Who left Lion, and reverted to SL?

[ahbdesign]

I'm sticking with Lion but only after I made some adjustments on (what could be considered an old computer) my MacBook.

When I first upgraded, jeeeez it was slow! Bootup time was way too long (which I was getting used to with SL) but shutdown times were 15-20 secs ! Uncool!

Once I upped the ram to 4gig, things ran smoother but I still felt like it was slow-ish. So I did a clean install (after going through lots of forums and websites) of Lion, and now I can say it's running nicely. Also, 10.7.1 fixed the wifi issues I was having, which was good.

The problem is, I can't remember having any issues when I upgraded to SL from Leopard. I LOVED IT! My mac was so much faster and snappier. I expected (probably unreasonably) the same thing when I upgraded to Lion from SL, but this was not the case. The clean install helped though.

Although, my friends who have newer macs (latest MBPs and MBAs) are perfectly fine with Lion. So I think, it's like how I felt when iOS4 came out and I was using my iPhone 3G at the time, which was slow as ****. Lion seems like the same thing to me.

OS X Lion is a step forward, but you'll have to step-forward your older macs if you want it to run nicely.

 

[starvingartist8]

I did't find useful Mission Control (Exposé was simple & better for me), the Apps folder gone and LaunchPad make me loose time. The one who make me donwgrade was the Autosave feature, it is good for students and home users but not for PROS, we like to have FULL CONTROL and decide when and what to save, and when to choose Save As... It was a nightmare.

Just drag your applications folder into the dock..

----------

Lion is a very decent and needed upgrade from SL.
Reverting to an older OS is just rediculous in my opinion.

What possible reason would a person have to actually revert back? (aside from the obvious software incompatibilities that might occur)

arrogance. The same thing that pc religious people bag mac over

----------

Ho-hum..

On July 19 I predicted that around 24% of all who installed Lion would shortly go back to Snow Leopard:
https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/12966726/

The poll indicates, at the time of writing this post, a percentage with just a few decimals above 24%. Told you

you're a hero, what would we do without u

 

[hipollito]

Are you running VM 3 or 4 on Lion?

Hello I am using 3.1.3 and t runs really nice, actually I think I like it more than parallels, that I used with SL. I only use windows (XP) for 3d modeling in rhino and it runs great!

 

[Chase R]

If Apple would just fix Mission Control, I would be happy with Lion. At least give us the ability to arrange Spaces in Mission Control!

 

[wikus]

If Apple would just fix Mission Control, I would be happy with Lion. At least give us the ability to arrange Spaces in Mission Control!

On/Off buttons for certain things in mission control would fix everything;

on/off for spaces being shows at all (and hide the ugly grey border)
on/off for grouping open windows in a single application

fact is, rearranging shouldnt even be an on/off switch, it should just be there by default.

 

[AppleFanatic10]

I have a partition of both Snow Leopard and Lion. If I ever get tired of Lion; I can just switch back to my other partition. Soooo easy

 

[Steve's Barber]

I have a partition of both Snow Leopard and Lion. If I ever get tired of Lion; I can just switch back to my other partition. Soooo easy

And you're proud of this? (enough to post about it anyway). This sounds really dumb. Seriously.

 

[AppleFanatic10]

And you're proud of this? (enough to post about it anyway). This sounds really dumb. Seriously.

I'm perfectly fine with it. And no need for you to be a smart ass.

 

[hexonxonx]

And you're proud of this? (enough to post about it anyway). This sounds really dumb. Seriously.

What is dumb about it besides your post?

 

[Pentad]

Back to SL for me. I've always been a bit apprehensive when it comes to upgrading ever since Tiger came out. From 10.1 -> .2 and -> .3 was easy - it was all new features and performance, and basically nothing taken away.

Tiger .4 concerned me given I had old hardware at the time, but I jumped straight on the bandwagon when I went Intel.

Leopard was a hard sell, I was concerned that the silly new 3D dock etc. would slow my system down (and I was right, but thankfully you can turn it 2D. Yus!).

Snow Leopard was about the easiest decision in the world, but I instantly regretted it because it ruined Expose for me by removing the relative sizings of windows, and moving the windows around too much.

