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
Nope, Lion is great, runs loads faster than Snow Leopard, looks nicer and has so many great improvements.

I don't think I could ever go back to Snow Leopard...
 
I reverted back.

On both machines I installed it on, I got the wifi cutting out problem.

Also, Lion generally felt to me like a lot of extranious eye candy globbed on. It 'felt' gerry rigged.

Now back at Snow Leopard, it feels like a lean, tight operating system again.

I know one day I'll HAVE to move to Lion (or maybe just wait for Snow Lion, or whatever the frick they decide to call the OS that follows Lion) but I'll hold off for quite a while.
 
Comment deleted, because it no longer represents my current view on subject.
 
Last edited:
Spronkey makes all the points I would. I use my MBP in the physical sciences, physics, and there are plenty of tools that were designed years ago but still work great however they need rosetta. I get a laugh when people say that these old apps should be retired and re-written. Would they like to re-write a 100K+ line magnetohydrodynamic simulation code in cocoa?!

I'll stick with SL thanks very much. Luckily I bought a 2010 MBP with SL install disks so I'll just bury my head in the sand for another two years until apple releases 10.8 or 11.0 or whatever... Hopefully Lion will be something we can laugh about then.
 
Lion out of the box is great.

I've been using all of the new (main) features of the OS. Full screen apps, launch pad, mission control..etc

Haven't had one issue yet. Using the new scrolling method took me 15 minutes to get used to.
 
The only problem is if my macbook suddenly dies or suffers an accident, all new machines have lion pre-installed and since apple doesn't provide drivers for older os, you can't just slap a snow leopard dvd and install it. I've tried by pure curiosity instating leopard on my macbook, it ran but it would heat up like mad, and somethings weren't working.
 
I've been upgrading with OSX since Panther and this is the first time I've ever downgraded.

- Mission Control sucks. Let's play hide the windows.
- Gray finder icons sucks. Thanks for making it harder for my old eyes
- No toolbar button on finder sucks
- Address Book looks annoying and it only shows two columns of information
- iCal time text color is now an even lighter than before and really hard to read
- Awake from sleep time is longer
- "Duplicate" is stupid if you have large documents open. Now I have to use twice the ram and close a window just to do "Save As"
- No "Skip" and "All" option when copying/replacing files in finder. Who's brilliant idea was that? Why would I want to copy 9 gigs of data to update a folder with 10 megs of new files spread throughout it

The only good things were gestures and versions.
 
I switched the MP back to SL. The lack of the smooth operating Spaces, no support from Xrite for the ancient monitor calibrator and all that iOS ugliness was just too much for me.

Lion is still running on my late 2008 MBP. FileVault 2 is working without a hitch. Everyday I learn a little more about how to turn off, disable or fix the Lion/iToys ugliness. Just today the mods at MacNix changed the skins on iCal and Address Book so I don't want to throw up when I look at them.

So far Lion has been doing well on the laptop. I haven't run into very many of the issues I've been reading about. Other than behind the scenes security I haven't seen anything that makes Lion a Must Have compared to SL.
 
Switched to lion on all macs on release day, switched my quad core i5 back two days later because i didn't like losing Front row, switched it back again today when i found out i could install it.
 
Downgrader

Upgraded to Lion and right away didn't love the changes to gestures and scrolling, but knew I could get used to that. Next thing I noticed was that my 1 month old MBP ran much slower on Lion, which disappointed me big time. Also, after about 20 minutes the computer was hotter than 2 hours of gaming or other intensive computing on SL. Also, the lack of "save as" made me scratch my head. Downgraded about two or three days later, just couldn't keep it.

I'll upgrade to Lion at some point down the pipe, but I'm definitely waiting for 10.7.2 at least. At least my upgrade was free because my MBP is so new.
 
I downgraded to Snow Leopard, but then I realised that I hated the 3D bar and the new expose so I had to downgrade to Leopard, which still had those features so it was back to Tiger. However, some of the features on Tiger just messed too much with what I was used to before that. To cut a long story short, I am back on 10.0 and couldn't be happier. Who needs Lion when you can have Cheetah? :p
 
I downgraded to Snow Leopard, but then I realised that I hated the 3D bar and the new expose so I had to downgrade to Leopard, which still had those features so it was back to Tiger. However, some of the features on Tiger just messed too much with what I was used to before that. To cut a long story short, I am back on 10.0 and couldn't be happier. Who needs Lion when you can have Cheetah? :p

I hope this is a facetious post lol
 
Don't feel sorry for anyone here. If you upgraded and went back to SL you have no one to blame but yourselves.

