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Is the developer preview 8 stable?

Z

zirosky

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 14, 2012
150
10
Hello,

I have a developer account, and I was wondering if the Mavericks DP 8 is stable, do you suggest me to install it on my macbook air 13" 2012 that I use every day and which is actually my only computer? Or it is still unstable? Thank you!
 
You should expect bugs, and be prepared to test them. However, lots of people have installed in as their main OS platform.

(Technically, "stable" in software development means (or used to mean) that the included features are not going to change, rather than referring to whether it crashes or not.)
While there are still bugs in Mavericks, very few of them cause applications to crash or data to be lost, if that's what you're asking.
 
benwiggy said:
You should expect bugs, and be prepared to test them. However, lots of people have installed in as their main OS platform.

(Technically, "stable" in software development means (or used to mean) that the included features are not going to change, rather than referring to whether it crashes or not.)
While there are still bugs in Mavericks, very few of them cause applications to crash or data to be lost, if that's what you're asking.
Click to expand...

Yes! Thank you... Do you think there will be any other DP before the GM?
 
In my experience testing it on my Mac mini (Oct 2012), 10.9 DP8 is pretty reliable. There are very few bugs that I encounter on a regular basis. There are a couple of seemingly-Magic-Mouse-touch-scrolling-related bugs in the App Store and Safari that I have reported. Beyond that, I have found a couple of apps with have Mavericks-specific issues (e.g. Calibre crashes when trying to convert ebooks and Plex Media Center crashes or hangs if it is launched with the menu bar focus on a secondary display). And on the cosmetic front, most apps that manage their own full-screen views (rather than use the official OS X full-screen API) have issues with the menu bar appearing on top of their full-screen views on secondary displays (because there previously hasn't been a menu bar on secondary displays).

But the multi-monitor support is so much better that I installed on my primary machine's primary partition a few DP releases ago. (I tested it on a separate partition for the first few releases.) And this weekend, I finally wrote over the clone I had made of my primary partition before I upgraded it from ML. At this point, there was no chance I would return to that several week old backup.

Because I have a desktop with 16GB RAM, I can't speak to the impact of power saving and RAM efficiency improvements in Mavericks, but those sound as if they would be worthwhile on an Air.

John
 
jhfenton said:
In my experience testing it on my Mac mini (Oct 2012), 10.9 DP8 is pretty reliable. There are very few bugs that I encounter on a regular basis. There are a couple of seemingly-Magic-Mouse-touch-scrolling-related bugs in the App Store and Safari that I have reported. Beyond that, I have found a couple of apps with have Mavericks-specific issues (e.g. Calibre crashes when trying to convert ebooks and Plex Media Center crashes or hangs if it is launched with the menu bar focus on a secondary display). And on the cosmetic front, most apps that manage their own full-screen views (rather than use the official OS X full-screen API) have issues with the menu bar appearing on top of their full-screen views on secondary displays (because there previously hasn't been a menu bar on secondary displays).

But the multi-monitor support is so much better that I installed on my primary machine's primary partition a few DP releases ago. (I tested it on a separate partition for the first few releases.) And this weekend, I finally wrote over the clone I had made of my primary partition before I upgraded it from ML. At this point, there was no chance I would return to that several week old backup.

Because I have a desktop with 16GB RAM, I can't speak to the impact of power saving and RAM efficiency improvements in Mavericks, but those sound as if they would be worthwhile on an Air.

John
Click to expand...

Thank you, John! As you can guess, I use my MBA just for email, safari, skype, iMessage, mail and to sync with iCloud... so I guess I will note notice the few bugs in Mavericks... I think I'll upgrade! ;)
 
zirosky said:
Hello,

I have a developer account, and I was wondering if the Mavericks DP 8 is stable, do you suggest me to install it on my macbook air 13" 2012 that I use every day and which is actually my only computer? Or it is still unstable? Thank you!
Click to expand...

As your only computer, clone a full backup before you do this so you can revert back if you have issues. Also remember that while DP8 might work for you, there is always the possibility that some future DP will have a serious issue on your only computer. (I've had this happen more frequently than I can admit.)
 
