If the categories are 10.5 to 10.9, I'd plump for Snow Leopard. Lion felt like Snow Leopard but with Rosetta removed, I've barely used Mountain Lion and my experiences with Mavericks were soured by endless kernel panics and applications regularly freezing on me during crucial moments, necessitating the force quit keyboard shortcut - or a hard reboot.
I sent a tweet to Tim Cook about these problems but he never replied, for some reason…
Gonna go
two three two-and-a-half further and dump on Lion here, as two things, right from the start, drove me away from using it.
The first being the system restore scheme which tossed in the now-ubiquitous recovery partitions and complicated an otherwise straightforward affair. Yes, I get how the termination of providing DVD installers was their motivation to adopt this method, but I’ve never warmed to this scheme.
It reminds me of a scheme one of my very annoying former co-workers did with our Quadra 840AV workstation back in the mid ’90s — in which he, with waaay too much time during the overnight shift, set up a hidden partition for which only he had access, on which a system restore image of OS 7.x would be copied over every night to the main, visible partition we worked with. It meant any two-day or three-day client project we had on our plate would get deleted (we didn’t have an external server drive at this point) — as would our preference settings for very literally everything, and the “default” system restore settings were what he wanted/used. It was infuriating.
In other words, I’m in camp “I want to see everything on my physical device, not just what another party wants me to see.” Apple could have deployed this in other ways, such as buying an image from the App Store (yes, purchase, not free), to enable people to run a simple Disk Utility image restore onto a USB stick, FireWire, or Thunderbolt device, from which that could be used to install onto the main drive. Instead, as we came to learn, security certificates associated with the method now adopted can and have expired, complicating re-install efforts. All of this began with Lion.
The second was the iOSification of the system itself. Lion was really when Apple earnestly began with the walled garden, closed ecosystem tack which shunted users into what Apple wanted for their users, not for what their users wanted for themselves. This, of course, incrementally made it tougher for everyday users to mix and match things from sources beyond Apple as they brought in Gatekeeper and SIP, as well as nudging third-party developers to rely solely on distributing their software via the App Store and enriching Apple further by letting them collect usage profile data on their users, turning users into the product in the process. No thanks.
Honourable mention: Lion began Apple’s continuing practice of rushing out of major version releases being cranked out annually, rather than when they were sincerely ready for prime time, and dumping them before all the refinement of a current major version was completely worked out. This is the Alfred P. Sloan approach to software development (an annual planned obsolescence, later typified by the annual superficial styling changes of Harvey Earl), and I detest it.
This, coupled with the “we’ll only support this major version, and only the two immediately prior,” accelerates how quickly the rotation of hardware being dropped proceeds and leaves us with more systems being dropped more quickly. A system on Tiger would still have security updates some four years later, as with Security Update 2009-005 — whereas now, a system which ran on Mojave (and the last 32-bit-software-capable version of macOS) as a current OS as recently as 2019, is now out of the support stream.
Sorry. My coffee seemed supercharged by caffeine this morning. 😤
