Lion or...Snow Leopard?

If you're buying a new Mac, don't even debate it. There's no point in going through the effort of rolling back to Snow Leopard if you don't have apps that won't run in Lion. There's nothing bloated or slow about Lion, inherently, although some who have done upgrades have had issues (I did at first, but after some troubleshooting, Lion is probably faster than Snow Leopard was for me, and that's saying something).

Enjoy your new iMac!

jW

NunoBerny said:

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I intend to buy an iMac soon (waiting for the forthcoming update).
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Based on this one statement, there isn't even a question as to what to run. Your answer is whatever it ships with.

There won't be support in Snow Leopard for the new processors and hardware in the soon™ to be released Macs.

NunoBerny said:

I thought I could "downgrade" to a previous version.
It shows how ill-informed about it I am...

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That only works for a few specific Macs because they were originally released with Snow Leopard. Or they were only a minor processor upgrade from a version that shipped with Snow Leopard.

Depending on when you buy it mountain lion might be out already

Just use what it ships with and worry about that when an upgrade comes out.

I've never really understood the urge to not upgrade to a new major OS. Yeah, sometimes there are hiccups along the way, but aside from anything else keeping up to date with the latest shipping OS is the one and only way to get new graphics drivers. There were a lot of complaints about Lion being too much like iOS or whatever, but I just don't use Launchpad and so on, and it feels very similar to Snow Leopard in general.

Having updated graphics drivers far outweighs anything else in my opinion. It's the only way to get performance improvements or compatibility fixes for new games, and there certainly have been enough of those lately.

If this is for a new Mac, then you would defenently want Lion and soon Mountain Lion.

The downgrading process from lion to snow leopard is a bit tricky to those who have little experience with Macs.

FeaRThiS said:

Just use what it ships with and worry about that when an upgrade comes out.

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Quoted for truth. Why go through the hassle of a downgrade when (assuming) Lion runs very, very well on fill_in_the_blank.

I'm a new Mac user as about six months ago, so I started with lion and I like it so much better than windows. Stable, quick, just fun to use. As I have an iPhone, I felt at home with the gestures and really like them.

If you're a soon-to-be-new user of OS X, without doubt go for Lion. It has many improvements over previous versions of OS X, and you won't miss anything that's gone because you haven't used previous versions.

Most people argue Snow Leopard is better because they're generally opposed to change, rather than it being based on some objective perspective. Yes, there are a few small things that got a little worse, but there are LOTS of huge things that got better.

shurcooL said:

Most people argue Snow Leopard is better because they're generally opposed to change, rather than it being based on some objective perspective. Yes, there are a few small things that got a little worse, but there are LOTS of huge things that got better.

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What exactly are these huge things you speak of? I have one SL machine and one which I upgraded to Lion so I could have the new version of Xcode. I don't have an enormous dislike for Lion, but I really don't see much advantage. I lost rosetta and expose with lion. In return for expose, I got mission control, which I don't find as useful. Lion added a really really bad implementation of full-screen - completely useless for those of us who use more than one monitor.

ScoobyMcDoo said:

I lost rosetta and expose with lion. In return for expose, I got mission control, which I don't find as useful.

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Do you think someone getting a Mac today will mourn the loss of Rosetta?

Will they be bummed out over losing "Expose" which they've never used, rather than satisfied with Mission Control?

Lion added a really really bad implementation of full-screen - completely useless for those of us who use more than one monitor.

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Full screen is really useful on 13" screens, and it doesn't take anything away. If you don't wanna use it, you're not negatively affected by its presence.

There are other cool Lion-only features like AirDrop, Auto Save and Versions, Resume after restart/shutdown, Launchpad (when you're learning OS X from scratch, it's very handy and useful... not useful if you're already used to older ways of doing the same thing, but now it works out of the box), FaceTime comes bundled, more Language support, natural iOS-like two-finger scrolling, Multi-User Screen Sharing, better Recovery tools, System Information dialog that shows nice info about your Mac, OS X Server being a downloadable set of apps rather than requiring a system reinstallation.

