The Best Mac OS X People Vote

[throAU]

Been a mac user since leopard.

Mountain Lion for me - my hardware is fine with it and the new features are nice.

 

[Naimfan]

I've been on Macs since they came out - the original Macintosh.

Snow Leopard by a mile. Fast, stable, clean. I don't like how "shiny" Lion and Mountain Lion are.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Tiger, but since it's not on the list...

Snow leopard. Heck, I'd install Snow Leopard on my macbook air if I could.

 

[BlazednSleepy]

Mountain Lion

runner up Snow Leopard.

 

[fat jez]

Snow Leopard. If they integrated iCloud and resize windows from any edge, it would have been nearly perfect.

 

[Blackberryroid]

Tiger and Leopard!

The two champtions. Over hundreds of new user noticeable features, unlike the three other guys. From far away, you can definitely tell if one is running Leopard or the other is running Tiger. I can't say the same with Lion and Mountain Lion. They are good upgrades, though.

 

[haruhiko]

Mountain Lion is great!

 

[munkery]

Once I got familiar with Mission Control and Launchpad while using Lion, the added features of Mountain Lion caused ML to supersede SL as my preferred version of OS X.

 

[swingerofbirch]

I would say Tiger, except, it is hard to remember what it was like to use it on a day-to-day basis. I really like Spotlight's implementation in Tiger—for me it's gotten worse since then. I liked the results window. And I don't use a lot of the extra features Apple has added since then. Still, as far as a more modern OS, Snow Leopard is wonderful, and the philosophy behind it: just making it cleaner and better was pitch-perfect.

I would love to see where Bertrand Serlet would take Mac OS X at this point (and I purposefully called it Mac OS X, I'd like to think he'd put the Mac back in the name and the Mac back in the Mac).

 

[WarrenFields]

Snow Leopard, definitely.

 

[golf1410]

I prefer the next version. Code name: Sea Lion

Image

Haha. Always wonder who named all these.

 

[Sital]

They are all fungible to me.

 

[AzN1337c0d3r]

Snow Leopard had the least amount of bugs for me. Possibly because Apple hadn't mostly replaced all the FOSS stuff with their own proprietary version at that point.

 

[dusk007]

I started with Snow Leopard and I would vote for that.
The new stuff is worse. The old stuff I don't know.
In general I am the kind who would usually always prefer the new stuff. I even like a lot about Windows 8 and Metro. ML though makes too much worse for no decent reason.

 

[InfinitiG]

Snow Leopard or Mountain Lion

Leaning towards Mountain Lion and I am running a macbook 5,1

 

[pat park]

I love me some Lion and Mountain Lion, but Snow Leopard was some damn fine OS X.

 

[mcman77]

this thread really needs a poll.....i'm going with Sea lion as posted above

 

[thermodynamic]

Hmmm

So far:


Laptops: Snow Leopard (though 10.8.x and improved battery life as a result of .1) might finally get Mountain Lion on the map.. I'm testing ML on my 2011 MBP...

Desktops: Mountain Lion, mostly due to a lesser need of worry about battery life...

I wonder if benchmarks between SL and ML exist for operations (not boot time fluff but how long a 3D rendering app takes, with the OS doing its thing in the background - that would be useful to really help decide which is better)...

But, so far, I like a lot of what ML promises... if battery life and stability are improved, then it wins...

 

[munkery]

Snow Leopard had the least amount of bugs for me. Possibly because Apple hadn't mostly replaced all the FOSS stuff with their own proprietary version at that point.

Not much FOSS was removed. The foundation of OS X is still mostly FOSS.

http://www.apple.com/opensource/

 

[charlieegan3]

But it was the best and most stable OS I ever used.
My Intel Macs had more kernel panics in one year than my iBook had in four years, and it was rarely hardware related.

this is true, tiger has to go on the list.

 

[Dunkaccino]

I liked Lion the best. Seemed like the best true update from SL. Didn't have many of the issues Mountain Lion is now having for some.

 

[AzN1337c0d3r]

Not much FOSS was removed. The foundation of OS X is still mostly FOSS.

http://www.apple.com/opensource/

You mean like the removal of GCC (replaced by gcc-llvm, which isn't open-source and still has many outstanding bugs, or clang, which doesn't support OpenMP)?

How about their own implementation of Samba in Lion?

 

[munkery]

You mean like the removal of GCC (replaced by gcc-llvm, which isn't open-source and still has many outstanding bugs, or clang, which doesn't support OpenMP)?

How about their own implementation of Samba in Lion?

Clang, llvm, and etc are open source, AFAIK.

http://clang.llvm.org/

But I see the point you're trying to make, a less mature project has more bugs.

Apple's implementation of Samba isn't open source yet. I wouldn't be surprised if it was open sourced once it is a more mature project.

Samba doesn't represent a majority of that which is Mac OS X.

 

[goMac]

Snow Leopard.

And LLVM is way better than GCC, and under a far better open source license.

LibDispatch is available if you're missing OpenMP.

 

[AzN1337c0d3r]

Apple's implementation of Samba isn't open source yet. I wouldn't be surprised if it was open sourced once it is a more mature project.

Is there any indications that it will be open-sourced. Knowing Apple, this doesn't seem likely since it will parallel the Unix/Linux effort.

Samba doesn't represent a majority of that which is Mac OS X.

I didnt claim Samba was a majority of OSX, Apple replaced a lot more than just Samba and GCC, those were only examples.

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And LLVM is way better than GCC, and under a far better open source license.

LibDispatch is available if you're missing OpenMP.

You can't claim that a BSD-derivative is a better license than GPL. I prefer GPL because I dont want companies like Apple not sharing any code they take after they modify it.

Furthermore, clang/LLVM is not universally a better compiler than GCC. GCC still produces slightly faster code.

LibDispatch is not available under C/C++ and besides, they don't even share the same parallel programming paradigm. OpenMP's main goal is to parallelize for-loops.

LibDispatch is for task-level parallelism. A more equivalent library would be pThreads.