I agree the dock system sucks. The side-mounted docks don't migrate at all. It's like they forgot about them completely. They also made the side-mounted docks too bright (from dark black) where a medium shade would have done better. A simple solution for the former problem would be to simply have a dock on each display like the menu bar. It's the obvious solution and I find it strange that Apple couldn't manage such a basic concept on their own.
I think ALL versions of OSX run too hot by default. Apple favors silence over safety. Fortunately, Macs Fan Control is pretty awesome and can be configured to ramp up fans at range of temperatures tied to the sensor of your choice or set to a constant speed or it can let Apple's settings handle it (or another fan program running like Lubbock's fan control) while monitoring it on the menu bar. Thus, I have no Mavericks fan issues because I don't leave it up to Apple to keep my machine cool. When I use Handbrake to encode a movie, my machine ramps up to maximum fan pretty quickly now.
I used to get these all the time with Tiger and Leopard on my PowerMac. I also got them on my MBP running Leopard. Snow Leopard onward seemed much more stable, although I skipped Lion entirely due to poor reviews. I've never had a single kernel panic with Mountain Lion or Mavericks yet or a major crash of ANY kind for that matter (i.e. Mavericks is the most stable 1.0 release I've ever used; Mountain Lion was stable here by 10.8.2 or perhaps 10.8.3, but 10.8 and 10.8.1 had some issues), though so it may be something specific to your machine or setup. Have you noticed any pattern to it? What is causing the kernel panic according to the log?
I honestly think other than the dock issue, this is minor quibbling and the use of "piss-poor" is 100% posturing, IMO as I don't see where Windows or Linux is now that much better and both had their own issues over the years. Other than the dock, I think the multi-monitor support is now quite usable and hardly "piss-poor" anymore. I personally wouldn't expect an OS to resize my windows for me automatically. If it did, people would complain that OSX is changing their desired window sizes or something. You can't really win on something like that except perhaps to offer a preference setting for the behavior. Of course, it's preferable to have multiple monitors that are the same size, but not always practical. Since Mountain Lion it's considerably easier/faster to resize a window since you can now drag any edge. My complaints about multiple monitor support are strictly related to the dock (or rather the lack thereof when it comes to the side-docks). Some older programs don't handle the second menu bar correctly, but then they need updated to proper screen handling anyway.
I disagree 100%. Snow Leopard's introduction SUCKED, IMO, particularly in that it was a bunch of minor changes that served mostly to DUMP PowerPC support entirely (and that was the only efficiency increase I saw seeing that Snow Leopard ran slower in my XBench tests than Leopard and it was supposed to be an efficiency upgrade, not a feature boon and what new features it did add like OpenCL don't get much use even today). More than anything, it lead to a lot of software no longer being supported by OSX for PPC in a very short amount of time. Otherwise, most of the changes could have easily been added to Leopard. Of course, I could say the same thing about Mavericks onto Mountain Lion. The cycles are awfully short now with this yearly update mantra. But I suppose if they are free, it doesn't really matter whether they're called major or minor updates.
I think Leopard was BY FAR, the biggest noticeable "bloat" increase of any OSX version ever. It was considerably slower than Tiger, especially on PowerPC systems whereas ALL previous versions of OSX felt faster and more streamlined as time went on. If anything, Mountain Lion was impressive that it was still FAST on a machine designed for Leopard and frankly, I notice no noticeable slower feel on my 2008 machine than with Snow Leopard or Mountain Lion.
I do think Apple could put some effort into getting OpenGL up to the latest versions so that DirectX conversions could have parity features for the GPU without slowdowns caused by software rendering of those missing features, etc. And we all know Apple could keep their video drivers up-to-date and optimized a LOT better (one of the major causes of games being slower in OSX than Windows on the same machine beyond outdated OpenGL calls).
Wake on Internet Activity never worked right on my late 2012 Mac Mini with Mountain Lion, but DOES work right in Mavericks. They've also added Power Nap support for email checking, etc. while in sleep for this machine (wasn't supported in Mountain Lion). I have mouse freeze bug when waking for sleep on this particularly machine for reasons unknown (plug/unplug to correct), but for the most part, things have improved.
