Snow Leopard vs Mountain Lion

[miata]

I have a question about one thing you wrote:

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)?

I got Lion on an iMac I purchased last X-mas and added all of the patches at the time. So, whatever the latest version was at the beginning of 2012.

I was doing a lot of video and photo stuff and Lion would just hang a couple of times a day. With ML the only things that crash are MS apps and Mail.app -- a lot of times that was when I was going back and worth with connecting an external monitor. The crash frequency seemed to be slightly higher than SL.

Don't get me wrong. I think that ML is much better than Lion and has real potential. I know I'll eventually have to move from SL, but I think it would be better to wait another 6 months or so. The Time Machine problems just made me too nervous.

 

[sidewinder]

I never had a crash with 10.7.x and I used it from the day it came until 10.8 was released. 10.8 has not crashed on me yet and I have run it since the day it came out.

S-

 

[ThomasJL]

I never had a crash with 10.7.x and I used it from the day it came until 10.8 was released. 10.8 has not crashed on me yet and I have run it since the day it came out.

S-

Hey, well that settles it. Since you never had a crash with 10.7.0 and 10.8.0, Apple should just stop making bug fixes.

 

[pooryou]

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

Even if it's a 2007 MacBook Pro that can only hold 4gb of RAM?

 

[sidewinder]

Hey, well that settles it. Since you never had a crash with 10.7.0 and 10.8.0, Apple should just stop making bug fixes.

I never said that, did I? My point that the OS has not been the bug ridden pile of crap that some people would have you believe......

S-

 

[swingerofbirch]

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.

If you're talking about what I'm thinking about, you can just select the Time Capsule from Airport Utility (make sure it's highlighted) and select Base Station from the menu bar and then "Restart . . . "

This confused me as well because all of the other functions are accessed through the Edit button that is in the "popover" when you click on a device.

 

[kappaknight]

If you're talking about what I'm thinking about, you can just select the Time Capsule from Airport Utility (make sure it's highlighted) and select Base Station from the menu bar and then "Restart . . . "

This confused me as well because all of the other functions are accessed through the Edit button that is in the "popover" when you click on a device.

Wow. Thanks for the tip. I guess friendly doesn't lead to intuitive.

 

[bruleke]

The VEREDICT: I HATE ML!!!!

First of all, my machine specs:

Macbook Pro Mid 2010
i5 2.4ghz
500gb Black Scorpio
8gb Kingston
CLEAN version of ML........... TWICE. (Did it twice to check if the installation was the problem)

Q: What do I mostly do with my mac?
A: Word, Excel, PDFs, Firefox, Mail.

Q: Why do I HATE ML?
A: For the same reason I hated Lion: Firefox crashes every single day (I tried Safari and Chrome... same ***** too), computer got a little bit slower than SL, takes more time to open apps.
The worst part is when ML freezes the browser (even SAFARI!!!): NOTHING else works the same. Its like running a 486 PC with Mountain Lion! Really slow. So I have to reebot it. Pretty good, uh?

Funny thing is that it happened with Lion... the same way!

So, Apple, since the same happened with Lion, the solution would be:

A. Buy a brand new Macbook Pro or;
B. Back to a 2009 operational system (Snow Leopard).
Right?

IMPORTANT: IF YOU ARE A FANBOY, PLEASE, no whining here.

I will be back to SL tonight. At least its FAST and doesn't crash. Simple.

 

[theBostonian]

I was a trifle apprehensive with upgrading from Snow Leopard but in the end the decision was made for me since ML came preinstalled on a new MBP.

There are some tips and tricks to getting ML to behave like SL however, such as going into System Preferences > Accessibility > Mouse & Trackpad > Trackpad Options > Enable dragging

Then, going into Trackpad settings, disabling three finger drag and changing "Swipe between pages" from two fingers to three fingers (thereby enabling the navigation of Finder windows through the use of gestures).

Another trick to get Exposé back is to go to Mission Control (again in system prefs) and unchecking the "Group windows by application" box.

