So far, I'm very pleased with Mountain Lion. Someone who had a good experience with Lion may not find ML very compelling, but my experience with Lion was very poor, and ML is a tremendous step up for me. I don't know how much people feel like reading, but I'll give some comparisons between my experiences with Lion and ML on the off chance someone might find them useful:
- Opening System Preferences in Lion would take several dozen seconds. Often the icon would bounce for a very long time before the window finally appeared. Sometimes, usually if System Preferences had recently been open, it would bounce maybe 3 times, but the window wouldn't appear for several tens of seconds more. My first instinct was that System Preferences had crashed on launch, but in the end it was just taking its sweet time. Opening a preference pane was a pain, too. Not only did it take a long time, actually using the pane meant waiting for awhile until your action was registered. Showing All took several tens of seconds.
In ML, though, System Preferences launches within a few seconds. The Dock icon bounces 4 or so times, and the window is up and ready to use. Individual panes are responsive. Showing All is nearly instant.
- Spotlight was very sluggish in Lion. It would frequently beach ball as I'd type, and it would filter the results very slowly. A specific example: When I'd type "f" with the intention of launching Firefox, Firefox would be the first hit...but with the slow filtering sometimes the Top Hit would be blank for awhile. So I'd go ahead and type "fi" hoping it would help Spotlight figure out what I wanted. It didn't help - typing "fi" would universally, and almost immediately, place Coconut Wi-fi as my Top Hit, despite the fact that I hadn't used that app since moving to Lion. It was faster to just go ahead and type "fire" than to type "f" and wait for the filtering.
In ML, though, there is no sluggishness at all. When I invoke Spotlight and type "f" the Top Hit instantly shows Firefox. Spotlight hasn't beachballed as I type once since the upgrade. Results are filtered instantly without the bothersome pauses where Top Hit (and often Applications) would be blank.
Lion's Spotlight also missed many documents, even when I'd actually type in their filenames or a line of text I knew they contained. They just wouldn't show up. They DO show up in ML. This is an improvement. I would go so far as to say that Spotlight under ML surpasses Spotlight under Snow Leopard. That's saying something.
- Quitting applications in Lion would often (as in most of the time) cause them to hang and require a Force Quit. Quitting applications in ML actually quits the application!
- In Lion, it generally took 10-15 seconds to launch an application (launching System Preferences took even more time). Firefox would take closer to 30 seconds. In ML, most applications launch within 4 or 5 bounces of the Dock icon and are ready to use within about 5 seconds. Even iPhoto only takes about 10 seconds to launch in ML.
- Stacks in Lion wouldn't scroll smoothly. They generally would only show blank squares and never show the file icon/preview. Scrolling through a stack usually caused repeated beachballing. Launching from a stack would cause several seconds of delay between clicking the app and seeing the app appear and bounce on the Dock. Opening a file from a stack would cause a similar delay before anything happened.
None of this happens under ML. Icons fill in quickly (though not instantly), and scrolling is smooth. There is no extra delay when I open/launch a file from a stack.
- Typing in Lion was awful. In any app, in any text field, Lion couldn't keep up with my typing. It generally lagged at least a word behind. Any autocorrecting would cause a beachball that would set it even more behind.
Typing in ML hasn't so far been an issue. ML easily keeps up with what I am typing, and autocorrect doesn't cause a beachball or a delay.
- Mission Control's animation stuttered under Lion, but it's very smooth in ML. Add to that the option to ungroup windows, and I have something almost as good as the Exposé from Panther, Tiger, and Leopard! Snow Leopard's take on Exposé was the only major annoyance I had with that OS. Lion's Mission Control caused me major aggravation. ML's is pretty good. While I do still miss a pre-Snow Leopard Exposé and the old grid of Spaces, I think I can live with ML's Mission Control and even be happy with it.
- I prefer Mail in full-screen mode. Sometimes when I launched Mail in Lion, it would automatically open full-screened. Sometimes it wouldn't. In ML, it's opened full-screened each time I've launched it since the first.
