Snowie

cornbb wrote: »

A handy way of doing this is using Spotlight. Hit cmd-spacebar, start typing the name of what you are looking for, and hit Return.

Duley Noted

any other tips ?

conor.hogan.2

I still do not understand why they went with a linear layout for "spaces" instead of the old grid way.

They could/should have at least left it as an option. Also if they were going to make it linear at least allow it to be circular so you can go from space 4 to 1 by moving right.