Hopefully this'll help some other Snow Leopard lovers coming to terms with ML's idiosyncrasies.

 

[3282868]

I was a trifle apprehensive with upgrading from Snow Leopard but in the end the decision was made for me since ML came preinstalled on a new MBP.

There are some tips and tricks to getting ML to behave like SL however, such as going into System Preferences > Accessibility > Mouse & Trackpad > Trackpad Options > Enable dragging

Then, going into Trackpad settings, disabling three finger drag and changing "Swipe between pages" from two fingers to three fingers (thereby enabling the navigation of Finder windows through the use of gestures).

Another trick to get Exposé back is to go to Mission Control (again in system prefs) and unchecking the "Group windows by application" box.

Hopefully this'll help some other Snow Leopard lovers coming to terms with ML's idiosyncrasies.

No way! I never knew about the three finger gesture for Finder! That's awesome.

Also, "TotalSpaces" adds 10.5/6 "Spaces" to 10.7/8. Been working with the developer for a long time on it and it's near perfect.

 

[theBostonian]

No way! I never knew about the three finger gesture for Finder! That's awesome.

Also, "TotalSpaces" adds 10.5/6 "Spaces" to 10.7/8. Been working with the developer for a long time on it and it's near perfect.

Glad you found it useful ^_^

I'd love to have spaces back, I'll make a note of TotalSpaces, thanks for the heads up

 

[3282868]

Glad you found it useful ^_^

I'd love to have spaces back, I'll make a note of TotalSpaces, thanks for the heads up

Check it out, it's free. I believe once he releases the 1.0 version it will be $12.00, but he won't release it until he's 100% certain it's perfect (and he's a perfectionist lol). He started it himself, and then BinaryAge, makers of "TotalFinder", bought it from him and kept him on as lead developer.

TotalSpaces

About TotalSpaces

Grid Layout
Overview grid
Overview grid backgrounds
Navigation
Multi-monitors
Hotkeys
Swiping
Mouse navigation
Transitions
Hot corners
App assignments
Full screen desktops
Overview grid app

 

[Dewdman42]

Count me in for the group of people that tried Lion and ran back SL. I found it slower, but particularly a few things were ruined in Lion.

• Spaces
• Mail
• SMB

I live with Mail every single day and while the new Mail app has some cool new features, they did one thing entirely wrong which I could not find a work around for, they made it so that all messages in the list have a Bold title, regardless of whether read or not. I tried both Postbox and Sparrow to see if they would work around it, at the time they were not adequate for some reasons I can't remember. SL Mail, with a few plugins I had added to it, worked totally great and I'm still using it.

I also totally required spaces feature to be fast, snappy, and to have a fixed number of spaces where I always know where stuff is. The new Lion version tried to make it more automatic, but forsake some control for me, I hated it.

I had networking problems with SMB, some network shares I could not mount or read correctly, found lots of posts on the net about it at the time, it was a known bug of some kind. I can't remember if it was NFS or SMB.

It was definitely slower then Snow Leopard.

The only reason I even tried it was because I was tempted by iCloud. Since then I've found other ways to work around the fact that Apple won't let SL users benefit from iCloud.

I also do music/audio, and a few esoteric things did not work right with Lion.

So now here we are with ML and wondering whether they've fixed the above issues or not. I decided to buy ML and install it under parallels where I can fool around with it for a while, so that's where I am at now. Personally I'm totally happy with SL I don't ahve any need for the features they have added to Lion or ML, but sooner or later I know I will have to catch up with the times, some new programs are starting to come out that will only run on 10.7 or newer, so its a matter of time.

For me, I don't like the direction Apple is going...

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

I will check that out thanks

upgrade. Expose's back to normal, and it's time to move on from SL.

Can you please explain what you mean when you say expose is back to normal?

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!

Interesting, what is really so different in the finder between ML and SL?

