Snow Leopard vs Mountain Lion

[Louis Wu]

TotalSpaces is great!

I wouldn't be able to use 10.8 (or 10.7) without an app called TotalSpaces. This brings back Spaces from Snow Leopard.

Thanks for that tip! That was the one thing holding me back from upgrading my main workstation to ML!

Louis

 

[Icy1007]

My opinion is that if your computer is supported by Mountain Lion, you should upgrade. Simple as that.

 

[Krazy Bill]

My opinion is that if your computer is supported by Mountain Lion, you should upgrade. Simple as that.

What sense does this make?

 

[kappaknight]

I have an early 2011 MBP. Did the Lion upgrade and reverted to SL and now I'm using ML.

To answer your questions:

1. A lot of the initial issues I had with Lion no longer applies here. Scroll still takes a tad bit to get used to but at least I can navigate back and forth in 3rd party browsers now that it's supported.

2. I'm running on an SSD, so even though I did the upgrade, things did not slow down.

3. The computer does however, freeze from time to time. When waking up, the graphics card seem to go crazy every once in awhile - none of these issues happened in SL.

4. I decided to stay this time because the Photo stream sync was more of a pro for me than the various tiny quirks that are here. It still feels a tad bit dumbed down vs. SL. (e.g. Airport Utility looks friendlier, but no way to reboot Time Capsule now.)

You still have to decide for yourself though.

 

[sgtbob]

Mountain Lion Problems

FWIW - I DL Mountain Lion and installed it on my iMAC 24" Desktop unit, 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, which was working pretty well. My experience was pretty unsettling. The first thing encountered after the install was trouble with changing desktop background (it simply was inoperative). The box kept stating 'loading images', but after an hours I had to 'force quit'. The system ran slow and opening and closing files ran slow plus lots of other little issues became apparent as I attempted to explore the new OS 8. In trying to shutdown/restart, the black/white 'pinwheel' ran for over an hour and I finally had to shut it down by the off switch - not a recommended procedure, but it was the only way to get started again. Bummer!!! I contacted tech support that is available for 90 days after the purchase and after an hour of working with the problem, I was advised to DL and re-install. That I did and the system ran so slow it was evident that something was wrong. In lieu of attempting another DL, I restored my entire OS 10.7.4 - took over 8 hours to get back to my original system. I may be a dinosaur, but I will not re-install Mountain Lion until I am forced into it. I hope my experience was a limited issue and that those who installed it had better results.

bob

 

[nightlong]

Getting very confused about this, why some people even with clean installs are having so much trouble with ML while others are not. I thought it might be that those not having trouble weren't working the computer too hard. But ... reading the last post here, even trying to choose different screen background is a major drama.

Have just ordered an MBA, it will come with ML, feeling nervous!

 

[sidewinder]

Getting very confused about this, why some people even with clean installs are having so much trouble with ML while others are not.

The vast, and I mean vast, majority of people are not having problems. You only hear about the people with problems on these forums. It's not representative of reality....

S-

 

[nightlong]

Hope so. It's not my idea of exciting mac experience, getting it out of the box, spending hours on the phone with apple support, and on and on, holding your breath every time you use it in case it crashes or freezes. First time for me with a .0 version, I usually wait for more intrepid and tech savvy folk to ferret out the bugs over a couple of versions.

 

[sidewinder]

Hope so. It's not my idea of exciting mac experience, getting it out of the box, spending hours on the phone with apple support, and on and on, holding your breath every time you use it in case it crashes or freezes. First time for me with a .0 version, I usually wait for more intrepid and tech savvy folk to ferret out the bugs over a couple of versions.

If what you described were reality, Apple would have ridiculously low customer satisfaction ratings instead of the highest in the industry. I have been using the ".0" releases since 1984 and I have never had issues like you see chronicled here. I haven't done a "clean install" on the Mac Pro I have used since 2008. All upgrades. It's just some people spreading FUD.

S-

 

[nightlong]

Thanks Sidewinder, you've turned my waiting for new computer day back from dread to excitement and optimism!

 

[dusk007]

I installed ML for iCloud mostly. Didn't do proper research and testing and thought it is more than it is.

I didn't go back yet and it works well enough for the most part. Not really much better or worse, only scrolling is more fluid. The last iphoto upgrade made that faster again after it was rather slow.

I am annoyed by full screen mode. I wish I could deactivate it. Luckly some Apps like VMWare don't use it but still their own.
I cannot stand Mission Control. It is laggy slow, it is terrible at arranging non grouped windows and I don't like the grouping. It has not the multimonitor support SL had.
Slide between spaces is slow and laggy.
Considering other people don't report much of that choppy MC related animations I suppose I need a clean reinstall to get over that.

