Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Who reverted to SL after using Lion?

  • Sticking with Lion

    Votes: 615 67.1%
  • Downgraded to Snow Leopard

    Votes: 301 32.9%

  • Total voters
    916
Shame you can't use that hack in Lion

Thankfully, ReSpace app was bought by the same company that makes TotalFinder, now TotalSpaces. You don't need to buy it yet, it is still in beta and had an update today. When 1.0 is released it will be a $12 license to have 10.5/6 Spaces in Lion, and the developer is working on bringing Exposé back as well. So far it's a fantastic app!!

TotalSpaces

That is some interesting news. I've been following ReSpaceApp for awhile and it is good to see that it will be released soon. Also, TotalFinder is amazing; it is a shame that Apple was lazy with their Drag files animation in Lion because it makes TotalFinder too laggy to really use. Heck, the dragging animation in Lion barely runs without TotalFinder.
 
It's funny because everytime someone posts this or comments about Snow Leopard's expose being the bestest, I'm reminded of all these threads :

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/777760/

Well, I would love Snow Leopard's Expose over Lion's pile of poop, but that doesn't mean I don't prefer Leopard expose over SL. If I could have my choice, I'd have Lion with expose from 10.4/10.5.

I remember using Expose in 10.3 and being blown away by it, but it's just been going downhill since. I seriously expect Mountain Lion's expose to be a single button that picks what app you want for you. :mad:
 
I have to admit I've warmed up a little to Lion. After saying so many bad(but true) things about it I've found reasons to use it again. Between Lion Tweaks, OnyX and Mac site tips Lion is almost behaving normally, so to speak. The lockfile thing is shut off, the Finder sidebar icons are in color, and stupid Duplicate instead of Save As doesn't matter because I'm using Office 2011.

I've got separate Lion, Snow Leopard, Windows 7 and Windows 8 boot disks. That's what happens when you have a Mac Pro and a bunch of hard drives you don't know what to do with!

Snow Leopard still feels more responsive although Lion's Geekbench and Cinebench scores are a bit higher. Windows 7 benchmarks noticeably higher than either Mac OS. Sadly that means that a Mac runs faster on Windows than it does on Apple's own OS. Nice work Cupertino.

Incidentally Lion on my FileVault2 encrypted MBP blew up, no restore partition and no help from Time Machine. Rather than go through that again I cloned from a Snow Leopard install from last summer (yet another HDD laying around), spent some time updating it and copied over needed data from the MP.

Snow Leopard feels really nice on the MBP. I'll keep it that way until Mountain Lion gets here and proves itself to be a worthy successor to Lion.
 
It's funny because everytime someone posts this or comments about Snow Leopard's expose being the bestest, I'm reminded of all these threads :

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/777760/

The complaints against Lion *seemed to* have only increased since it's release. You are right, eventually people got used to the new SL expose and it worked for them. What makes this instance different is that a year later you have just as much backlash against Lion's MC now as there was when it was released, people aren't accepting it.
 
I always notice the same people doing the complaining though... There are a few very vocal ones...

You should read the ADC forums, a lot of us have been filing UI bug reports since DP1 of Lion regarding "Mission Control", and still do with "Mountain Lion." There are a lot of threads about iOS style Spaces being inefficient in comparison to 10.5/6, of course "All Windows" Exposé is a major contention, even the threads here. The Apple Geniuses I used to work with hate it. Some may be very vocal, but generally it has arguably been the worst UI implementation by Apple. If Apple engineers simply gave users a choice, there wouldn't be so many complaints.
 
I always notice the same people doing the complaining though... There are a few very vocal ones...

Take the time to look at the poll that this thread is centered around. 1/3 of the people responding decided to downgrade rather than use Lion. Until Lion I never downgraded my OS, not even for bugs.

Lion has a 1/3 disapproval rating in the App Store also. And 2/3rd of people prefer 10.5/10.6 Expose and Spaces to Mission Control.

