I have come to the conclusion 10.6 is actually Windows ME

[sjinsjca]

Hm, no problems here. Rock-solid stability on my 3.5-year-old original-issue Macbook Pro, which I absolutely hammer with virtual machines, development packages, etc etc. It runs for weeks at a time between reboots. Months, maybe. I frankly can't remember the last time I rebooted it, much less remember when it "needed" rebooting or misbehaved in any way.

There could be something buggered about your system. Is it possible to take it to an Apple store for an appointment with a Genius?

 

[TheSpaz]

Don't take this as a fanboy comment but, Snow Leopard is also running great for me. No problems at all. Much better than Leopard.

I'm telling the truth!

 

[Schtumple]

I'm gunna chime in and say since Leopard I've had an annoying Airport problem where it likes to turn itself off, and won't turn back on. No updates have fixed that for me.

 

[rusty2192]

no problems here

No problems here on the MacBook or iMac. Now, in full disclosure, I have not had SL as long as some people. I wasn't able to install it the day it came out, I had to wait till the next morning

But seriously, no problems to report here, especially since 10.6.2 was released. I am actually going to be installing it on my fiance's MacBook whenever i get some free time.

 

[r0k]

I installed a SL family pack on all our Macs but our old G4 Mini. It has worked fine. However there are times I find my Macbook to be a bit slow.

I'm amazed nobody mentioned the main benefit of installing SL. For $29, you get about 15 gig of space back, regardless of how you round or count megabytes or gigabytes. That means a lot on older machines with smaller drives. SL regained this space by removing some code and by compressing some applications. This is what sometimes makes it slower because the OS has to decompress certain apps when it runs them. If only M$ would sell you something for only $29 that would make your machine run better AND reduce code size at the same time. And yes, I believe our Macs are running better under SL. Does that mean SL is necessary or a "must have" upgrade? No. Not really. If you want 7+ gig of disk space back and can spare 30 bucks then go for it.

How can you compare SL to Windows ME? I bought a machine that came with ME. What a joke. ME is 98SE with the Win2000 network stack cobbled onto it. It was a disaster and I am still surprised there was no class action lawsuit to make M$ upgrade all ME users to XP for free. Vista is widely despised but is nowhere near as bad as ME. With 7, I would say M$ finally has a modern, stable OS.

However, all M$ OS are still far behind OS X in terms of usability. Let me provide an example... Starting with se7en, if you want to enter a wireless passphrase, you only need to type it once and you have an option to show what you are typing. Sounds good. A definite improvement over typing 26 characters twice and not seeing what I'm typing. But on my Macbook when I want to search for wireless networks I get the list instantly. I mean now. No 90 second timeout waiting for a refresh followed by another 30 seconds "doing something" before I get asked for the passphrase. And this experience is fresh. I set up my friend's 7 machine to talk to a 2wire router just last week. It was painful and it reminded me why I left Windows behind for home use. The biggest penalty for Windows users is time. Time spent watching an hourglass. Time spent futzing with video resolution that has suddenly changed all by itself. Time spent waiting for a passphrase dialog to come up every time you want to use wifi. I use XP Pro at the office and it is like nails on the chalkboard waiting and waiting and waiting. Popup after popup after popup telling me stuff I don't care about and never will care about. All that time adds up and detracts from productivity and builds up a healthy distaste for all things M$. To me the best Apple commercial is 24 hours using Windows.

I have a rep as "the computer guy" and when my friends come to me for broken printer drivers, lost internet connections, etc, my first response is often "Get a Mac". I'm not being mean. I'm simply saying that it would be less painful for me to sort things out for them if they had a Mac. Not that I would still need to sort anything out for them or anything.

 

[TrumpetMaris]

running slow for sure...

i'm sure 90% of the users had now problem with SL. But it's nice to hear about people like myself that have had nothing but problems with SL since I installed it. I even waited for the first update before installing!
I'm on a Mac Pro 2x2.66GHz 5GB RAM machine with the latest 10.6.2 update. I routinely run 40+ processes (only mine, not system) and am constantly switching between them all since I wear many 'hats' in my own company.
Some apps are 64bit, some 32bit, and some PowerPC.