Otherwise it is as stable or unstable as SL for me. Which means it crashes and freezes but so did SL lately. Another reason why I upgraded and hoped it fixed it. New is a frequent Flash video bug that shows up on not even high temps. The plugin doesn't crash but it is only ants
I work around the MC issues with Totalspace but am not really happy with the solution. Totalspaces is neither as fast as SL nor does it have the exposé integration.

I am not yet annoyed enough nor do I have the time to switch back, but I would stay with SL now.

BTW the only feature I really like is the notification bar and how you can move in. I don't like the messages as they don't look good and are often right in the way of click on tabs and stuff. I would prefer if I could only use the bar but get all temporary on screen banner delivered to growl.
Growl was so nice and customizable. It is just doing a better job.
I don't get what the new Growl does. Some say it breaks compatibility, I don't see any mention how it works with the notification bar.

 

[elpmas]

I jumped ship to Lion when it was released, but regretted it because of the limitations of apps. Stuck with SL until ML...and now there's no regrets. I like ML much more than Lion, and slowly becoming my favorite.

 

[Paradoxally]

Another vote for ML. I loved SL, and to me it's still the best OS out of the last 3 that Apple released, but ML is way more stable than Lion, fixes annoying quirks that Lion had, and is considerably faster and slightly better at RAM management.

 

[ppnkg]

people who had Snow Leopard, installed Lion and realized it was a terrible choice, then reinstalled Snow Leopard.

Yep, that's exactly me. I had terrible problems with Lion which were not solved by subsequent updates, so I downgraded.

I've installed ML a few days ago on an external Firewire 800 SSD disk and run it from there. Did not migrate but rather set up the system from scratch, did a fresh install of office and a few other applications, then moved files manually from my macs hdd. It runs wonderfully, smooth and fast, on my 3.06 2008 iMac.

Stuff that I was using and Lion broke work fine on ML. I've changed some of the settings I cannot get used to such as 'natural' scrolling etc, and I removed from the dock stuff that apple wants me to have but I cannot see myself using such as mission control. I was pleased to see that apple came to their senses with stuff like save as etc so the actual difference I experience from SL is minimal. I kept the launchpad, which is basically a useful shortcut to the applications folder.

So far I quite enjoy the new notifications and iMessage. Saving to iCloud (which I am using) is also very handy.

The only problem I'm having so far is with Calendar and google calendar, which as far as I can tell from what I've read online is a google issue. Mail was initially also rather unstable with my work outlook exchange account, but I've played with the settings and now works ok (problems with exchange were my main woe with Lion).

I haven't stretched the machine yet, but so far so good - ML on the external SSD feels as fast as SL is on the mac's hdd, if not faster.

I logged on to SL just once since the upgrade, and that was to check some of the setting on that side - which suggests I haven't had any reason to miss it much yet...

I suspect the clean install has contributed to the problem free upgrade, as after all 'migrating' cancels the notion of 'clean', but who knows for sure?

So far, very pleased with ML

 

[sgtbob]

Mountain Lion

Well, I re-purchased ML - I figured for $20 I didn't want to argue with having bought the first one that didn't show on my purchased feature under the App Store.

I DL and installed it between 3:00-5:00 AM this morning. It seems to be working pretty well at the moment. Some items are a bit slow, but we're always wanting things to be faster - just human nature I suppose and it appears to be performing ok. Anyway, my recent complaints seem to have been resolved and I am now running the OS 8 and learning its features. So, maybe things are going better today!

 

[iMacFarlane]

To the OP:
I had a 2009 iMac with SL on it. I avoided Lion for about 8 months, because my computer was running well and I was shocked by the negativity surrounding Lion. Finally upgraded when it became necessary for software development.

Hate, hate, hate the Lion. Broke scores of my programs (removal of Rosetta), ran slower, less useful, ixnay on the Save As . . . , the list goes on.

Upgraded to Mountain Lion, all issues fixed (except the unfortunate Rosetta thing), snappier computer, ML is good to go. I recommend it.

 

[Luis Ortega]

This thread is intended to reach all of the people who had Snow Leopard, installed Lion and realized it was a terrible choice, then reinstalled Snow Leopard.

So, here is my question: since I am one of these people, I want to know from the people described above if Mountain Lion is a good choice or should I keep my Snow Leopard?

I just don't want to do the same mistake I did installing Lion and going back to Snow Leopard.

I use a Mac Pro and a MBP. I kept SL on the MP because I find it works better as a workstation OS. I put ML, and earlier, Lion, on my MBP because it's more of a toy for me and I wanted to check what the post-SL OSs were like.
For me, they are gimmicky and focused on gimmicky, frivolous stuff that's popular with the tablet and phone crowd.
When using ML, I feel like I should be able to touch the screen.