Lion... well. What a cluster****. If all you do with your Mac is use it in isolation for web browsing, mail, and the occasional video, go ahead. It's got some new eye candy (Mail, iCal, Launchpad, rubber band scrolling - yuck), and some features that dumb down some of the previously power-user features and make them more accessible (Mission Control).

But if you use your mac as a serious tool... well... Here's a list for you:

• It's slower. (Post indexing, on both a Late 2008 Unibody 15" MBP, 2011 13" MBP)
• The new gestures are disgusting. The thumb pinch is impossible, and the 2 finger swipe clashes with scrolling and doesn't work properly outside Safari.
• Mission Control, while a good feature of its own accord, is not a replacement for Spaces and Expose. Why did Apple have to take these features away? What's wrong with having both Mission Control and the old Spaces/Expose? They don't seem mutually exclusive to me...
• The new autosave document model might be "the way of the future", but when it comes to network devices and removable storage, YAY for holding on to billions of file handles and ****ing up my battery life, sleep routines, and general chi.
• iCal peaked in 10.4. Ever since, it's been going downhill in terms of usability. This new leather feel is just another kick in the guts.
• 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?!
• There have been numerous issues with regards to upgrading from old installs. While it's always a bit of a hot topic, it's just another thorn in the side.
• Safari 5.1 has serious issues. Memory leaks galore leaving me with no available RAM and causing my system to swap like a mofo. Extremely uncool.
• 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.

I expected a lot more. I was looking forward to some of the cooler features of iOS - like saving application state, and good integration with things like GMail. I certainly didn't expect my operating system to start making decisions about which of my apps to keep open. I know this better than any algorithm ever will, Apple.

So, I reverted back to Snow Leopard (and in fact suprred me to find a Beta version of SL's Dock.app to get 10.5's expose, which I find vastly superior to SL's). It's better than SL has ever been for me - I highly recommend it.

What really irks me is the cavalier attitude Apple are now taking toward more professional users like myself. Previous editions of Mac OS X didn't really take away features; certainly not ones as prominent as Spaces and Expose - yet they are content to simply wipe the board clean with new UI tools that I believe one could empirically prove worse.

In the past, OS X felt like it was built by a team of interaction designers. People that understood how both novice and expert users work with computers, and who were able to craft a solid experience across the whole spectrum. Now, OS X feels like it's drawn by graphic designers and animators, who are concerned with flashy eye candy and have little regard to the human-computer interaction.

I love my Macbook Pro. There's nothing even remotely close to the form factor in the PC world. But I find myself longing for the utilitarianism that is Windows. (The lack of a 1440x900 panel and low-cost SSD on the now-rather-overpriced 13" Macbook Pro really isn't helping either)...

Boy you nailed it! I am tired of the coffee-house-surfers who don't really use their MBP for work claiming Lion is bug free.

I DO use my MBP for work and the bugs are driving me crazy. I too wish I knew where QA was in testing Lion. Ever get the feeling that iOS gets more TLC @ Apple?? Also, I wish there was a comprehensive bug list for Lion because I would like to add all mine to it.

Frankly, I'm worried that Lion won't mature until 10.7.5.

Finally, I love my MBP, think Apple is ok, and even think MS is ok. I believe my MBP is probably the best tool I'ver ever owned. I am just frustrated with Apple that some of the most obvious bugs weren't addressed before shipping. SL was an OS that was firing on all cylinders for me so Lion has some pretty big shoes to fill and Apple let us down.

I'm not saying that I think Lion is Vista but the bugs need to be fixed and I wish they would bring back Spaces/Expose.

-P

 

[nilk]

I upgraded 2 out of 3 of my Macs: an early-2008 MBP and a 2006 Mac Pro. I did an upgrade, not a clean install. I have since switched back to Snow Leopard on the early-2008 MBP because of wifi issues and weird random slow down issues (that required a reboot to fix). I probably could have done more to try and fix the wifi issues (clean install, some possible workarounds), but I don't have time to waste and switching back to SL using my Time Machine backup was really effortless and it worked even though I had been doing Lion backups on top of it (just had to choose the 10.6.8 backup to restore from).

My initial impressions of Lion were pretty good. Most of the things people complain about don't affect me. I never used Expose and I'll never use Mission Control, so that change doesn't bother me. Full screen with multi-monitors is implemented completely wrong, but I've been able to workaround this in the apps it matters in (Quicktime Player I just maximize the window instead of full screen, and since it has no window borders this works ok). All the silly default settings I've been able to revert back to what I'm used to. I don't like Finder's grey icons and arrangement, but not a big deal, I'll get used to it. There are plenty of things I like about Lion, but those are all minor tweaks (some of which have been much needed).