 

[Mari0-br0s]

I'm glad I've found this topic, since I've been through the same experience. Was using SL, than upgraded at launch for Lion. Lion happened to be the worst 30$ I've ever spent. Waited until 10.7.2 to see f any improvement would come.

I reverted back to SL. And god this was a relief.

I've read most of the messages in this topic, so I'm quite interested in trying ML. I'll have t try it in a virtual machine since my Mac is too old for ML, I'm running a good old Santa Rosa MBP. I'm looking to upgrade my laptop, but I want to make sure ML is something I ould be satisfied, otherwise I'll go back to PC while Windows 7 is still available (Windows 8 will be crap).

The majors problems I had with Lion were:

-major system instability compared to SL
-system was slower than on SL, it feeled like Leopard
-I bought Lion for Filevault 2... and it failed me big time, I couldn't unlock my drive to repair the permissions in the recovery partition. My password nor the 24 digit key that we have to note when activating FileVault 2 was working... had to reformat and reinstall Lion....
-I couldn't restore my Time Machine backup from my Time Capsule via the recovery partition... had to transfer manually on a USB hard drive the .sparsebundle image, then plug it to my Mac. This took like 22 hours of transfering data...
-I've been having recuring problem with the Mail.app, email were being downloaded but were not appearing in the inbox. Sent messages were getting stock in the outbox (sooo Outlook behavior)
-Mission Control replaced the most useful feature of OS X. The Expose view that I use 9865 times a day
-I hated the new Address Book interface. You couldn't drag and drop a contact to a group, since they're on two separate "pages". And the paperbook look was ugly.
-I had also a ******** of wifi issue, looked like a butched kernel extention for my hardware.
-Lost of Rosetta (since then I'v found alternative to evry old PPC apps I had, no longer an issue)
-Lost of QuickTime Pro 7 (QuickTime X is ****)

All of the above were major problems that I couldn't just go around.

I also disliked the following:

-The Finder left bar was all gray, it was more difficult to easily identify the folder I wanted to select
-I've never been able to adapt to the revert scrolling. I've been able to deactivate this so it wasn't such a big deal.
-The full screen app were pissing me off, I do not have an advanced trackpad on my MBP and the Escape key or command+Q wasn't working to exit full screen... somehow I had to hard reboot with the power button, that was so stupid.
-The "feature" to relaunch every apps that were open after a system crash was making my computer unusable for a long period of time because a lot of icons were bouncing and trying to open at the same time (now I have an SSD, but back then...I almost killed myself)
-I didn't like the new iCal look. The fact that you can't see your calendar list at the same time of your calendar was non functionnal for me, since I have about 20 different calendars and I do not know all of their respective colors by heart.
-I didn't like the Finder and Mail left bar character size, but I managed to bring them back to SL style, so no big deal.
-I didn't like the new Mail presentation, but was able to set it back as in SL

Here is the only features that I bought it for:

FileVault 2
Time Machine backup FileVault while LOGGED IN

So if any of you can tell me what I've been fixed, what havn't, it would be great. Meanwhile I'll download ML from somewhere and try it out in a VM.

thanks,
Phil

 

[davelanger]

I am really glad I found this thread, I came here looking to see if I should upgrade to ML from SL but it looks I should still wait.

 

[MichaelLAX]

To the OP:
...Broke scores of my programs (removal of Rosetta)...

Options for workarounds to Rosetta:

1. Parition your hard drive or add external hard drive and install Snow Leopard (and Rosetta; it is an optional install) on it and use the "dual boot" method of running your old PowerPC applications;

2. Upgrade your PPC apps or find alternatives; and/or

3. The method I use for most PPC apps except graphic intensive games: Install Snow Leopard (with Rosetta) into Parallels 7 (or now 8).

NOTE: STEP ONE of the instructions linked below currently only works in Snow Leopard or Lion for now, so make the modified image file of the Snow Leopard Install DVD BEFORE you upgrade to Mountain Lion.