• When I first installed SL there were several programs that simply wouldn't run, which I either had to find an update for or give up using (since they no longer were maintained by the programmer). I spent the better part of a day tracking down updates and cleaning up.
• Then I noticed that SL has completely changed the way it decides what the default app is for any data file. So now ALL my .jpg files will only open from ONE app by default. The OS no longer cares what the file type says it should use for an app. This really messed up my workflow, since I previously could have different sized JPGs open with different programs (photoshop, graphic converter, preview), depending on their use.
• My HP scanner (4-5 years old) became obsolete, since HP was not going to update their 'old' driver to support this new OS.
• Also there is this weird thing that happens when I switch from any program back to the Finder. The hard drive suddenly is accessed for reading for what seems like a long time when you just want to drag and drop a file into, say, an email. The Finder hangs for about 4-5 seconds and you can't drag or do anything during this time. Is this the mds trying to keep the index up to date?
• Speaking of mds (meta data system or Spotlight), I find that it is trying even hard to always keep itself up to date. Every little change I make or might make seems to want to be recorded. The .DS file stored in each folder (hidden) is updated so often that I can't even scroll down in a folder long enough to find something before it is refreshed. (this only happens if you have turned on seeing hidden files, which programmers often need to do to see the files starting with '.'). Now when I work, i've gotten into the habit of using turning off indexing, so it doesn't slow things down.
• Rosetta is used to translate the older programs (PowerPC) for the Intel processor.I was always surprised how well this worked in the past with hardly ever any crashes. Now daily my older programs will crash for now reason or sometimes fail to even load.
• I have now tried the plist trick of deleting the file com.apple.audio.coreaudiod.plist to see if it somehow helps. So far the system seems snappier and isn't doing that disk access thing every time I switch back to the Finder.
• The very new printer driver for the Xerox Phaser also causes just about any program to crash, if you try to make changes in the print dialog box. There is not yet an update from Xerox, so i'm hindered in the printer options I can choose. (yes, deleted and reset all setting files and re-installed printer driver from scratch).

Still beats Windows (even 7) any day. Somethings are faster like startup.

 

[MisterMe]

i'm sure 90% of the users had now problem with SL. ...

As I said in my last post on this thread, stop whining and ask for specific help with specific problems.

 

[djellison]

OK - specific help for my specific problems please...

-I've explicitly put my Time Capsule on the Spotlight indexing ignore list. I've restarted my machine since then, just to be sure. It's still indexing it. 17 hours to go. Awesome. Make it stop....please.

-Flash. Every time I go to a website that has flash, it's dreadful, Safari, Firefox, Chrome. All the same. Browsing on my PC is far FAR faster. Always has been. Make it stop....please

-iPhoto. Slow. As. F***. Make it go faster...please.

-FTFF, and networking.

-Changing sizes of windows. Seriously - can I not have drag bars on the sides, or other corners than the bottom right? REALLY? I've actually had iTunes stuck, be bigger than my screen - and fundamentally, the GUI will NOT let me change it back. There is NO means to do it. The maximize button turns it into some tiny playing window. That really doesn't help.

-Mail. Says it's getting 4, 5, 6, 8, 16 new messsage, any large number...but there are none. Where are they.

-Mail. Sometimes, just will.not.quit. Make it stop...please

-iChat. Bonjour list works great, and SOME Buddy list contacts show as online...but others, when I KNOW they are online, do not. Similarly, I do not show as online to them. Skype will show status perfectly.

-HDD spin down. I've told OSX to NOT spin down my HDD. It still is. I can hear it spinning up if I've not done anything for a few seconds - I get a second or two of hang before carrying on. DAMN annoying

-Spotlight. Just a damn mess. I can type in Photo Booth... and it will not bring up Photo Booth...or, it will, but it'll then vanish again.

-iTunes. SLOW AS HELL. My GOD it's like having all my music and podcast embedded in treacle.

This is the same experience on multiple Macs (MB, MBP, UBMB) but most are Snow Leopard spectaculars. They are all still occurring despite 'repairing permissions'. Despite doing complete reinstalls. Despite asking iPhoto to rebuild all its indexes.

Can we please forgo the myth that Macs are in some way perfect. Can we please forgo the myth that Macs do not suffer the same stutters, stalls, crashes and so on that Windows does.

And if someone turns round and says "you must be doing something wrong" or "open the terminal and...." I will stand, open mouthed, an inch from your face, and you will hear a sound louder than you have ever heard anything in your entire life - that sound will be me, screaming

IT JUST WORKS

Rant over.