But it's due to the bugs that I'm not ready for the switch to Lion. Whether or not these issues are because I didn't do a clean install, because of 3rd party apps I'm using, or whatever, it doesn't really matter. I don't have time to do a clean install right now and figure out what 3rd party app is causing problems, etc, so restoring my SL backup is the quickest, easiest solution to my problems.

On the Mac Pro I've had some problems. I suspect that Apple's software RAID is buggy in Lion because I stopped having kernel panics after I removed a RAID 0 array that I had created with Lion, but I've never had good luck with Apple's software RAID. I'm having issues with the VNC server being unusable with 3rd party clients, but there's some possible solutions I still haven't tried. I haven't decided whether I will restore SL on this machine or not yet.

Though I have issues with Lion, I'm not upset about this at all. I'm a software developer and I know how difficult it can be to release bug free software. And this is not the first time a new OS X release has had problems (I had problems early versions of SL), so it was not unexpected and I had a backup plan to revert back to SL. I know I'll be forced to upgrade to Lion (or beyond) at some point, by either hardware or software that requires it. But by that time I expect it will be considerably more bug free, and I will choose to do it at a time when I can do a clean install and sort out problems.

 

[vitzr]

Snow Leopard is not a downgrade. Period. It's the best of the 10.6.x series.

Here's how I know. Because I have several Macs and a robust home network all centered around OS X 10.6.5. I have zero desire to muck up any of my machines with Lion, just to try it. So I bought a new Lion equipped MBA from Amazon when they offered the 20% discount, free shipping (in my case) and no tax. This gave me the opportunity to experience Lion without disturbing the setup I already have.

I do find Lion interesting, and I think that Apple has done an excellent job when viewed from their perspective. When viewed from mine, there are features that I have no use for. That doesn't mean it's bad, it just means it's not for me. There is nothing in Lion that will make me enjoy the new MBP, MBA, and Mac Pro's I have any more than I already am.

I understand that many must have the latest and "greatest" to fulfill themselves. Others must have it because they feel left behind by not keeping up with others. Then there are those who find the features in Lion compelling and useful to them. Now that is a good reason to migrate to Lion.

But to come right out and say that Snow Leopard is a downgrade, is a bit shortsighted.

Snow Leopard does everything I want and need. Both for personal and work. The speed and stability are excellent and I am completely satisfied.

You can't ask for more than that.

 

[MartiNZ]

Boy you nailed it! I am tired of the coffee-house-surfers who don't really use their MBP for work claiming Lion is bug free.

I DO use my MBP for work and the bugs are driving me crazy. I too wish I knew where QA was in testing Lion. Ever get the feeling that iOS gets more TLC @ Apple?? Also, I wish there was a comprehensive bug list for Lion because I would like to add all mine to it.

Frankly, I'm worried that Lion won't mature until 10.7.5.

Finally, I love my MBP, think Apple is ok, and even think MS is ok. I believe my MBP is probably the best tool I'ver ever owned. I am just frustrated with Apple that some of the most obvious bugs weren't addressed before shipping. SL was an OS that was firing on all cylinders for me so Lion has some pretty big shoes to fill and Apple let us down.

I'm not saying that I think Lion is Vista but the bugs need to be fixed and I wish they would bring back Spaces/Expose.

-P

And I think you're being optimistic. I don't think they -will- go back on their new flawed methodologies in Lion's time, not by 10.7.5 or even 10.7.10 should there be such a thing. And if they don't go back, I don't go back. I restarted into Lion the other day, it had been a few weeks since my MBP left Windows 7 ... and neither of us enjoyed it.

 

[Gurutech]

My MBP came with SL disc.
But I was able to redeem Lion and checked it out.
I was so disappointed with it (mainly due to space change), I reverted back to SL.
I'm going to use SL as long as I can.
All the new features of Lion are not that attractive yet.