Full Snow Leopard Installation Instructions Here

[click on images to enlarge]

 

[jk73]

I like Mountain Lion except for Safari, which is SLOW, SLOW, SLOW on my new rMBP. Sometimes it's lightning fast, but more often than not, there's a multi-second lag between clicking a link or otherwise requesting a web page and the page loading. The progress bar often stalls on the domain name, as if it's having trouble resolving the web page before it begins to load. If this was a two-day thing, I'd suspect the ISP (Time Warner), but it's been happening since I installed 10.8.1. (I don't remember if this happened under 10.8; I only installed it a few days before 10.8.1 was released.)

 

[Ryan9]

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

I think some of the irritation with your thread is that some may actually be interested in helping you... if you'd just say what the problem was before so they could offer you some constructive advice. I could tell you about speed/performance and then it could still be a huge mistake for you if, say, you're a Quicken junkie (because it's not supported on ML). My guess would be that you go through this level of agony anytime you're exposed to change. Just take the plunge and see how it goes.

 

[MichaelLAX]

... if, say, you're a Quicken junkie (because it's not supported on ML)...

BAD EXAMPLE (worked on Mountain Lion even before this update)

 

[Ryan9]

Not the point, chief

BAD EXAMPLE (worked on Mountain Lion even before this update)

Sigh. Soooooo not the point. But since you brought it to the forefront, yes, you could potentially use Quicken but your options are to use the old 2007 version or the stripped down Quicken Express. Intuit has always had issues about dragging their heels supporting Macs. REGARDLESS, asking "Will I be happy with Mountain Lion?" is a little silly unless someone knows what your priorities are. I think that was infinitely clear.

 

[MichaelLAX]

Posting incorrect information is always on point to be corrected!

You left the distinct impression that Quicken will work in Snow Leopard but not work in Mountain Lion; that impression is incorrect. Quicken for the Mac works EXACTLY the same in Mountain Lion as it does in Snow Leopard!

Others come into these threads, read these posts and hope to rely on their accuracy...

And that's "Mr. Chief to you", Bub!

 

[colourfastt]

I think you can safely upgrade to 10.8. I never liked Lion myself but was forced to upgrade when MobileMe ended (to get iCloud compatibility).

Now I'm quite happy on 10.8. The upgrade was very smooth and everything actually seems more stable.

Couple of things: I wouldn't be able to use 10.8 (or 10.7) without an app called TotalSpaces. This brings back Spaces from Snow Leopard. The auto save function is awkward, but I'm beginning to learn to live with it. I still think Snow Leopard was better overall, but at least 10.8 is great compared to Lion. They fixed a lot of annoying issues. SMB sharing is gone, so a WDTV for example can not access your Mac over the network. And especially annoying is the large font size and gray theme of the Finder Sidebar and Mail. But it's not a deal breaker.

"Awkward" is being overly generous.

 

[throAU]

I upgraded to Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion on week of release.


Lion today after 10.7.4 is nothing like Lion version 10.7.0 as far as performance goes.

Mountain Lion is superior in every way to Lion.



IMHO - you should either upgrade to 10.8, or start looking for a new software platform - Linux, Windows, whatever.

10.6 support is not going to last forever, and those out there holding onto 10.6 are going to end up being the Mac equivalent of Windows XP users in coming years. A pool of machines out there on the internet that no longer get security updates and end up getting used to spread malware.

 

[closetnerd]

snow leopard

I had ML and went back to SL for me the main reasons were I dont care about facebook integration or twitter for that matter, also my wifi would drop no matter what I did and I was sick of it. There are some features I miss but I think some of them can be made to work with SL like calendar sync

 

[RSL]

I moved to Lion on my work machine after waiting for some time after it came out.

It was sluggish compared to SL, mainly due to the constant caching. (Of course this problem is the reason why they created the Fusion Drive.) WiFi was constantly dropping requiring relogin/restart. When the problems persisted in 10.7.4, I upgraded back to SL.

Although Dropbox does a similar job, I do miss versions (though the scrolling through the versions needs serious work if you have something like 30 versions of a long document a day).