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Reverting Back to an Earlier Mac OS X Version

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OldGuyTom

macrumors regular
Sep 6, 2013
156
33
US
@BradHatter:

My advice to you is use the OS that's best suited to your needs and your liking and not buy into the "you must have the latest and greatest there is." I have no use for any of the new features with Yosemite, and I sure as hell don't like the way it looks, so why should I use it?

The aging argument is valid, assuming you use the web, because Snow Leopard will have some problems with some online sites and online video. Whether that can be dealt with using another browser like Firefox, Sea Monkey, or Chrome, I don't know.

I was using a system running Lion a few days ago and it had no problems with anything, it booted in 30 seconds from an old HD, and it used a fraction of the RAM and drive space. Things seemed much quicker but I wasn't measuring anything with a stopwatch.

Pay no attention to the hype and use what suits your needs and likes and stick with it.
 
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TheBSDGuy

macrumors 6502
Jan 24, 2012
319
29
I was curious about testing out all the problems I see on the App Store so I cloned a Mountain Lion install over to a spare partition and then did an upgrade to Yosemite. Although I'm not a Yosemite fan, I really don't understand how or why some people are having such problems. Bad network connections? Odd or questionable software like MacKeeper installed or other stuff of that ilk? I just don't see it. I've had no problems on four systems. That doesn't mean it's perfect but I just don't see all the lockups. Is it a hardware issue?


The things that tick me off about Yosemite are the follows:

  1. Translucency in the menu bar of an application. It's childish. Especially Safari.
  2. Translucency in the menu bar of Finder with no realistic option to change it.
  3. The icons look cartoonish
  4. Icon services agent is too much of a memory pig (same as on Mavericks)
  5. Lack of support for some of their older apps (Apple apps, at that)
  6. The lack of 3-D effects to segregate controls from other fields.
  7. Excessing translucency in the drop downs, which becomes too noticeable on dark screen backgrounds.
  8. Loss of real icons in Safari when viewing in the sidebar.
  9. It looks much, much worse on big external displays than it does on a small display, like a 13" (or smaller) display

All this stuff with Jonathan Ive taking over complete control of the UI group seems to look like he really lacks the experience and knowledge some of the other UI designers had that have been forced out, resigned, or more or less fired. There are obvious oversights and errors. I really don't think this guy knows what he's doing.

The UI looks like something I would have expected on a Linux box 15 years ago.
 
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BradHatter

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 7, 2014
191
13
The OS that I'll probably stick with will probably be Mountain Lion or Mavericks. I've reviewed, loaded, and tested all of them on an external HD. If Snow Leopard had updated browsing, I'd go with it. Here's my rationale for all OS X versions I'm looking at:

Leopard: Too old, compatibility problems with new stuff, and really, Snow Leopard is just a refined Intel-only version of it.

Snow Leopard: I believe this is my favorite. This had support for old PPC apps, and IMHO it was the last version of OS X that adhered to the "It just works" philosophy.

Lion: Lion to me represents when the "Change for the sake of change" brigade started injecting themselves into the OS development at the expense of the "It just works" brigade. Lion was the last release of OS X that could actually run, and run reasonably well, for me anyway, with 2GB of RAM.

Mountain Lion: I see Mountain Lion as sort of an incomplete implementation of Mavericks. The initial releases of this version were quite honestly terrible. When I first started using it there were so many application crashes and lock ups I switched back to Snow Leopard. Many of the bugs now seem fixed, it boots fast, it isn't that much of a resource hog, but it still has a few glitches that i feel I can handle. You need 4GB of RAM for this to work well.

Mavericks: Mavericks is to Mountain Lion as Snow Leopard was to Leopard. I see it as a refinement of Mountain Lion, but unfortunately it's a memory and drive space pig, which I don't like. For the most part almost every app I have will run under it. It's a toss up for me whether to use Mavericks or Mountain Lion. ML just, for some reason, seems tighter.

Yosemite: If I have to move to Yosemite, I can deal with the looks. They really don't bother me that much, but I hardly call the appearance an improvement. That's not what I'd call high praise. With this release, the "Change for the sake of change" brigade has completely displaced the "It just works" brigade, who now operates under the name "It might work." You may need 8GB of RAM for this to work well, but it can probably survive with 4GB of RAM.

