For those of you who have lived with Lion for some months...

[Boo The Hamster]

I moved to Lion from Snow Leopard a day or two after launch, and I was one of those who hated it. I know there were some things, like the scrolling, Launchpad etc that could be 'fixed' fairly quickly, but the bugbears for me were things like :

Having to untick the 'resume on startup' box every single time.
Not being able to 'Save As', but having a 'Time Machine' style document system and so on.

I lasted a week before reverting back to SL, and I've stayed there ever since.

I was (and am) very much of the opinion 'My iPad is a handy notepad style device and my Mac is a proper computer and I don't want them working in the same fashion'.

Right. All that said, my trusty Macbook is nearly 4 years old, and while it's still mighty quick, my wife would like it to become the household machine, so she has easy access to iTunes, our photos etc.

So with this in mind, and my annual bonus coming next week, I'm thinking hard about a 15" MBP. (For the sake of this discussion, we can leave aside the issue of a possible redesign/relaunch in the next few months).

My question is (and I've finally got to it), those who have lived with Lion for a while - have you got used to it? I'm particularly interested in the views of those who, like me, weren't immediately thrilled with the changes.

Much as I'd love a shiny new machine, I have major reservations about spending £2000 on a laptop that I'll potentially hate using.

I'd appreciate any thoughts or comments.

Cheers!

 

[Paradoxally]

First of all, I don't understand why this thread got 2 down votes, probably one of those 'omg Lion is the best thing ever!!!11!!' people....this is clearly a legitimate question.

Anyways, Lion takes a while to get used to. It's different from SL, of course, but I've lived with it for more than 8 months and I dislike parts of it, while other parts are nice.

Your points:

1- Can be easily disabled with a script. Just run it in Terminal, and that stupid 'open all my resumed stuff on startup 'cos my computer totally can handle 20 apps opening at the same time' option goes away forever (the checkbox will still be there, but it won't work). If you ever want to bring it back, just run it again and it will enable it.

Resume is one of the most idiotic features Lion has, and I've disabled it system-wide.

Launchpad too, because we totally needed more ways to open our apps. Oh, and let me point something out about Launchpad. Right-click does NOT do ANYTHING. You can't even delete apps from there if they're not purchased from the Mac App Store, it's the most ridiculous feature ever. No search bar, nothing. Even on an iPad you have a search bar!

2 - Save As....there's nothing you can really do about that, but not apps have it, thankfully. Only Apple's apps do and some others who have implemented their API. Thank Adobe that Photoshop, Indesign, etc...don't have that option or I would go crazy (as many others would).

The problem is all the features you see here, will be in the next version and the next one and etc...it's not like you can stop buying Macs (okay, proven, you obviously can, if you want to go Windows).

I like Lion overall. Some features are stupid and poorly implemented, though. I don't love it like I loved Snow Leopard, that's for sure.

If you're buying a new Mac and it comes with Lion, it's fine 'cos you already paid for it. Buying it as a system upgrade, though? I regret that decision.

The bottom line for me is, is once I turned everything off, it's basically just Snow Leopard that I paid 30 extra dollars for.

 

[klaxamazoo]

I've got one of each, a Macbook Pro running Snow Leopard at home and a new Macbook Air running Lion that I take to the lab.


You can definitely work with Lion, it is just frustrating. Mission Control really sucks and Versions is dangerous. I find myself doing more work at home these days just because Lion can't handle a Window/Content intensive workflow, i.e. you can't just open up everything and go at it. I end up having to spend time thinking about how to manage my Windows instead of just letting them flow.

As for Versions, I don't use many Apple applications where it matters most, i.e. I prefer Word over Pages, etc.

However, Preview and Textedit can be dangerous to use if you are opening data type documents where small, unnoticed changes can really mess things up. I ended up assigning a hot-key to Revert and habitually hit those keys before I close a document in Preview or Textedit. So that kind of works but no nearly as good as having the option pop-up to Save, Don't Save or Cancel.

Versions really should change its "Locked" document behavior such that a locked document acts like a Traditional document in that you can make changes, but it will prompt you if you want to save them. That would be the best of both worlds and really amazing.

Anyway, if I were you and could wait, I would wait to see how ReSpaceApp turns out and it if works with Mountain Lion. If it works then the only negative with 10.7/10.8 is Versions and that can be avoided by not using Apple products for sensitive documents. Also, the ugly, crippled iCal can be replaced with BusyCal but Address Book still sucks.

 

[cosmicjoke]

I moved to Lion from Snow Leopard a day or two after launch, and I was one of those who hated it. I know there were some things, like the scrolling, Launchpad etc that could be 'fixed' fairly quickly, but the bugbears for me were things like :

Having to untick the 'resume on startup' box every single time.
Not being able to 'Save As', but having a 'Time Machine' style document system and so on.

I lasted a week before reverting back to SL, and I've stayed there ever since.

I was (and am) very much of the opinion 'My iPad is a handy notepad style device and my Mac is a proper computer and I don't want them working in the same fashion'.

Right. All that said, my trusty Macbook is nearly 4 years old, and while it's still mighty quick, my wife would like it to become the household machine, so she has easy access to iTunes, our photos etc.

So with this in mind, and my annual bonus coming next week, I'm thinking hard about a 15" MBP. (For the sake of this discussion, we can leave aside the issue of a possible redesign/relaunch in the next few months).

My question is (and I've finally got to it), those who have lived with Lion for a while - have you got used to it? I'm particularly interested in the views of those who, like me, weren't immediately thrilled with the changes.

