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The Lion Thread (OS X 10.7)

Status
The first post of this thread is a WikiPost and can be edited by anyone with the appropiate permissions. Your edits will be public.
M

MysticCow

macrumors 68000
Original poster
May 27, 2013
1,564
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Mac OS X 10.7 Lion

Supported Hardware
  • iMac (Late 2006 to Late 2011)
  • Mac mini (Mid 2007 to Mid 2011)
  • Mac mini Server (Mid 2010 and Mid 2011)
  • MacBook (Late 2006 to Mid 2010)
  • MacBook Air (Early 2008 to Mid 2012)
  • MacBook Pro (Late 2006 to Mid 2012)
  • MacBook Pro with Retina Display (15" Mid-2012)
  • Mac Pro (Late 2016 to Mid 2012)
  • Xserve (Late 2006 to Early 2009)

AirDrop works with the following: Mac mini Mid 2010 or newer, MacBook Late 2008 or newer, MacBook Pro Late 2008 or newer

How to get it

Purchase Lion from Apple

Apple Support Lion Installer


Minimum RAM
  • 2 GB

Minimum Hard Drive Space / Partition Size
  • 7 GB

Release Date
  • July 20, 2011

Apple Software Updates

Web Browsers, FTP et al.

Web Design & Development

Audio & Video

Games

Graphics & Design

Office & Productivity

Tools & Utilities


Notes

This is a WikiPost. Feel free to add any softwares or additional OS info that you find. Add new categories if you feel your software does not fit under any current category. Some of these lists may not be populated currently, so please add a bullet list (Unordered List.) Unbold the links if they are bolded.
 
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The OS that made me leave Apple. (Don't worry I came back). It was terrible and slow and I hated the iOS look and it had no Rosetta. I later learned to appreciate Mountain Lion a lot on a MB 2,1. I bought a MB 7,1 at a pawn shop a while back and the Internet Recovery put it on Lion and it was a screamer with a SSD and a better CPU. This one will always be bittersweet for some I imagine.
 
I don't get why Lion gets all the hate. Rosetta never came back on any release after 10.6. Everyone always brings that up. Like it's Lion's fault that Rosetta disappeared. I don't get it. It wasn't going to stay forever anyway as Apple moved forward in to the Intel world. It's no different than when Apple dropped "classic" support after 10.4. I also don't find it slow at all. It's almost on par with my 10.6 installs (excluding boot time). As a matter of fact it's my preferred development environment because i can build for 10.6 all the way up to 10.14 with 10.7's SDK, and it's been rock solid and stable over the last 3 years of me brutally hammering it with compiling browsers all the time. Using 10.8 and up SDK's break cocoa slightly on 10.6 as you end up with missing radio buttons and other graphical oddities.

Cheers
 
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I can't speak to the SDK's, but I always found Lion itself to be buggy and weird. Little things like the lack of a Save As option (I like auto-saving, but Apple struck a better balance in 10.8+), the inability to disable reopening windows after rebooting, stuff like that.

It's hard for me to speak in more detail since I haven't used Lion since 2012, but I remember that upgrading to Mountain Lion felt like a serious return to form.
 
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I don't hate Lion per se, I just can't think of a compelling reason to use it. Ever since MacPostFactor, NexPostFacto, etc. came along to allow me to run Mountain Lion and later on Macs that were previously stuck at Lion, my experience has been that later versions just feel more responsive to me. That, and other versions open up more software options. Want Rosetta? Snow Leopard. Want Zoom? Mavericks. Want a more responsive machine? Mountain Lion has it all over Lion for my uses.

Lion just occupies a space for which I personally have no use. It's nice to know, though, that some people appreciate it. Unlike certain Windows versions, I can't say there's any version of the Mac OS that deserves to be an orphan.
 
I didn’t like Lion at first, but over time I have come to like it. I plan on putting it back on my 2006 MBP since Mavericks didn’t work out too well on there and I had a bad experience trying to get MacPostFactor to work.
 