 

[DaffyDuck]

I've personally filed 3 bug reports for Lion, one of which has been marked as duplicate. The one that bugs me the most basically negates using my brand new Mac Mini Server as a media player in my living room. Video freezes onscreen when logging into a secondary account using screen sharing. It's a server, it should handle multiple accounts very well and I should be able to do other things with it while it's playing a movie. If only I could downgrade to Snow Leopard...

 

[tigres]

Had an issue this week with my sons MM account and syncing w/iPhone. At any rate, I had a MM chat with apple support.

The gentleman asked me to log in to his iCal on his mac and re-enter his password. I had forgotten my son was running Lion on his Macbook, so I grabbed his Mac, went into iCal. Had to go into prefs, which then opened sys prefs....

Well, spinning BB, Spinning BB. Sys Prefs closes.
Re-open sys prefs, iCal crashes...

I tell tech support (on my MBA) one moment, iCal crashed on his Mac, I'm working on it.

Rep says, is he running Lion?- I say yeah.
Response. Take your time....

Priceless.

 

[harcosparky]

I had SL on my brand new MBP when I bought it -- LION came out not long after.

I upgraded to LION for a while and thought it was OK but I did revert back to SL for several reason. The most prominent reason was to clean up some massive photo libraries. I got tired of buying bigger HDD's and decided it was time to clean house. Went to SL for this because I did not want to run the risk of LION somehow doing anything funky to the library so that when I copied the library back onto my SL iMac it would be fine.

All is well now on that end and I may reinstall LION and give it a more roust effort.

Snow Leopard does everything I want and need. Both for personal and work. The speed and stability are excellent and I am completely satisfied.

You can't ask for more than that.

Have to agree with you. One thing I can say about LION in my time using it, the way it affected my workflow it sort of slowed me down.

When I reverted to SL I was getting work done faster. I admit though not being totally comfortable in using LION contributed to the 'slow down'.

.

 

[andrewjthrelfo]

I've temporarily downgraded back to Snow Leopard. It's a very nice OS, but it isn't stable enough at the moment for running Logic Pro and MainStage all the time. I'll try it again early next year, and I think that by then it should be good to go

 

[tigres]

Can anyone explain this.

I have 24mb Uverse connection, and this eve when I got home it was crawling at 3 mb down. I did everything we all normally do:

Restarted my MBA - no effect
Restarted the modem then router- still slow.
Called AT&T to see if their was an outage - nope.
Thought I might check other devices in the house, so my son had his MacBook open on his bed on. It was sleeping, so when I woke it I saw iTunes open, word, and preview. His is on Lion- so I thought wth, restarted it.

I went downstairs and checked the speed- bam back to normal? Is this lion related too? Anyone have this experience before on any system bogging down an entire network?

Btw- no he does not have torrent software.

 

[bruleke]

Back to SL for me. I've always been a bit apprehensive when it comes to upgrading ever since Tiger came out. From 10.1 -> .2 and -> .3 was easy - it was all new features and performance, and basically nothing taken away.

Tiger .4 concerned me given I had old hardware at the time, but I jumped straight on the bandwagon when I went Intel.

Leopard was a hard sell, I was concerned that the silly new 3D dock etc. would slow my system down (and I was right, but thankfully you can turn it 2D. Yus!).

Snow Leopard was about the easiest decision in the world, but I instantly regretted it because it ruined Expose for me by removing the relative sizings of windows, and moving the windows around too much.

Lion... well. What a cluster****. If all you do with your Mac is use it in isolation for web browsing, mail, and the occasional video, go ahead. It's got some new eye candy (Mail, iCal, Launchpad, rubber band scrolling - yuck), and some features that dumb down some of the previously power-user features and make them more accessible (Mission Control).

But if you use your mac as a serious tool... well... Here's a list for you:

• It's slower. (Post indexing, on both a Late 2008 Unibody 15" MBP, 2011 13" MBP)
• The new gestures are disgusting. The thumb pinch is impossible, and the 2 finger swipe clashes with scrolling and doesn't work properly outside Safari.
• Mission Control, while a good feature of its own accord, is not a replacement for Spaces and Expose. Why did Apple have to take these features away? What's wrong with having both Mission Control and the old Spaces/Expose? They don't seem mutually exclusive to me...
• The new autosave document model might be "the way of the future", but when it comes to network devices and removable storage, YAY for holding on to billions of file handles and ****ing up my battery life, sleep routines, and general chi.
• iCal peaked in 10.4. Ever since, it's been going downhill in terms of usability. This new leather feel is just another kick in the guts.
• 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?!
• There have been numerous issues with regards to upgrading from old installs. While it's always a bit of a hot topic, it's just another thorn in the side.
• Safari 5.1 has serious issues. Memory leaks galore leaving me with no available RAM and causing my system to swap like a mofo. Extremely uncool.
• 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.