- Dashboard in Lion would generally take about 10 seconds to update the weather widget and iStat. In ML, swiping into Dashboard causes these widgets to update within about 1 second.
- Launchpad's new search field is handy. Same with the search in Dashboard.
- Under Lion, my MacBook took several minutes to sleep. It also took around 10 seconds to wake from sleep. In ML, sleeping takes somewhere around 30 seconds. Waking from sleep is almost immediate.
- Booting up under Lion took around 3 minutes. Under ML, it's been taking around 45 seconds. Shutting down in Lion took anywhere from 1 to 3 minutes. Shutting down in ML is consistently taking about 5 seconds. Lion always started up with the audio muted, no matter what it had been set to previously. ML doesn't do this.
- Switching to the Guest account in Lion sometimes caused the machine to freeze and require a hard reset. I even got a few full-on gray-screen kernel panics switching to the Guest account. When it worked, it could take around 3 minutes before the Guest account was ready to be used. Subsequent switching into the Guest account would take around a minute. In ML, The first switch to the Guest account takes about 15 seconds. Subsequent switches take about 3.
- Finder in Lion
actually I don't want to rehash those unpleasant memories. Finder in ML isn't sluggish and seems to work without aggravation or hanging. I can even eject external drives in a timely manner now. Adding 100MB's worth of files to a USB drive no longer takes several hours.
- Wifi in Lion was generally fine, but fairly often it wouldn't log into my network when waking from sleep. During these times, the icon in the Menu Bar wouldn't show any networks near me. It would just search over and over and do nothing. Turning off and on the Wifi would usually fix the issue, but sometimes it required a reboot. So far, ML has managed to log back into my network when waking from sleep every time.
- I was never able to use my bluetooth mouse under Lion. Any attempt to connect it would result in a kernel panic. It connects and works just fine in ML.
So for me, Lion was very, very bad. My problems persisted even after a clean reinstall. They were present when I created a new user account. They remained even after performing the usual recommendations of repairing permissions and resetting the SMC and PRAM. I know there were quite a few people who had positive experiences with Lion. I was most definitely not one of them. In my own personal experience, Lion now ranks with Windows ME as the absolute worst operating system I've ever used. I dreaded having to use my Mac to actually get any work done. It was bad enough using it to check email or send a friend a message on Facebook. Until Lion, my Mac was always a joy to use. With Lion, I hated using it. I'd wake it up wondering what was going to **** up next.
My old iBook running Jaguar had exactly three kernel panics in 2 years, each of them brought about by overheating when one of the vents got blocked by my clothing without me realizing it. That same iBook with Tiger had one kernel panic when I loaded in what turned out to be a corrupt CD-R with old back-up files. One of the point releases fixed whatever issue caused that, and I had no further problems in the next two years that computer lasted. Other than that, I never had a situation that forced a hard reset. On my current MacBook, I never had a kernel panic or needed a hard reset under Leopard or Snow Leopard.
With Lion, had had several dozen kernel panics and several dozen situations where I had to hard-reset the machine. That's all in one year. So yeah, that's 7 years of using Macs with a total of 4 gray screens telling me I need to restart my machine, then 1 year of a few dozen of those instances, and a few dozen more where there was no gray screen, but the system was entirely unresponsive.
My longest uptime was 189 days under Jaguar. It could have been longer, but we had an electrical storm, and I shut the computer down. My longest uptimes under Tiger, leopard and Snow Leopard were just shy of 100 days. I restarted due to updates. My longest uptime under Lion was 10 days, and the computer was beachballing constantly.
For me, Mountain Lion is ever so much better. Maybe I was just so beaten down by my Lion experience that anything would seem good by comparison, but so far I'd rank ML as right up there with Snow Leopard and Tiger.
Sorry for going on so long, but hopefully someone will get some good out of it.
and the OS feels much smoother and faster. The new dock is sleek.