 

[Eidorian]

Browser issues?

I use Opera, Opera 10.5 pre alpha, Firefox 3.5, 3.6, 3.7 pre alpha, Safari and Webkit without any issues what is the issue?

The newer Expose does feel worse from a speed of use viewpoint than Leopard. One annoyance for me is that I got into the habit of clicking and holding an application to quit it, in Snow Leopard this means it flashes to the front and everything else disappears and then when I click close it flashes away and everything else jumps back. Horrible. Also with a lot of windows open I find it harder to pick out the window I am looking for due to the scaling of windows.

I still look back to Tiger for Spotlight, however having time recently to use Tiger again it was a lot slower to find files. However when I am looking for system files the extra steps I have to jump through on Leopard/Snow Leopard makes it much much slower. +s and -s.

I guess we will see the benefits of the new expose come the 27th.

A few niggles aside I find Snow Leopard to be more solid and faster than Leopard, obviously your mileage may vary and it has done so considerably.

Browser issues involving the Open and Save dialogs. The Open/Save bug also affected other programs as well.

Tiger's Spotlight was the best and Finder had remarkably consistent behavior. Finder just does what it wants now under Leopard and it's worse under Snow Leopard. In addition to my Spotlight issues searching, I lose my Spotlight comments if I do a clean installation. I've spent hours tagging my files. I can't lose that when it's thousands of files. Not to mention Apple decides to change how Spotlight works and bolts it into Finder instead of what it was in Tiger.

I managed to work around in Leopard but even then it at best 75% of my Tiger productivity. Now Apple tosses in some flagrant workflow breaking nonsense. I can either work in Leopard or try to fix Snow Leopard and still be less productive than I was in Leopard. It's very disappointing. What makes matters worse is being forced to use Snow Leopard if I want to buy a new Mac. I can't be forced to throw away years of work for that.

 

[danny_w]

It's not only him. I'll put my hand up and say SL is worse than L. I have FAR more beach balls, far more halts, hangs, pauses, waits and crashes, yes, crashes of Mail, iPhoto, and so on.

I just tried a complete clean install - for the second time.

No difference.

I agree, SL has been far worse than L for me too. I just did a clean install today and it is still acting flaky. However, as others have said L wasn't really stable until 10.5.4 (I refused to install it until then) so this is not totally unexpected. Hopefully 10.6.3 will fix many of the beach-balls that I have been having.

 

[NOLF1]

This is what I am talking about with SL. It is like some people have NO issues, but for others like me there are tons that don't exist on 10.5.

This to me indicates they developed SL with certain mac products in mind.... and simply let QA fail on other types of mac machines even though they would be running SL.

 

[Daveoc64]

I just had to do ANOTHER force shutdown on my MacBook.

Finder wouldn't open, Terminal couldn't create a new "pseudo tty" so I couldn't try restarting that way, Activity Monitor wouldn't open, the menu bar had locked up and pressing the power button didn't ask me if I wanted to shut down.

I regularly have problems with the Menu bar (and NO, I don't have ANY menu bar plug-ins).

 

[PeterQVenkman]

Installed Snow Leopard on 7 macs in our office. 6 had bad problems. From my experience it was Adobe software that wasn't ready for 10.6, despite claiming compatibility.

Oh, but whatever Apple changed with the way fonts were handled caused all sorts of problems on my system. it was solved by installing Font Agent Pro.

 

[PeterQVenkman]

-iTunes. SLOW AS HELL. My GOD it's like having all my music and podcast embedded in treacle.

Right click on every smart playlist (like recently played), pick edit, and turn off live updating.

iTunes and my Ipod were almost unusable until I did this in SL.

 

[RevoDS]

I've had mixed experiences with Snow Leopard. I get almost no beachballs anymore (it was a nightmare on Leopard), and it does feel faster. But on the other hand networking is horrendous: frequent Wi-Fi connection drops and issues connecting to networked drives. I also hate having to force shutdown because the damn thing stays stuck on a blue screen for ages after it ends the user session. The only reason I didn't go back to Leopard was because I'm hopeful the issues will get fixed eventually, and because I dread beachballs, probably even more.