Lion presented too many changes so you should have been cautious about upgrading to begin with. Most of you here on MR had months of posts to read and at the very least should have installed Lion on a separate partition instead of on top of Snow Leopard. I installed it on an external drive and will do the same with 10.7.1 to see if it fixes what I need.

But I do understand the temptation. It's like seeing the aftermath of train wreck with bodies strewn about. You know you shouldn't look but just can't help it.
 
  • The multi-monitor issues. Display colour profiles not working on multimonitor systems, fullscreen apps not working on multimonitor systems, mission control being spastic on multimonitor systems... where's the quality control?!
  • Finder. Oh dear. "All my files" has no place on the system of anyone who knows what a file is, and this new grouped inline coverflow view is both tacky (like Coverflow itself), and extremely slow.
  • Finder's sidebar is now even less useful. Compare and contrast to Windows 7. Sigh.

Can you go into more detail with a couple of your items?

My design firm runs dual monitor setups with MBP's and Dell U3011's. Color profiles are huge for us. What exactly is the issue with color profiles used in multi monitor setups in Lion?

How bad is the Finder now? Maintaining folder organization both on our Mac's and our server is crucial... does the way Finder works in Lion truly impact the ability to organize as we have in the past two versions of OS X?
 
I installed Lion on a separate partition on my drive so I can dual boot to SL or Lion. In the finder in Lion, it does not seem to recognize that there are 2 separate partitions - it displays a mixture of files from the SL partition as well as the lion partition. You can force it to use the Lion partition in finder preferences but it will not display the partition sizes/free space etc. The ONLY way I can just get info on the Lion partition is to dismount the SL partition.

The Lion finder is now pretty brain dead. I can't see the root at all. Pretty useless.

In addition, Lion beach balls sporatically - no where near as solid as SL. I have a Sandy Bridge MBP 15 with 2.2 ghz I7. I fear Lion has many rough edges yet.

I really have no need for a 4.5 lb IPhone or IPad right now. Hopefully Apple will get the bugs out. I need another computer soon. I will probably try to buy from old stock so it has SL installed.
 
After almost two weeks with Lion, I can say with confidence that none of the additions and changes have really improved my workflow. If anything, it's hurt it. Mission Control isn't too useful to me, Safari 5.1 has been flaky, and autosave in iWork is disruptive because the apps pause for a moment and pop up a progress bar whenever they save. Argh. That said, I don't have any plans to switch back to Snow Leopard at the moment, because it's too much of a pain.
 
I have to say, I'm missing Snow Leopard.

I have turned of features in order to get the old OS feel back, but I miss things like Expose, and hate Launchpad/ Mission Control and in many cases, the pointless full screen app feature.

I have stumbled across a few issues of flakiness too, mainly with apps etc relying on the internet. oh, and I have to boot in 32bit to access work tools properly (that might not be a Lion issue, it just so happened to kick off once I upgraded) which is really annoying.

However, I won't downgrade, I'll just ride out the storm until bugs are fixed and I get better accustomed to the change. Hopefully.
 
I upgraded to Snow Leopard :p

I'm going to stick with Snow Leopard because Mission Control is destructive to my workflow. I use Exposé as a window switcher rather than an application switcher like Mission Control is. For an application switcher I've used command + tab for the longest time. Hiding the Library is a bit of a pain because I do like to have full control of my system and will head into Library from time to time to clean it up after having deleted applications.

The changing of gestures is also a pain. The gesture to see the desktop is now very awkward compared to the four finger swipe up on Snow Leopard, especially on the laptop trackpads. I was perfectly content with the gestures in Snow Leopard, and the new gestures that have been added are not worth the change in my opinion.

All my files is pretty useless to me, it just makes sense that a new Finder window should bring you to the Home folder. Yes, I did change that in preferences so that it opens up in the Home folder, but it was another annoyance. It started with Snow leopard, but also the default of hiding the HD, external HD, network HDs and CD/DVDs from the desktop was a bit annoying. It just seems like if you want any control over your Mac at all you now have to immediately press command + , and enable it rather than just having it work. And in addition to all of this, multiple monitor support was not in mind with the designing of Lion.

