What is it with Snow leopard?

Since you've adopted a Mac in the Lion era, you DO NOT wanna know... Snow Leopard is the predecessor of Lion, and with Lion many things have changed which result in interrupted or unnecessary workflows, and impeded productivity... Older Mac users like us often find buggy and dumbed-down Lion to be user-unfriendly...

 

1. Mail works, and works and works.
2. Shutdown times are nearly instant
3. Snappy
4. Documented PC File sharing (samba)
5. Works quite well in a Active Directory

I personally use 10.8 on my computers, but for very good reasons a lot of my customers computers are still running 10.6.8.
I would say 10.7 was a side step. We where promised iCloud documents etc but never got it until 10.8.

 

I think 10.6 is faster and much leaner (less resources/HD space) than 10.8.2 but overall 10.8 is a better OS

 

Spaces is the kicker for me:

Imagine going from Spaces in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, looking like this

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to Mission Control in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, looking like this

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Of course, not everyone uses that many Spaces, but Mission Control seriously hampers the usefulness of more than four virtual desktops.

The other stuff I do not really care about, I do not need Facebook or Twitter integration, no iCloud and no fullscreen ****. And the extra small traffic light buttons are also not my type.

Apple makes it money with consumers now, thus it does not need to deliver for special audiences anymore, and that causes animosity. I am still deciding between getting a 2011 or 2012 Mac, since 2011 Macs can still run Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, while a 2012 Mac does get me only Mac OS X 10.7 Lion or OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.

 

I would say the worst is Mission Control especially with two monitors.
In spaces you entered the overview in which even expose still worked and you could quickly throw some windows on different desktops and displays. In MC you cannot ever move a window to a different display. Only onto different desktops on the same display. If they at least decoupled it completely it would make sense.

But there is this utterly stupid single app mode aka full screen mode that unfortunately breaks the full screen feature in some apps. You cannot put apps in full screen on one monitor because it blanks the other screen. So I end up only making the window as big as possible.

So somehow they don't decouple the displays and still don't use them like one workspace. It is annoying. I used expose and Spaces all the time. Now I find myself almost never triggering Mission control but using other means to switch Windows and manage Windows. The single App exposé still exists but somehow got slower with poor reaction time even after a clean install. In SL it was instant always and I never had to wait for it reacting.

iCloud has also been underwhelming. It could really be more. All I use it for is syncing contacts, mail, cal. Everything google synced for me on my iphone just fine. Now iCloud is easier to set up but it should do more. I don't use iWorks and they could have opened up the file management somewhat. This way it is inconvenient with spotlight/alfred and finder. I end up using dropbox and Microsofts Skydrive which both are better than iCloud for actual cloud stuff other than simple synchronization of some contacts.


So to sum it up. ML maybe simple and easy to set up and use but its features are worse than before or just poor and substandard.
They did MC afaik because most people never made use of Spaces but it sucks that they cannot do it properly and still support the features for power user and people with more than one monitor. It wouldn't require many changes.
SL had less fluid scrolling but otherwise it didn't stall nearly as often under heavy load and its features weren't tailored to small single display Mac Book Airs.

 

Apple started changing stuff with Lion and took them to a weird and unpolished direction. The GUI is becoming inconsistent, mission control is (in a lot of aspects) worse than expose and launchpad makes little sense.

Snow Leopard was a mature OS. It matured over time a lot of kinks were worked out and it was generally bug-free. Then Apple started changing things that didn't need change, and introduced a ton of bugs in the process.

You know how iOS users want change in their UI but Apple refuses? The defenders say that "it's a tool" and it doesn't need a UI overhaul.

And while it's questionable that iOS devices are tools, OSX devices are unquestionably tools and being bug-free/consistent and reliable is more or less required. Maturity and evolution is much more appreciated than changes.

New users might find something in OSX that might not work that great, but they'll just go "oh well, they'll fix/improve it eventually" and give it no second thought, in fact they might not even notice that it could be better and just accept it as-is. But if you used macs before Lion and you know that this used to work better than this (for example the whole Save As fiasco) you can't help but become a little bit angry.

EDIT : TL;DR Version : People dislike change in things they rely upon daily to do actual work. And if you change things you have to make them obviously better than previously for them to be acceptable. Lion and ML changes from SL are at best "as good".

 

My take:

Lion was a downgrade from SL. ML almost brought parity to where we were with 10.6, but still needs work.

Parts of the UI suck, partly due to the skeuomorphism, which will hopefully be jetissoned along with Scott Forstall, partly due to poor human interface choices.

Can't say I used expose much, but MC isn't as intuitive in my limited experience. Like others, I'm not sure I see the point of launchpad.

I like the fact that items can be grouped on the Dock, but I hate the fact that you now have to go through a nested menu to remove or keep an item on the Dock. In SL there was a nice drag off, and a simple menu to keep things there.

Good riddance Scott, take your skeuomorphism and don't let the door smack your butt on the way out.

 

Lion and Mountain Lion pushed a load of unnecessary features and GUI changes that brought a more iOS feel to OS X. Many people, myself included, found this not only to be pointless, but counter intuitive. Especially when usability was being sacrificed for leather stitching on Apps. The gestures features, in my mind, are stupid for a computer.

The whole slowness of Lion and the WiFi bugs didn't help either. Mountain Lion has a lot of performance improvements, but the GUI still looks like iOS raped OS X.

For me, OS X Tiger was the best version of OS X because it was lightweight, simple to use and feature complete without feeling bloated. But Leopard and Snow Leopard were still good versions and I think it is a shame Apple does not support their software for as long as Microsoft does.

The departure of Forstall may improve things. I guess we'll see.

 

I run 10.6. I've held off on upgrading to Lion and Mountain Lion because of what I read on forums such as these. Bottom line is, Snow Leopard is so quick and unfussy that I feel no need to change.