Much as I'd love a shiny new machine, I have major reservations about spending £2000 on a laptop that I'll potentially hate using.

I'd appreciate any thoughts or comments.

Cheers!

SL runs just dandy on my late '11 15" for the record... all i did was delete the hidden recovery partition and merge it with macintosh hd from terminal, swiped an early '11 10.6.7 install dmg off thepiratebay (i own a legit SL disc, just fairly sure it doesn't have sandy bridge kernel support at 10.6.0), burnt it, installed, voila.

 

[cal6n]

I upgraded on launch day, just as I have for every version since 10.3.

I took to Mission Control and natural scrolling easily but after a couple of weeks I realised that I really didn't like restore, resume or versions and the WiFi bugs on our campus network were a real pain. However, I was just starting a high-priority section of my work and couldn't afford the time to downgrade my 3 Macs (2006 Mac Pro, 2008 iMac and 2009 MacBook Pro 13). Also, I hadn't started using Time Machine then, so any reversion to Snow Leopard would have to be accomplished the hard way. I decided to soldier-on and adapt to the new OS.

I found that I couldn't do it, though. Even after using it day-to-day for months, I still found it incredibly frustrating. So, once I'd finished my writing, I took backups of all my files and did clean reinstalls of Snow Leopard on all 3 Macs. Sanity returned and I started using Time Machine too.

Since then, in November, I sold my Macbook Pro and bought a refurb of the early 2011 model, as that was the last one to come with Snow Leopard installed from the factory. The one that I bought had Lion installed and so I briefly tried it again and found only minimal improvement. I located a copy of the original Snow Leopard install media on ebay and installed that.

But Lion is obviously the way Apple are taking things so I'll have to get used to it eventually. I tried Lion on my MacBook Pro (it seems to have become my "canary" for Lion) a third time in early March. This time I did some research and found out how to limit most of the annoyances. I still had wifi authentication issues that both I and our IT services found insurmountable and so I returned to the calmness of Snow Leopard once more.

This still leaves me with a problem in the long term, though. What will I do once I'm forced away from Snow Leopard? I know it's years away but it'll still going to happen one day. Windows isn't an option and anyway, it looks like they're determined to break everything usable about their system too. And as for Linux, Gnome shell and Unity are worse than both Lion or Metro, with the added bonus of clunky, unusable applications thrown in for good measure.

Anyway, sorry for the long post but the upshot for the OP is to buy a refurb Mac that'll take Snow Leopard and find a copy of the original install media privately.

 

[Boo The Hamster]

Thanks for that, one and all.

I think I'll go into an Apple Store, have a play around and see if it's as bad as I remember. I'd like to think that in future, Apple will make things like the resume tick box, and the versioning optional, but I'm not holding my breath.

Shame. Using SL is a joy. I'm definitely not someone who handles change well, but it's even more frustrating when things get changed for the worse!

 

[simsaladimbamba]

You can still "install" Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on all 2011 Macs except the 2011 MBA, as it has a new Thunderbolt chip for which there are no 10.6 drivers.

Example: [SUCCESS!]Late 2011 Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard

 

[TheMacMania]

Hi,
I'm not a super happy lion user as well. when it first came out it definitely drove me crazy:
- my printer wasn't working
- photoshop shut down while saving a document
- applications crashed
... i can't name them all...
many bugs are fixed now but today i will have to reinstall my mac completely... because:
- the thunderbolt display connected to my macbook makes the mouse stuck and apple care has no solution for it
- applications still crash
- most features are not that great that i can say "hey, ignore all the problems!"

i adapted and can live with many things now. it´s not bad all the time of course or i would just re-install snow leopard which would, most probably, be the better idea...
i will be patiently waiting for the fixes and mountain lion ;-)
so if you can and don't mind - stick to sl for a while and then jump to the new lion version

 

[throAU]

I upgraded to Lion on day of release.

I never went back to snow leopard.

With regards to the changes:


- reverse scrolling: it threw me for a bit, i went back to the old way, but then i got a magic trackpad (this was on my mini). natural scrolling works, and after a couple of days it became a non-issue. My MBP15 shipped with Lion (very late "early" 2011 model ) and i was used to it by the time i got that.
- i love mission control - i never really found the mac implementation of spaces/expose that useful, but with a trackpad, mission control works for me
- full screen = good. i have 3 finger swipe set up to swipe left/right between full screen apps
- versions - I like being able to go back to a previous document version and cut/paste changes between the new and old document.
- mobile time machine backups - like - i run time machine off an external drive and it is nice to have local backups running when i can't be bothered plugging it in.

and... shock of shocks.

I'm actually using launchpad via the 5 finger pinch. when running full screen, it saves me flicking back to a desktop, opening an app from the dock or the apps menu. simply 5 finger pinch, pick app. it works. if you do don't like it, you don't have to use it though.


all up: i'm happy. it uses a bit more RAM than snow leopard and isn't quite as stable, but it is "good enough" after 10.7.1 came out, and i like the new features.


edit:
i highly suspect that if you aren't using a trackpad for input, the upgrade is a lot less pleasant. ditto if you're on a desktop, and aren't getting the benefit of local time machine backups when not attached to your storage. or if you have 2gb of RAM...

as to no search bar on launchpad... if you want search, use spotlight instead?


I suspect that mountain lion will fix much of the "duh" bits of Lion. if you're happy with Snow leopard, I'd wait for Mountain Lion (only a little while now?) and make a decision then. I really get the feeling that Lion is "OS X Vista Edition" (I didn't mind Vista, either ) - there's been a lot of work done under the covers, but the user-facing stuff isn't *quite* polished yet.