As you might guess, I don't need a lot of the features that integrate the iPhone or iPad into the system. I don't care for iCloud because as far as I'm concerned it's just a security risk waiting to happen.

These are all, of course, just opinions and my observations, so don't take it as the final word or a detailed analysis of everything.
 
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Eithanius

macrumors 68000
Nov 19, 2005
1,556
419
If you must know, I have downgraded all the way to Snow Leopard...

Snow Leopard - barring extremely minor bugs, it just works...!

Lion - never give a damn. Got the impression it was hell when it launched.

Mountain Lion - If one must take advantage of the iOS and iCloud crap, this is the almost perfect OS X. It seems slightly lighter than Mavericks itself. But sadly I had to give up this one due to the audio stuttering bug which Apple failed to resolve.

Mavericks - Toys will be toys. Cannot handle heavy load when dealing with huge files on Preview and Pages without crashing. And a nasty bug on TrackPad Handwriting. Finder is ever slow. Snow Leopard does not have all of these...!

Yosemite - Now this is a "toy dangerous even for kids". Final release is worse than beta that I literally gave up helping Apple seeding it. Slow Finder syndrome got carried over from Mavericks and performed worst ever.


Finally back to SL until my laptop dies. MBP rocking it for 4 half years. Praying for another 2 more peaceful years...
 
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TheBSDGuy

macrumors 6502
Jan 24, 2012
319
29
How about web problems on Snow Leopard?

I didn't look into it too much but when I loaded video clips from news stations Safari/flash seemed to have problems. I suppose a work around would be to try Chrome and/or Firefox, but I never did it.

Before making a commitment to anything don't forget to test out all peripherals that you may need (but may not have remembered just yet) like the printer. You don't want to be in rush on something then go to print it out only to find the printer doesn't work.
 
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BradHatter

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 7, 2014
191
13
I've been spending the last two weeks using Mountain Lion. I was impressed by the fact that it used less memory and disk space than Mavericks, but it still has glitches...and lots of them. For example, for some reason the system went to sleep and waking up it was more or less locked up. There are problems with Safari that just don't exist with Mavericks. If mail accounts aren't set up just right, Notes seems to have problems. There are just a lot of little glitches that seem like they were never quite fixed 100%. Booting is noticeably faster with Mountain Lion than it is with either Yosemite or Mavericks, which both seem to me to boot in similar times.

FWIW, I'm probably going to stick with Mavericks. It just seems refined. It's slower than Mountain Lion, and thanks to IconServicesAgent, it's a drive and memory pig, but I'll just tolerate it. Yosemite is out of the question because some of my old Apple applications aren't supported on it.
 
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BradHatter

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 7, 2014
191
13
I have decided to stick with Mountain Lion. My rationale for this is:

  1. It's noticably faster than Mavericks or Yosemite
  2. It has the features I need and use
  3. It's reasonably stable, at least for me
  4. Everything that I use works under it.

I'm avoiding Mavericks because I think it's just plain too abusive. The IconServicesAgent problem I have persists, and it really shouldn't be my problem to have troubleshoot an OS problem of Apple's. It's slower loading than Mountain Lion by about 20%, and some applications are slow loading, like System Preferences, which almost always takes 30 seconds to load. The use of a megaprocess to cache icons is, IMHO, stupid, as is kicking on background processes for users that aren't using the system and in fact may never use it again. It eats up about 20GB unnecessarily just to store icon inmages. It's just too plain abusive.

Yosemite is utterly out of the question. First, it generally extends all the problems I had with Mavericks, but it also uses more memory and higher CPU resources. I assume the latter is to support that idiotic idea, translucency. Many, and I mean many applications, and they're Apples applications, now have a circle with a slash through them (prohibited sign). I have no use or interest in any of the new iPhone/iPad extension features. Finally the appearance of the UI, which looks to me like it's targeting the "3 to 5 year old power user demographic" (I actually read that.....somewhere) doesn't impress me.

There it is guys...the decision is made.
 
Z

ZVH

macrumors 6502
Apr 14, 2012
381
51
Booting is going to be inconsistent from system to system. Every time a system starts up it has to interrogate all attached drives. If someone has any other storage attached it will be interrogated during boot. How fast each OS reacts and handles that storage may very well vary not only with the OS version but the actual hardware as well.