 

[tmt]

To OP:
I got my early 2011 mbp just before they preinstalled lion on them, so I never bothered to get it as it was my first mac. I upgraded to ML and it works great. Don't know if it's faster, but in this config I geekbenched it on 10.6.8 and got about 6800 points. Now I got 7002 points.
Never got a pic of the geekbench result on SL though, so it never really happened
/J

 

[Doc69]

Go to:
Preferences --> General
Change the "Sidebar icon size" to "Small".

Thanks! I would have though something like this would be in the Preferences of Mail and the Finder and the general prefs. Now if I could only get the Snow Leopard side bar colors back as well!

 

[Doc69]

Now if I could only get the Snow Leopard side bar colors back as well!

I just found an app called SideEffects. It did the trick. Now the Finder looks exactly like it did in Snow Leopard, colored icons and all. No more squinting!

 

[miata]

Mountain Lion is not as bad as Lion, but I would wait 6 months...

Whatever you do make sure you have a fallback strategy if you upgrade...I experienced serious problems with both upgrade and Time Machine recovery on ML.

First, I have to admit that I've been using Macs exclusively since I got my first one with System 7 more than 20 years ago. OS upgrades used to be exciting, and I almost always upgraded to the latest release within a week of release.

Things are different now.

I got a new iMac with Lion a while back and ended up downgrading it back to SL. On top of the well know UI and other downgrades from SL there were serious stability problems.

The day after ML came out I did something really stupid and tried an in place upgrade of my MBP to ML. The upgrade process went well except my more than 3,000 notes did not carry over from SL. I ended up going back to a copy of SL and doing a migration upgrade to Lion and then to ML. This time everything worked fine with the upgrade. I had to change a bunch of Apple defaults like everyone else, but to be honest, it was kind of refreshing to use a new OS after so long without a change. ML was much more stable than Lion, but I was still having more frequent MS app and MacOS problems than I did with SL.

Now, the fun part. This Monday I had my system disk die. That was a bummer, but fortunately I had a Time Machine backup from earlier in the day. So, I boot into the recovery partition and restore from Time Machine. Only problem is that this time Mail was unable to restore any of my local mail boxes (I have about 300,000 messages and got a message about "running out of space" before stopping -- even though I had 125GB available. In addition to the Mail problem, there were problems with missing fonts. Apparently, there are still quite a few bugs in Time Machine for Mountain Lion and who knows what else I might discover as time went on.

Fortunately, I still had my trusty old Snow Leopard image on a separate partition. I decided to do another Mountain Lion Install and migrate from that partition. However, I knew that I was going to lose a bunch of recent notes that I created in Mountain Lion, so I copied all of my ON MY MAC notes to iCloud. I even tested to ensure that I could move them back. I also copied a bunch of recent documents to a thumb drive to restore later as well. So, I spent forever doing the install and migration and in the end everything was working -- except I couldn't get my notes back to ON MY MAC.

The Time Machine failure should have been the last straw for me, since I use my MBP for work -- but the iCloud notes bug took it over the top for me.

So, today I am back on Snow Leopard and will stay here for another six months of so until Apple shakes the bugs out of the ML upgrade and Time Machine Recovery processes. I really don't miss any of the ML stuff.

For anybody else thinking of going back to SL from ML it was fairly painless. Here are a few pointers:

• I was able to archive email boxes in Mountain Lion and import them into Snow Leopard with no problem.

• If you keep around a mountable ML partition you can easily move documents back to your SL disk using the SL finder.

• Moving notes was a not as bad as I though. I simply "shared/emailed" all the new notes in ML to myself. I had to do one Note at a time which was a bit of a drag though. However, from SL you just drag the email messages into the Notes and they are fully usable. I did go and copy them one by one into real notes, but I'm not sure that that is really necessary.

 

[ThomasJL]

Question for miata

Excellent post, miata! Thanks for taking the time to write that. My notes are important to me, and your post has convinced me to not do an upgrade from SL to ML.

I have a question about one thing you wrote:

ML was much more stable than Lion, but I was still having more frequent MS app and MacOS problems than I did with SL.

When you say "ML was much more stable than Lion", did you mean that the very first version of ML (10.8.0) was much more stable than the very first version of Lion (10.7.0)? Or did you mean that the very first version of ML (10.8.0) was much more stable than the latest version of Lion (10.7.4)?

 

[iHailCarlo]

ML is better than SL and L! just my opinion its really polished, it has its hangups but I am sure they will be worked out.

 

[sidewinder]

Just crazy people spreading FUD......

 

[njean777]

I installed ML on my mbpr and after a day of using it went back to Lion. ML is just way to laggy and it feels unfinished to me. I never had any lag on lion so I just went back to it and will wait for the next os. I don't mind the changes in lion so....