After all the negativity towards both Lion and Mountain Lion on these forums recently, I thought I'd share with you all my own experiences, most of which have been very positive.
Back when Lion was first released I performed a clean install, wanting to start fresh rather than do an upgrade over Snow Leopard. The big OS change I thought warranted such a thing. As with most peoples systems, I had the odd problem with Lion here and there but for the most part the system was very stable and had no significant performance issues. Bearing in mind that by the time we got to 10.7.4, I had a very worn-in install meaning that a lot of stuff had been installed, uninstalled and played about with over the since Lion's release. I wouldnt consider myself the average Mac user either, for example I do a lot of command line work and have custom setups of various tools via MacPorts, including open source samba to replace Apple's own very broken version. I also have a number of cron jobs running daily executing some custom scripts and a whole host of other scripts run via hotkeys and certain system events. So I wouldnt consider mine your average install by any means.
So along comes time to install Mountain Lion, I decided against my better judgement to risk doing an upgrade install (something I never usually do). I first ensured that anything installed deep into the system (i.e. Anything I had that had its own kernel extensions) for example Parallels, Vmware, Soundflower etc was fully updated. I then proceeded with the upgrade process and crossed my fingers. About half an hour later, install was complete and the system rebooted into my newly upgraded Mountain Lion install. I was surprised to see almost everything was exactly as I left it and whats more, everything was working perfectly... All my apps, my scripts, cron jobs etc all of them were working exactly as they did under Lion.. Even my custom setup of samba which I felt sure would get wiped out somehow or disabled... Nope, it too was working perfectly. I had read about issues people were having with iCloud and Notifications, so I tested those aspects and sure enough it was all working great. Ive since been playing with it all since day of release and to be honest Im impressed. Pretty much every annoyance i had with Lion has been solved and many things improved, most notably for me is Safari which is leagues ahead of its previous incarnation. Its so much quicker at rendering pages its almost comical. Also Im noticing improved performance in disk-to-disk transfers, app launch times and wake/sleep times.
If this is indeed a sign of things to come for OSX then I think its a good thing. My apologies for the long-ish post but I thought a positive take on Apple's latest and greatest was worthy of a post
Back when Lion was first released I performed a clean install, wanting to start fresh rather than do an upgrade over Snow Leopard. The big OS change I thought warranted such a thing. As with most peoples systems, I had the odd problem with Lion here and there but for the most part the system was very stable and had no significant performance issues. Bearing in mind that by the time we got to 10.7.4, I had a very worn-in install meaning that a lot of stuff had been installed, uninstalled and played about with over the since Lion's release. I wouldnt consider myself the average Mac user either, for example I do a lot of command line work and have custom setups of various tools via MacPorts, including open source samba to replace Apple's own very broken version. I also have a number of cron jobs running daily executing some custom scripts and a whole host of other scripts run via hotkeys and certain system events. So I wouldnt consider mine your average install by any means.
So along comes time to install Mountain Lion, I decided against my better judgement to risk doing an upgrade install (something I never usually do). I first ensured that anything installed deep into the system (i.e. Anything I had that had its own kernel extensions) for example Parallels, Vmware, Soundflower etc was fully updated. I then proceeded with the upgrade process and crossed my fingers. About half an hour later, install was complete and the system rebooted into my newly upgraded Mountain Lion install. I was surprised to see almost everything was exactly as I left it and whats more, everything was working perfectly... All my apps, my scripts, cron jobs etc all of them were working exactly as they did under Lion.. Even my custom setup of samba which I felt sure would get wiped out somehow or disabled... Nope, it too was working perfectly. I had read about issues people were having with iCloud and Notifications, so I tested those aspects and sure enough it was all working great. Ive since been playing with it all since day of release and to be honest Im impressed. Pretty much every annoyance i had with Lion has been solved and many things improved, most notably for me is Safari which is leagues ahead of its previous incarnation. Its so much quicker at rendering pages its almost comical. Also Im noticing improved performance in disk-to-disk transfers, app launch times and wake/sleep times.
If this is indeed a sign of things to come for OSX then I think its a good thing. My apologies for the long-ish post but I thought a positive take on Apple's latest and greatest was worthy of a post
