My 10.9.1 experience

[ls1dreams]

I've been waiting to upgrade to Mavericks for quite a while now from 10.6.8, and thought I'd leave some feedback. I did a clean install on an SSD from a USB stick, but won't have a recovery partition.

Overall:

Much smoother than I thought. I'm not seeing any of the weird hangs in Finder that others have mentioned. It generally feels quite snappy. Boot time is insanely fast - like 20seconds on my 840 evo.

The weird issues I'm seeing so far:

1. Random beach balls probably every 10-15min. They disappear so fast that it doesn't really get in the way of my work, but it's odd.

2. No left/right swipe gestures in Finder is awful. I'm having trouble getting Better Touch Tool to work properly for it as well.

3. Double-tap for secondary click was slow and lagged, but was fixed by disabling smart zoom in preferences > trackpad > gestures. Basically the trackpad is waiting to see if a second tap is coming, which makes the menu delayed. If you don't use smart tap, definitely disable it - it feels SO much faster.

4. When trying to return from idle / screen blacked out, the touchpad sometimes won't wake the computer. Only using the keyboard will for some reason.

5. Some weirdness in finder: files sometimes use the wrong icons, particularly in context menus. Also, when using the context menu "Open With", it will wait to spin up my regular HDD for some reason. No idea why.

I don't use Safari or Mail, so I can't really comment on those.

 

[Ddyracer]

Doesn't sound that smooth to me. That's the type of bugs most of us here complaining are getting.

 

[RedRaven571]

#4 is the way the system works, whenever the screen goes black, or computer sleeps, you need to touch a key, not the trackpad, to bring it back.

When you say clean install, do you mean you wiped the osx partition, installed mav, then manually reinstalled your apps, settings, etc.?

 

[w0lf]

I've been waiting to upgrade to Mavericks for quite a while now from 10.6.8, and thought I'd leave some feedback. I did a clean install on an SSD from a USB stick, but won't have a recovery partition.

Overall:

Much smoother than I thought. I'm not seeing any of the weird hangs in Finder that others have mentioned. It generally feels quite snappy. Boot time is insanely fast - like 20seconds on my 840 evo.

The weird issues I'm seeing so far:

1. Random beach balls probably every 10-15min. They disappear so fast that it doesn't really get in the way of my work, but it's odd.

2. No left/right swipe gestures in Finder is awful. I'm having trouble getting Better Touch Tool to work properly for it as well.

3. Double-tap for secondary click was slow and lagged, but was fixed by disabling smart zoom in preferences > trackpad > gestures. Basically the trackpad is waiting to see if a second tap is coming, which makes the menu delayed. If you don't use smart tap, definitely disable it - it feels SO much faster.

4. When trying to return from idle / screen blacked out, the touchpad sometimes won't wake the computer. Only using the keyboard will for some reason.

5. Some weirdness in finder: files sometimes use the wrong icons, particularly in context menus. Also, when using the context menu "Open With", it will wait to spin up my regular HDD for some reason. No idea why.

I don't use Safari or Mail, so I can't really comment on those.

1. Beachballs really shouldn't be happening. Is it only happening in specific apps? You could try a reinstall because I haven't seen Beachballs since around the end of the 10.9.0 beta and I think many others do not have this issue. If it was wide spread there would be quite a bit more than Will Beachballs Vanish in 10.9.1 thread.

2. Make sure you set the Gesture Sensitivity in Basic Settings to Easier to Trigger.

3. Fixed and the original issue was by design.

4. Simply click the touchpad rather than swipe/touch. I'm fairly certain this is by design to prevent accidental wake, as well as probably saving battery.

5. What do you mean have the wrong icons? Probably just old cached icons.
As for waking your external, do you by chance have any apps on your HDD drive? Because if you do it's probably waking it in prep for you choosing one of those apps so it's not dreadfully slow to open.

Edit: just read your other thread and you do have apps on your HDD so that solves all problems except #1.

#4 is the way the system works, whenever the screen goes black, or computer sleeps, you need to touch a key, not the trackpad, to bring it back.

Actually you can wake the display from sleep by with the trackpad gestures but you can't wake the computer from sleep with trackpad gestures.

You can however physically click the trackpad rather than tap to wake from any sleep state.

Pretty sure this is by design to prevent accidental wake as well as not having to monitor the trackpad for tap input.