Lame excuse? Getting rid of legacy code so they can move forward is not lame. Just this week MS announced a 14 year old but that is going to get patched in Windows. 14 YEARS OLD! That means in 1996, under Windows 95, this bug was introduced or possibly known. Now how did a Windows 95 bug get into Windows Vista and Windows 7? Wasn't Windows re-written @ Windows XP? Or Windows 2000 (dropping the Win95/98 drivers in the process)?

That's only half-true. Windows wasn't rewritten from scratch with XP as both NT and 9x kernels existed before then, but NT was more business-oriented. For consumers, XP was indeed akin to a "rewrite", but in reality it was simply a migration to a more reliable codebase which had existed for about 10 years prior. So about that bug, it's possible that if the code existed in Windows NT4 it was still there in Windows Vista/7, and was only fixed now (14 years is still pathetic, no doubt here)

 

[Pigumon]

On the other hand... there is really no reason not to either

In spite of the apocalyptic language of some users here who are known for their vitriolic diatribes against anything Apple, most users experienced no real issues by upgrading

Like NewMacBookPlz said, all my apps worked and required no upgrades that were not already available, it works fine with my Linksys router, and I have had no issues

But truthfully, you will probably not notice any tangible differences from Leopard unless you are looking for something specific

Woof, Woof - Dawg

If there's no tangible difference yet Snow Leopard forces you to upgrade almost all of your apps, then I'd say that's the reason not to.


For me Leopard was a disaster, it was just so buggy and still is, it was obvious to me why 10.6 was still called Leopard, it was just a giant bug fix. It surprises me that people are having MORE problems with SL than L, I didn't think it could get worse than Leopard! Leopard was the system I called "Windows". I guess I'll be skipping SL altogether.

 

[MythicFrost]

I have been using Snow Leopard since release on my Imac and Macbook Pro. (clean install on both)

I must ask, by clean install you mean: formatted your hard drive > installed SL without restoring from Time Machine or migrating from an existing drive, so you have a brand new fresh (nothing on it) OS? is that correct?

If you still experience issues, well you shouldn't (I wouldn't settle for problems, I'd keep looking you shouldn't have to have problems). I'm going great, and noticed improvements over the build increments (10.6.3 > 10.6.0), but I have noticed a little more beach balling since 10.6.1&2&3 compared to 10.6.0 (up from almost never to here and there).

 

[atyoung]

For those who asked what trouble one can have with Snow Leopard: Try using Apple's Airport cards with non-Apple wireless routers. This alone is painful enough to seriously consider ditching Apple's whole platform. And it's still not fixed.

Seriously... I have never had a issue connecting to any type of router. You do know hardware problems exist right? Yes even in airport cards, which is why the Genius bar exists. Or maybe you should buy I dunno a semi reputable router. Dynex (or whatever the generic brand best buy sells is called) isn't selling them for $10 cause they are models of compatibility. $1000+ for a nice mac, and under $50 for your router, does that make any sense at all?

Right click on every smart playlist (like recently played), pick edit, and turn off live updating.

iTunes and my Ipod were almost unusable until I did this in SL.

Too true. Personally I don't use smart playlists anyways. I don't like the concept, call me old school but I like to just drop what I want on my player when I want it on there. I don't like the idea of things changing without my say so.

I never understood the reason people blame third party hardware driver problems on the OS developers. Call your manufacturer on your esoteric printer and get to the meat of it. Better yet buy a new printer, or whatever it is you are complaining about. I understand you just bought the printer 5 years ago, but you know what, stop being a cheap f***. You have 3 macs, buy a new Fing printer.

SL hasn't been anything but rock solid on my early 2008 MB. I abuse it with virtual machines, long compiles, and even *gasp* third party drivers, tweaks, hacks and what have you with narry a problem. Granted I'm very experienced in nix based OS's so perhaps I just know what BSD can take. On the other hand, I have yet to run into a situation where I needed to reboot randomly, kernel panic, random unexpected beachball, or the like that some people, who aren't as demanding on the system as me, claim is the OS.

I suspect things like trying to run things that shouldn't run, cracked and hacked together versions of programs and/or the os itself as the more likely cause. When your favorite tweak that used to work on leopard causes the beachball of doom on your fresh SL you blame the OS, for shame.

Or maybe you should fess up, you downloaded SL from some torrent site, it's crashing allot and you just aren't willing to accept your download is wanky.