I expected a lot more. I was looking forward to some of the cooler features of iOS - like saving application state, and good integration with things like GMail. I certainly didn't expect my operating system to start making decisions about which of my apps to keep open. I know this better than any algorithm ever will, Apple.

So, I reverted back to Snow Leopard (and in fact suprred me to find a Beta version of SL's Dock.app to get 10.5's expose, which I find vastly superior to SL's). It's better than SL has ever been for me - I highly recommend it.

What really irks me is the cavalier attitude Apple are now taking toward more professional users like myself. Previous editions of Mac OS X didn't really take away features; certainly not ones as prominent as Spaces and Expose - yet they are content to simply wipe the board clean with new UI tools that I believe one could empirically prove worse.

In the past, OS X felt like it was built by a team of interaction designers. People that understood how both novice and expert users work with computers, and who were able to craft a solid experience across the whole spectrum. Now, OS X feels like it's drawn by graphic designers and animators, who are concerned with flashy eye candy and have little regard to the human-computer interaction.

I love my Macbook Pro. There's nothing even remotely close to the form factor in the PC world. But I find myself longing for the utilitarianism that is Windows. (The lack of a 1440x900 panel and low-cost SSD on the now-rather-overpriced 13" Macbook Pro really isn't helping either)...

THANKS YOU, thank you so much.
I was almost going to buy Lion after dreaming with a brand new OS, but after doing some research on the internet and CONFIRMING with your post, I wont do that.
Apple... what have you done? You really screwed this time... there's poop everywhere! WITH CORN!

 

[chocolatejeff]

I've downgraded... for now because of several issues with some apps and wi-fi performance

I still have a back up lion OS fresh install on an ext which I do my developing work for fun but my main machine is SL and performance is top notch... better than than lion for now

Looking forward to 10.7.2 and hopefully fixes many issues with current state of Lion so it can be my main OS again I really like some features like the autosaving and versions..

 

[ozaz]

I dislike a couple of things about Lion, but on balance I prefer it to Snow Leopard so I'm definitely sticking with it.

What I like: Gestures, Mission control, Improved filevault, Full screen apps, Versions
What I dislike: The iOSifying of Mail and iCal, No Rosetta, Resume, Full screen apps not properly integrated into multi-monitor setups

 

[krzyglue]

Is anyone else experiencing memory issues with Lion? At least with Safari, I swear after a few hours of usage, it swallows up far too much memory. In fact, it gets so bad that occasionally the entire system becomes unusable until I quit Safari. I do not remember this happening with Snow Leopard, not once.

I'd love to try a clean install of Lion, but I don't have a large enough external hard-drive handy to backup all my data at the moment. Then again, if upgrading is the reason behind this, that's still a pretty big flaw.

 

[TheRdungeon]

Is anyone else experiencing memory issues with Lion? At least with Safari, I swear after a few hours of usage, it swallows up far too much memory. In fact, it gets so bad that occasionally the entire system becomes unusable until I quit Safari. I do not remember this happening with Snow Leopard, not once.

I'd love to try a clean install of Lion, but I don't have a large enough external hard-drive handy to backup all my data at the moment. Then again, if upgrading is the reason behind this, that's still a pretty big flaw.

Yeah I have the same issue, sometimes safari can be using 1.5GB (safari and "safari web content" combined). I'm really looking forward to 10.7.2, things are running all good really, I chucked some more ram in which definitely helps. I think these will be ironed out in time, that's what usually happens. A little bit pissed off i jumped on lion this early but got a new MBP so decided to start with it from day one

 

[iBug2]

Boy you nailed it! I am tired of the coffee-house-surfers who don't really use their MBP for work claiming Lion is bug free.

I DO use my MBP for work and the bugs are driving me crazy.

I use my MBP with Lion for my work and it's bug free for me.

Depends on what your work is. Meaning it depends what apps you use for your work. Meaning it depends whether those 3rd party apps are working ok with Lion.