Lion is too much of a downgrade for me to deal with, so I'll just stick with Snow Leopard ad infinitum on my current Mac. It's a good thing I'm not looking to get a new Mac anytime soon.
 
I installed Lion on a separate partition on my drive so I can dual boot to SL or Lion. In the finder in Lion, it does not seem to recognize that there are 2 separate partitions - it displays a mixture of files from the SL partition as well as the lion partition.

Same here, so I went back to SL, to wait for Lion 10.7.1 or 10.7.2 upgrade. But, SL + DropCopy, Dropbox, HyperDock, DockSpaces, HyperSpace, even with Scroll Reverser, gives me more pleasure than Lion (not to mention its frequent WiFi dropouts).
 
Heat Fans

The deal breaker for me is my fans are always on and my 2009 MBP 17" is much hotter than SL 85-100c even when avoiding flash / intensive tasks, full screen safari is nice though.
 
After more hours than I care to count in trying to get back to a professional working machine, I am back to the most solid, up to date and yet able OS I have ever used, 10.6.8.

I have always early adopted out of curiosity and commitment to Apple's innovation and forward momentum, always had bugs that I covered my rear with multi-tiered and solid back up plans, sweated out third party apps in waiting for revisions, but trying out Lion has changed that for me forever. I will *NEVER* do any update until at least 3 revisions in, ever...

Like several who have posted on this forum, I had some pretty bad finder lockups that resulted in hard force quits, power button only restarts. One of my fastest drives, a WD Caviar Black 2TB contains the primary import folder for my professional photography needs, seeing thousands of images per job come in that need to be batch renamed and thumbnails rendered for catalogs. After importing 1,800 images and doing the usual work, the finder locked up on a delete of those files, they never made it to the trash, 20 minutes into the beach ball, I had to do yet another hard restart.

Mac OSX 10.7 Lion in it's chronic freeze and lock up issues fried the drive, I have a 3TB on order to replace it....

I know many have had good experiences on their machines and I am not surprised, it all depends on your hardware, software and usage. I see many mid to low end machines in signatures, the kind that don't strike me as quite as built up and task heavy as my 4 month old monster with 5 drives, raid, $18,000 film scanner, etc. So I get it....that some of you *don't* get it, that many of us have found this to be the most bug ridden and workflow disruptive piece of software we have ever encountered and it is all our fault for upgrading too soon, you win, we lose, feel good now?

Enjoy Lion if you can, I am sure it has some great features from a consumer standpoint, but given how much trouble many of us have had with it on launch, how utterly iOS-like and handicapped it is, well, I am pretty sure the next time I upgrade to a new OS will be when I get a new primary machine in 3-4 year's time and I doubt I will be running Lion on it...

I am finally done with this crap, my MacPro is running smoothly again, I am going to bed...
 
Last edited:
as a pro user, meaning using my macs to work and generate money, i left lion after 3 hours (consider 2 installing and setting everything up), and not planning on coming back.

There are three reasons I started using macs, and keeps me doing so:

The main one, stability.
Second, my pro software runs perfect (archicad, adobe creative suite, apple final cut studio & aperture)
Third, originally expose, and since a few years, spaces = Workflow

I tried lion on the new mbp I bought in march, and everything feels definitely slower

Autosave is not good for pro apps:
1: there is a reason why photoshop don't have the function apple: we're working on +5gb files !!!!!
2: archicad autosave crashes the app everytime (don't ask me why)

Gain my workflow speed back was impossible, as there is nothing faster than "spaces + expose + cmd tab" when you have +20 windows from different apps running

Switching back to SL reminded me the moment when i switched to apple the firts time: everything just works, again.
 
I loved Snow Leopard, but Lion is even better. Wouldn't go back for anything. Some people were calling Lion Apple's Vista, but my last laptop was Vista and there's no comparing them. Lion is light years ahead and much more convenient and fun to use.

No offense, but you're deluded. Mac OS is not light years ahead of Windows. Apple is good at making really cool applications. Some are downright incredible. Too bad they cant apply that talent to an OS as it sorely lacks.

Lion is the Vista of the Mac world. Not doubt about it....

Did Apple forget who they typical customer is?? Certainly not someone who can navigate the perils of a bad OS upgrade.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.