Lion is not a small mistake, it is a cluster-**** of mistakes.
 
Take the time to look at the poll that this thread is centered around. 1/3 of the people responding decided to downgrade rather than use Lion. Until Lion I never downgraded my OS, not even for bugs.

Lion has a 1/3 disapproval rating in the App Store also. And 2/3rd of people prefer 10.5/10.6 Expose and Spaces to Mission Control.

Lion is not a small mistake, it is a cluster-**** of mistakes.
Yeah, Lion definitely has some downsides. That I agree with. For me, though, the up outweighs the down.
 
Take the time to look at the poll that this thread is centered around. 1/3 of the people responding decided to downgrade rather than use Lion. Until Lion I never downgraded my OS, not even for bugs.

Lion has a 1/3 disapproval rating in the App Store also. And 2/3rd of people prefer 10.5/10.6 Expose and Spaces to Mission Control.
Just looking at how many people awarded less than 3 stars does nothing more but looking at how many people awarded less than 3 stars. It says nothing about why they awarded it 2 or 1 star(s). The same applies for the poll. You need the actual reviews in this thread and the app store to figure out why they are not so content with Lion.

From what I see most are the obvious upgrade problems that every new release will have (take a look at Leopard, that was by far the worse in this area, mostly because of things like APE). These are not to be taken into account since they will happen with every new OS X release. The same goes with things like scrolling, scrollbars, etc. because they are settable by the user. It is a matter of undoing the defaults so you get the old way back.

What you need to look at are the real problems. Usability of Mission Control being one of them. It needs a user settable option for displaying the windows per app or not (most commonly and incorrectly known as "all windows" Expose as Expose will only display as many windows it possibly can due to screen size restrictions and viewability) as well as a better spaces implementation. Previously you could simply create a space than tell the app to stick to space 1, 2, etc. Now you have to create the space, move to the space then tell the app to stick to this space. It works fine if you want to start using the app right away but in any other situation it takes too many steps. These things really break the workflow and there is no way of setting it to the old way. The user can not change the behaviour. The only way of resolving this is by actually reinstalling the old OS version. Bugs are bit more difficult since they can get fixed. It might be best to look at ongoing bugs that haven't been fixed in .1, .2 and .3.

Long story short: don't look at numbers but look at numbers AND the reasons behind it.
 
Time will tell. I plan to revert back to Windows when SL support stops or perhaps back to Linux. Moving on will show Apple it's more than a rant, I'm voting with my feet. But then I am still using XP on one laptop so perhaps in 10+ yrs SL will still be useable. And by then I may have some better OS options. I'm leaving it up to Apple to entice me to part with my hard earned $$ on their products. Let's see what they come up with.
 
It didn't used to be a game of hide and seek, the old expose was fantastic, where windows were easily identifiable by size, shape, and content.

Well, it was my lame attempt at a joke. Yep the old expose was wonderful and always worked great across multiple screens meanwhile it seems Lion doesn't like more than one display at once.
 

Attachments

  • expose.png
    expose.png
    125.2 KB · Views: 244
Well, it was my lame attempt at a joke. Yep the old expose was wonderful and always worked great across multiple screens meanwhile it seems Lion doesn't like more than one display at once.
I'm curious as to what Apple's ideas are concerning multimonitor setups. They have a very strange implementation of things like MC and fullscreen mode when it comes to more than 1 monitor.
 