Amethyst1 said:
Cheetah *cough, cough* Yosemite *cough, cough* Big Sur *cough, cough* OK, I'll stop now. :)
Click to expand...
More versions I've never tried. Perhaps I was too generous.

BUT on second thought, I do know of at least one person who uses Yosemite for a particular purpose that they couldn't seem to make work with later versions of Mac OS. Wish I could remember what it was!

And Cheetah and Big Sur have historic significance. They may suck, I wouldn't know, but each represents a major turning point for the Mac OS, which makes them noteworthy regardless of how well (or not) they work.

So, nah. I'll stand by my comment. :)
 
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MacFoxG4 said:
I didn’t like Lion at first, but over time I have come to like it. I plan on putting it back on my 2006 MBP since Mavericks didn’t work out too well on there and I had a bad experience trying to get MacPostFactor to work.
Click to expand...
Just curious, what problems did you run into with Mavericks on the 2006 MBP?
 
I liked lion, love mountain lion and wish i can use Snow Leopard like the past with internets and iClouds.
mavericks to high sierra made eventually me buy a dell xps, then Mojave revived my apple heart!
how bad is bigsur?
 
retta283 said:
Just curious, what problems did you run into with Mavericks on the 2006 MBP?
Click to expand...
Firefox 78 ESR had this issue where the scroll bars would disappear on Discord, so once you clicked a channel you couldn't scroll down to switch to another channel further down the list. If you switched to another server and then switched back, the scroll bar would reappear, but once you clicked on a channel it would disappear again. To make sure this wasn't an issue with Firefox 78 ESR, I used Discord on Firefox 78 ESR on my MacMini 3,1 running El Capitan at the time, and the scroll bar functioned normally.

Amethyst1 said:
For Mountain Lion, MacPostFactor 1.0.1 is the way to go. I had no problems with that on my 2006 MBP.
Click to expand...

The problem I had is that MacPostFactor 1.0.1 used this thing called Adfly. Every time I pressed "Skip ad" a new one would pop up. Sometimes the ad screen would turn white and not change for a few minutes. I could never get past the ads to continue with the installation. I tried MacPostFactor 1.0 and the same thing happened. I was going to try ParrotGeek's ML patcher, but then Safari got taken over by pop up ads. I immediately wiped the Mini's SSD and went back to El Cap (I downgraded the Mini to Lion so I could download the Mountain Lion installer from the app store). I gave up on trying to patch Mountain Lion after that experience.
 
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MacFoxG4 said:
Firefox 78 ESR had this issue where the scroll bars would disappear on Discord, so once you clicked a channel you couldn't scroll down to switch to another channel further down the list. If you switched to another server and then switched back, the scroll bar would reappear, but once you clicked on a channel it would disappear again. To make sure this wasn't an issue with Firefox 78 ESR, I used Discord on Firefox 78 ESR on my MacMini 3,1 running El Capitan at the time, and the scroll bar functioned normally.
Click to expand...

Something's weird. I don't have that problem with Discord in Firefox 78 ESR on Mavericks.
 
Wowfunhappy said:
Something's weird. I don't have that problem with Discord in Firefox 78 ESR on Mavericks.
Click to expand...
What Mac are you using Mavericks on?

I think in my case there was probably some graphical glitchiness due to my 2006 MBP’s GPU not being officially supported by Mavericks.
 
MacFoxG4 said:
What Mac are you using Mavericks on?

I think in my case there was probably some graphical glitchiness due to my 2006 MBP’s GPU not being officially supported by Mavericks.
Click to expand...
Ah, yeah, it's probably the GPU, that makes sense!
 
I didn't experienced OSX Lion at the time (only saw it on my Mom's Macbook) but i recently had to install it on someone's else white 2006 Macbook with only 1gb RAM (did it through TDM from my non-unibody 2008 MBP) and was impressed that it could handle YouTube without much CPU load on Firefox Legacy.
 
Updated original post with the recently released Apple Support free installer for Lion. Surprised they did this after this long, but may be worth having as a backup for some. Now if they would just release Mavericks...
 
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