Lion or Snow Leopard?

[myrtlebee]

Wow, this sounds like me. I've been using Lion since the first DP, then I decided to go back to SL because it was buggy. But then as soon as the gold version hit, I upgraded and never looked back. I thought I was following the natural course - when a new OS is released, most people generally upgrade.

I was happy with Lion - it was decent, I never had any WiFi problems. Mission Control took a while to get used to, but it wasn't the worse thing ever. The lack of all windows Exposé, however, was. But alas, time to move on, and I forgot all about it.

Then, after about 8 months, I start to fire up some VMs, 'cos I needed to run Windows, and noticed how slow it was. I thought it was because I didn't have enough free space, so I went ahead and deleted some files. No go. Then I start reading all the complaints with Lion that people had - battery lasting less, terrible RAM management, lack of Exposé/Spaces which JUST WORKED (Mission Control is a disaster for more than 4+ desktops, I tried it).

And then I decided to downgrade, in early March of this year. I stayed with SL for two weeks, but it felt awkward, 'cos I was used to the whole gestures and MC with Lion. Plus, iCloud and iMessages. I thought: 'wow, I need iCloud!' so I decided to do a zero-out and install Lion CLEAN.

First day, it was much faster. Wow, a clean install worked wonders. But over time, it started to page out my RAM. I used Lion for around a month (end of March - end of April). I tried disabling dynamic_pager, that worked, but then as soon as the Mac started to have very little free RAM, it would freeze temporarily. Nah, that's not good enough.

Back to Snow Leopard - and can you believe it, everything just works: longer battery performance (and mine already has 1,015 cicles - it lasted 1h to 1h30 on Lion, on SL it's over 2h), Spaces/Exposé again (rejoice!), decent RAM management. I'm a happy camper.

My Mac is a 13" mid-2009 model, 2.26 Ghz with 4 GB RAM. I might upgrade to ML this summer, but I'll need 8 GB and A LOT of patience.

Same thing happened to me. Same model machine. Also, I noticed when on Lion, animations weren't totally smooth (I have a MacMini 2011 i5 and Lion is perfect on that machine, animations smooth) and I could hear a light sort of "clickwheel" noise when scrolling in Safari and when toggling in and out of fullscreen. I'm assuming it had something to do with the graphics? A bit of a shame actually, because I enjoy Lion, save for a few things - but I would return to Lion (and, in turn, ML this summer) if I could.

 

[rm -rf /*]

Easy choice: Snow Leopard

Lion is like Snow Leopard with mittens and lipstick. It doesn't look or feel like a *nix system. I am rolling back my main box this week.

 

[Garoolgan]

I'd stick with Snow Leopard

I had to go Lion on a new MacBook Pro. It was a lot of hassle to get some programs running on Lion, searching for product updates etc. My scanner is also doing strange things and Canon says it won't run on Acrobat 8 under Lion. It does however seem to function from Photoshop CS3, but I'm still testing it. My printers seem to be OK from MS Office for Mac and Photoshop.

I couldn't get the Migration Assistant to find the Lion MacBook so I wound up transferring my data with a couple of 8Gb jumpsticks.

The loss of being able to scan in Acrobat is for me a major issue. As a temporary solution I'm scanning with Photoshop, saving as pdf then assembling pages in Acrobat 8! Talk about time wasting! I'm still trying to work out whether it is realistic to buy a new Adobe Acrobat Pro as there are a lot of negative opinions on the Acrobat/Lion issue. Maybe there are other pdf programs out there that work on Lion? I think I'll post a non political straight question on the forum!

Garoolgan

 

[astrorider]

Maybe there are other pdf programs out there that work on Lion? I think I'll post a non political straight question on the forum!

Garoolgan

Have you tried the Preview app? it comes with Lion and has an option to scan directly in it; I think it's under the File menu.

 

[kaielement]

I use lion on two different macs and love it. No wifi issues for me. And as to printers and scanners so far no problems yet.

 

[myrtlebee]

I purchased 8gb of RAM and installed it into my 2009 2.26 C2D MacBook Pro 13". I have since switched to Lion and everything runs smooth and fast. If anyone has any trouble, I would suggest bumping yourself up to at least 8gb of RAM and see how that goes. I'm enjoying it more than SL now and have become more of a gestures user. Much more efficient for me.

 

[astrorider]

I've been using Lion for the last 5 months or so, but it really surprised me how many of the tips in this article I hadn't yet come across:
http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/80-handy-os-x-lion-tips-and-tricks-1044374