I haven't had any issues with any of DPs yet. They were as stable for me as any other OS X version.
 
zirosky said:
do you suggest me to install it on my macbook air 13" 2012 that I use every day and which is actually my only computer?
Click to expand...
Anyone here suggesting you use a developer's preview as your only OS is irresponsible.
 
talmy said:
As your only computer, clone a full backup before you do this so you can revert back if you have issues. Also remember that while DP8 might work for you, there is always the possibility that some future DP will have a serious issue on your only computer. (I've had this happen more frequently than I can admit.)
Click to expand...

I know I asked this question before, But I have a second partition with OSX maverick and Mountain lion on the other partition. And I would like to combine the two, how do I go about it?
 
zirosky said:
Hello,

I have a developer account, and I was wondering if the Mavericks DP 8 is stable, do you suggest me to install it on my macbook air 13" 2012 that I use every day and which is actually my only computer? Or it is still unstable? Thank you!
Click to expand...

I upgraded from ML to Mav yesterday after testing it for a while on a spare mbp, and it completely hosed my system to the point where it barely useable anymore. I posted my problems on the dev forums. I was glad to have a Time Machine backup and my working mbp will remain ML for a while from now on...
 
Developer Preview 8 is stable, but I wouldn't recommend using it as your only form of OS X because it IS a Developer's Preview. On one of my MacBook's I have DP8 and I use it daily, there are a few bugs here and there but overall it is pretty stable.
 
kftrainer said:
I know I asked this question before, But I have a second partition with OSX maverick and Mountain lion on the other partition. And I would like to combine the two, how do I go about it?
Click to expand...

I would expect Migration Assistant would do it (from ML to Mav) but it won't merge accounts together.
 
Ok thank you all! But how can I install it from ML? I can install the dp8 combo? Or i have to install them one by one starting from dp1??
 
zirosky said:
Ok thank you all! But how can I install it from ML? I can install the dp8 combo? Or i have to install them one by one starting from dp1??
Click to expand...

Install dp1 (or dp4 which is the only other release with a full installer as far as I'm aware) then update to dp8 using the combo update.
 
Hi guys! I installed it and everything was ok... now I used my TM backup and there are several bugs... how can I go back to ML??? Im' downloading ML from Mac App Store but I don't have it on a usb key... I must use something like Lion DiskMaker to make a bootable USB? Or there are simpler ways?
 
Last edited:
The only real bugs I have come across is a video corruption bug on part of my Retina screen when coming from sleep. I ran a hardware test and it doesn't happen on 10.8, so its a 10.9 driver issue. It has gone down in frequency since Preview 3. 8 started to give me occasional Kernel Panics. Again 10.8 made them stop.
 
zirosky said:
Hi guys! I installed it and everything was ok... now I used my TM backup and there are several bugs... how can I go back to ML??? Im' downloading ML from Mac App Store but I don't have it on a usb key... I must use something like Lion DiskMaker to make a bootable USB? Or there are simpler ways?
Click to expand...

To re-quote my original reply in this thread:

talmy said:
As your only computer, clone a full backup before you do this so you can revert back if you have issues.
Click to expand...
 
saberahul said:
Was thinking of following your footsteps… glad you posted this reply. I'll wait for the official build :)
Click to expand...

NB. The bugs I get are: not full translation into italian (so if you need english, no worries), when I click on the button to turn off the macbook, just the screen turn off and "slow-mo" effect when I switch from one page to another in the launchpad
 
zirosky said:
I did a backup but if I restore, the mac has still Mavericks :)
Click to expand...

If it was a true clone backup, the backup would have been bootable. All you would need to do is clone it back. Cloning can be done with Disk Utility or (much faster) SuperDuper! or CarbonCopyCloner. TimeMachine does not create a suitable backup.

If all you have is a TimeMachine backup you might be able to restore your original OS using Internet Recovery (try CMD-R). Although this still might insist on re-installing Mavericks if it sees the Mavericks recovery partition. At that point you would need to delete the Mavericks recovery partition, which can be done from the command line.

If you have or can create an install disk or USB flash drive you can use that. Follow instructions found all over the web.

Then attempt to restore your data from the TimeMachine backup using Migration Assistant.
 
zirosky said:
NB. The bugs I get are: not full translation into italian (so if you need english, no worries), when I click on the button to turn off the macbook, just the screen turn off and "slow-mo" effect when I switch from one page to another in the launchpad
Click to expand...

What's NB? Not bad?
 
Am I the only one with a pretty much unusable Mail.app (CPU load)? This has been going on since DP4 or 5.
 
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