In other words, Apples are not necessarily being compared to Apples.
 
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FrtzPeter

macrumors member
Aug 11, 2014
77
3
@BradHatter:

Why not just go back to Snow Leopard? You can probably work around any incompatibilities, it's faster, it's the best looking, it isn't a pig....

....Ya know...I think I'm going to downgrade myself!:cool:

Oh, wait....that's right, my system is too new for it.:eek:

Oh well.
 
K

KoolAid-Drink

macrumors 68000
Sep 18, 2013
1,859
947
USA
Interesting replies!

My personal observations here:

Snow Leopard: Stable, worked well, but definitely showing it's age.

Lion: Slow, chunky, half-assed for the most part

Mountain Lion: A huge improvement over Lion, much faster and more responsive

Mavericks: Sluggish, very buggy and rough around the edges, sloppy, one of the worst releases of OS X

Yosemite: Another huge improvement over Mavericks; less sloppy and buggy so far, feels much more complete and 'wrapped up' (am on 10.10.1)

Out of all, my least favorite was Mavericks, followed closely by Lion. For some reason, I never liked Mavericks, from the very beginning. It just felt so... incomplete and mismatched.
 
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Badagri

macrumors 6502a
Aug 9, 2012
500
78
UK
Eithanius said:
If you must know, I have downgraded all the way to Snow Leopard...

Snow Leopard - barring extremely minor bugs, it just works...!

Lion - never give a damn. Got the impression it was hell when it launched.

Mountain Lion - If one must take advantage of the iOS and iCloud crap, this is the almost perfect OS X. It seems slightly lighter than Mavericks itself. But sadly I had to give up this one due to the audio stuttering bug which Apple failed to resolve.

Mavericks - Toys will be toys. Cannot handle heavy load when dealing with huge files on Preview and Pages without crashing. And a nasty bug on TrackPad Handwriting. Finder is ever slow. Snow Leopard does not have all of these...!

Yosemite - Now this is a "toy dangerous even for kids". Final release is worse than beta that I literally gave up helping Apple seeding it. Slow Finder syndrome got carried over from Mavericks and performed worst ever.


Finally back to SL until my laptop dies. MBP rocking it for 4 half years. Praying for another 2 more peaceful years...
Click to expand...

Do tell…
 
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BradHatter

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 7, 2014
191
13
I've been running Mountain Lion for about 2 weeks now. There are a few annoying hiccups with it, mostly with Safari and Notes but I can work them out or get around them.

No audio stuttering experienced yet....I guess that's something maybe i get to look forward to. ;)
 
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BradHatter

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 7, 2014
191
13
One of the reasons I was favoring Mountain Lion over Mavericks is because for me, IconServicesAgent was eating tons (close to 400MB) of RAM. Earlier I was provided a solution to this, and now Mavericks is running I'd say more memory efficiently than Mountain Lion. Here's a link to the thread:

https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=20592860&posted=1#post20592860

The post by "TheBSDGuy" provided me with the answer. Mavericks for me is now running more efficiently than even Mountain Lion. I have to assume that's a bug in Mavericks because to me it shouldn't be reading info from other attached disks to get config info.

This may very well mean Mavericks has entered contention again.
 
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Eithanius

macrumors 68000
Nov 19, 2005
1,556
419
BradHatter said:
One of the reasons I was favoring Mountain Lion over Mavericks is because for me, IconServicesAgent was eating tons (close to 400MB) of RAM. Earlier I was provided a solution to this, and now Mavericks is running I'd say more memory efficiently than Mountain Lion. Here's a link to the thread:

https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=20592860&posted=1#post20592860

The post by "TheBSDGuy" provided me with the answer. Mavericks for me is now running more efficiently than even Mountain Lion. I have to assume that's a bug in Mavericks because to me it shouldn't be reading info from other attached disks to get config info.

This may very well mean Mavericks has entered contention again.
Click to expand...

But I still find Mavericks' Finder running a lot more slower than Snow Leopard or Mountain Lion... Yosemite's Finder was even worse...
 
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Eithanius

macrumors 68000
Nov 19, 2005
1,556
419
Not only tabs... The whole of Finder...

When opening folder within the same window, it takes a second or 2 to load compared to SL's fractions of a second...

When copying large files, it delays for around 2 seconds before the copy progress bar appears...
 
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