When I got my first Mac, it was a few months before OS X Lion and while Snow Leopard was cool, I couldn't wait for Lion to finally come out because it felt "next-gen". As an iPhone user since 3GS, I got hooked on the Apple side because of how modern and well-done the iOS side is. That makes you want to check out their computers too, and I really appreciate all the modernization that's going on since Lion and soon in Mountain Lion (can't wait for AirPlay!).

Bottomline: new users benefit more from the recent OS X updates, since they have "nothing to lose" and everything to gain.

I had been holding off on upgrading my household's five macs (I know; I have a problem) from Snow Leopard to Lion; mostly because of laziness and partially because of all the complaints about Lion I saw on here. I finally did the upgrade to Lion Saturday, and and after a couple days of using it I haven't run into anything that makes me cranky or annoyed (and I am generally pretty cranky about problems with gadgets and OSs). In fact, for the way I use Mac OS X I just don't see a huge difference between Snow Lion and Lion.

All this to say, just use Lion and don't worry about Snow Leopard.

This whole "staying back with Snow Leopard" deal reminds me a lot of how I was sticking with Windows XP on all my machines until just a year ago or so (when I upgraded to Windows 8 Developer Preview).

It wasn't due to laziness, and I am an advanced user/software developer, so I was purposefully staying with XP because I had already customized it to do everything I needed to really well, and it'd work consistently across my Core i7 desktop and 9" netbook with 8 GB SSD.

For me at the time, Windows Vista and 7 did not offer that many improvements as I could still use all the same software on XP, and some of my machines were not that modern (2 GB RAM and so on) so Vista/7 only ran slower without offering much advantage.

At the very same time, who in the right mind would recommend XP over 7 to someone getting a new computer? Legacy software works for legacy users who have legacy burdens, but new users are free to enjoy the benefits of the latest software releases.

shurcooL said:

There are other cool Lion-only features like AirDrop, Auto Save and Versions, Resume after restart/shutdown, Launchpad (when you're learning OS X from scratch, it's very handy and useful... not useful if you're already used to older ways of doing the same thing, but now it works out of the box), FaceTime comes bundled, more Language support, natural iOS-like two-finger scrolling, Multi-User Screen Sharing, better Recovery tools, System Information dialog that shows nice info about your Mac, OS X Server being a downloadable set of apps rather than requiring a system reinstallation.

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So, yea I guess air drop seems like a cool feature, but I haven't had a chance to use it yet.

Autosave and versions - I guess the software I use doesn't take advantage of this - but it seems weird that this would be a OS level feature - seems application level to me. Although I kind of had versions with SL by using time machine - also the development IDE I use has had this type of feature built in for years. I did a quick search of the help facility and the only thing mentioned about Versions that I could find was regarding TextEdit - are there any other apps that use the feature?

WRT FaceTime, I rarely use it - maybe if I were better looking, folks would want to FaceTime with me.

The only difference I noticed about the system information is that it seems to take one more mouse click to get there - am I missing something?

ScoobyMcDoo said:

So, yea I guess air drop seems like a cool feature, but I haven't had a chance to use it yet.

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Agreed. I haven't had a chance to use it yet, but I still really like the fact it's there. In fact, the day I will get a chance to use it, this is how I'll feel:

Autosave and versions - I guess the software I use doesn't take advantage of this - but it seems weird that this would be a OS level feature - seems application level to me. Although I kind of had versions with SL by using time machine - also the development IDE I use has had this type of feature built in for years. I did a quick search of the help facility and the only thing mentioned about Versions that I could find was regarding TextEdit - are there any other apps that use the feature?

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Yeah, I too am waiting for larger adoption of this feature. IMO it's really cool and I wish I didn't have to keep track of file versions manually.

WRT FaceTime, I rarely use it - maybe if I were better looking, folks would want to FaceTime with me.

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I almost never use it also, just because not so many people I know have capable Apple products and are connected to Wi-Fi yet. But I can't wait until they do.

The only difference I noticed about the system information is that it seems to take one more mouse click to get there - am I missing something?

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vs.

(plus there are other tabs that tell you about the Display and Video Card, Disk Utilization and RAM slots.