Lion is BROKEN with regard to multi-display setups. It splits the displays' desktops amongst the individual displays, instead of positioning them next to each other, as nearly EVERY OTHER desktop environment handles it, as did snow leopard(and leopard). I hope this is fixed in ML
 
Lion is BROKEN with regard to multi-display setups. It splits the displays' desktops amongst the individual displays, instead of positioning them next to each other, as nearly EVERY OTHER desktop environment handles it, as did snow leopard(and leopard). I hope this is fixed in ML

Exactly. Most people don't use more than one display as most users are new to OS X and/or are consumers. Those who use their systems for work (film editors, photographers, designers) are used to having 2 displays and sometimes a monitor for film. The workflow in previous OS X versions handled multiple displays much better. Lion seems more for consumers with MacBook's and iMac's than professionals.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
This won't be fixed until Apple either gives up on Lion's Full-screen mode or at least give the option of going to Full-Screen mode in the same Space. Note either of these would also fix the problem with Spaces in Lion. SL's Spaces was also better than Lion's.

Maybe when Apple's monitor sales drop, they will figure out they need to fix this.
 
I never left SL but there was nothing in Lion that compelled me to upgrade. SL is serving me well on my Santa Rosa MBP. It's stable and reasonably nimble on my machine. I was also not hip to the idea of iOS UI concepts bleeding into a desktop environment. I waited until the recent product announcements and then decided to get a late 2011 MBP because the latest legacy models do not run SL. I love the form factor of the retina laptops, and I would've overlooked the non-expandability of the hardware, but being forced to use Lion was a deal breaker. Lion is the first Apple OS I've avoided since adopting Macs around System 4 or 5. I'm looking forward to the refinements in Mountain Lion. I hope an improved Finder is one of the 200 features but I'm not holding my breath.
 
Demoralized and Disenchanted Fanboy

Wow. Just wow.

I converted to Mac back in 2010, with a late '09 iMac. After a month of easing into the OS, I became more and more impressed with the design, the usability, the built-in features, the 'it just works' paradigm . . . becoming quite the zealot and Mac advocate. I just couldn't believe how great it all was, after over 20 years in PC's/DOS/Windows.

Up until a month ago.

It makes me ill to even formulate a list of things that have gone wrong with my Mac since then. Beachballs. Random data loss. Inability to install updates. Error message after error message. Slowdowns. Inexplicable and unrepeatable behavior.

The gilding has been removed.

All of this . . . ALL of it, started after I upgraded from SL to Lion. Absolutely disgusted with the computer now. Tried setting up a new account for another user, NOTHING works. Mail. Safari. Piece of unusable garbage.

So, today's the day. I'm copying my files to an external drive, and re-installing Snow Leopard (10.6.3, I think).

So, as Snow Leopard was like Windows XP (stable, usable, well liked and supported), and Lion has proven itself to be like Windows Vista (unstable, unusable, despised), let's hope Apple keeps the parallel here and delivers Mountain Lion in the same way Microsoft delivered Windows 7 (by far their best OS to date).
 
Wow. Just wow.

I converted to Mac back in 2010, with a late '09 iMac. After a month of easing into the OS, I became more and more impressed with the design, the usability, the built-in features, the 'it just works' paradigm . . . becoming quite the zealot and Mac advocate. I just couldn't believe how great it all was, after over 20 years in PC's/DOS/Windows.

Up until a month ago.

It makes me ill to even formulate a list of things that have gone wrong with my Mac since then. Beachballs. Random data loss. Inability to install updates. Error message after error message. Slowdowns. Inexplicable and unrepeatable behavior.

The gilding has been removed.

All of this . . . ALL of it, started after I upgraded from SL to Lion. Absolutely disgusted with the computer now. Tried setting up a new account for another user, NOTHING works. Mail. Safari. Piece of unusable garbage.

So, today's the day. I'm copying my files to an external drive, and re-installing Snow Leopard (10.6.3, I think).

So, as Snow Leopard was like Windows XP (stable, usable, well liked and supported), and Lion has proven itself to be like Windows Vista (unstable, unusable, despised), let's hope Apple keeps the parallel here and delivers Mountain Lion in the same way Microsoft delivered Windows 7 (by far their best OS to date).
Wow, I feel bad for you - I have not had any of these issues with Lion. In fact, save for one annoying bug, Lion's been solid. I too hope Mountain Lion delivers a better experience than Lion did.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.