Doesn't sound that smooth to me. That's the type of bugs most of us here complaining are getting.

I dunno. None of these actually sound like big issues. Non-smooth would be something actually not working.

 

[sjinsjca]

1. Random beach balls probably every 10-15min. They disappear so fast that it doesn't really get in the way of my work, but it's odd.

Odd indeed.

Has Spotlight finished indexing your drive?

If so, try disabling spin-down of your hard disk and see if that impacts the beach ball issue.

 

[Gochugogi]

No beach balls for me at all but Mail freezes once in a while, especially during shutdown (cancels shutdown!). And none of my FW drives will sleep automatically or manually. USB sleeps fine. I have 6 external drives and Spotlight was going nuts trying to index them and bogging down everything. I had to put all my externals, even Time Machine, on the Spotlight exclude list to keep my 2013 i7 Mini useable. 10.91 is 90% finished. Another bug fix release or two and it should be as stable and smooth as 10.85 was!

 

[ls1dreams]

#4 is the way the system works, whenever the screen goes black, or computer sleeps, you need to touch a key, not the trackpad, to bring it back.

When you say clean install, do you mean you wiped the osx partition, installed mav, then manually reinstalled your apps, settings, etc.?

To clarify, I added an SSD, so everything is BRAND new. Installed mavericks 10.9.1 from a USB drive, and installed all apps fresh (did NOT use the migration tool). I wanted it as pure as possible.

The old hard drive was moved to the optical bay in a caddy.

Odd that in 10.6.8 swiping the touchpad would return from sleep, but this one is the least of my concerns.

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Odd indeed.

Has Spotlight finished indexing your drive?

If so, try disabling spin-down of your hard disk and see if that impacts the beach ball issue.

As far as I can tell spotlight is done indexing. I do have a mechanical HDD in the optical bay though, which I suspect sometimes messes with the system when it tries to spin up (but shouldn't really need to).

 

[RedRaven571]

To clarify, I added an SSD, so everything is BRAND new. Installed mavericks 10.9.1 from a USB drive, and installed all apps fresh (did NOT use the migration tool). I wanted it as pure as possible.

The old hard drive was moved to the optical bay in a caddy.

Odd that in 10.6.8 swiping the touchpad would return from sleep, but this one is the least of my concerns.

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As far as I can tell spotlight is done indexing. I do have a mechanical HDD in the optical bay though, which I suspect sometimes messes with the system when it tries to spin up (but shouldn't really need to).

As far as the sleep/touchpad, I know, I went from sl to mav too and it seems odd but apparently too many people accidentally woke their macs.

First, I would try running disk utility and repair the osx partition, see if it makes any difference. Can also reset pram and VRAM. Lastly, can use mav USB to use disk check and see if errors on disk.

If that all checks out and doesn't correct your issues, you installed onto new ssd, try removing hdd from optibay and see if still if the other symptoms persist. If so, is it out of the question to install mav on your old hdd since you were having no problems running sl, and see if the symptoms persist. If they don't, maybe something wonky with ssd?

I seem to remember reading various posts on these forums about certain ssd not playing well with macs.

 

[GlenK]

Seems to be working well. Only small issue still remaining so far is addressing an email to a group by double clicking on the group still doesn't work. It's no big deal but you just have to type it in.

 

[allan.nyholm]

I think the issue with spinning drives waking up is something OS X has had an issue with always. It's been like this forever when opening the Open With menu entry and/or having a Time Machine drive connected directly to the computer via USB or FireWire even Thunderbolt I'm guessing.

And if you've been in an application that you want to have open a new file that is located on your internal drive any external drive with spinning platters will spin up regardless. When I have a drive that makes a horrific spinning sound then I use KeepDriveSpinning(available on MacUpdate) - an app that'll send a notification to the drive of your choice every 60 second or 30 seconds to keep it from sleeping thus eliminating the spinning when accessing your OS. The wait time for a drive to spin up can sometimes be too much to handle.

The downside for keeping a drive awake always with KeepDriveSpinning is the sleep on your OS - it will not automatically sleep. But you can sleep it manually but the drive is spinning so be aware of that.

The Better Touch Tool is something to be tinkered with - I got it working with a two finger slide. I bet three fingers will work too. Just tinker with BTT.