Yosemite was a bad move, for me at least

[stevep]

I have been a big fan of OS X since it first came out way back in the days of raspberry flavoured iMacs. Yes, it has always had a few annoyances (setting up a network printer, for instance, has always been a strangely convoluted process in OS X), but overall everything was simple and intuitive. It worked.

Fast forward to Yosemite:
1. It now takes forever to boot - at least four times longer than Mavericks. Maybe there's a reason, but I've yet to track it down.
2. I've now got weird glitches in Mail, with emails that I know have been sent (and received at the other end) still remaining as drafts on my machine. And ugly strike-through text on the highlighted mailboxes in the Favourites bar at the top.
3. iPhoto is behaving strangely as well - I import photos from my camera, they appear as thumbnails but double-clicking them results in nothing, just a sea of black.
4. I open up Notes and the text flickers and flashes at me. I have to view several different notes, and then go back to the first to get it to stop.
5. I won't even start on Spotlight - it's just too dreadful for words.

It was nice to give up on Windows all those years ago. It seems I'm almost back there now.

 

[Beavix]

You got something weird going on there. Have you tried a clean install? Yosemite has its issues but it's not THAT bad.

 

[Taz Mangus]

I have been a big fan of OS X since it first came out way back in the days of raspberry flavoured iMacs. Yes, it has always had a few annoyances (setting up a network printer, for instance, has always been a strangely convoluted process in OS X), but overall everything was simple and intuitive. It worked.

Fast forward to Yosemite:
1. It now takes forever to boot - at least four times longer than Mavericks. Maybe there's a reason, but I've yet to track it down.
2. I've now got weird glitches in Mail, with emails that I know have been sent (and received at the other end) still remaining as drafts on my machine. And ugly strike-through text on the highlighted mailboxes in the Favourites bar at the top.
3. iPhoto is behaving strangely as well - I import photos from my camera, they appear as thumbnails but double-clicking them results in nothing, just a sea of black.
4. I open up Notes and the text flickers and flashes at me. I have to view several different notes, and then go back to the first to get it to stop.
5. I won't even start on Spotlight - it's just too dreadful for words.

It was nice to give up on Windows all those years ago. It seems I'm almost back there now.

Agree with Beavix. Try creating a separate partition and clean install Yosemite. Gives you a chance to see what might be causing the problem. Might be a third party app. When I did a clean install of 10.10.2 I ran into a situation where my Mac would come out of a deep sleep, the screen would go black and then reboot. This was being caused by a third party driver I installed after. Once I uninstalled the driver the problem went away. If I had installed Yosemite on top of 10.9.5 I would have had this issue and thought the problem was with 10.10.2 and not the third party driver.

 

[maflynn]

I'm not experiencing anything near what you have

As others stated, back up your data, wipe the partition and reinstall a clean copy of 10.10

 

[ABC5S]

No issues here. Do a complete clean install, no back ups and see it that works. Than install some of your programs to see if one of them is messing things up

 

[Taz Mangus]

No issues here. Do a complete clean install, no back ups and see it that works. Than install some of your programs to see if one of them is messing things up

This. I believe that some of the issues people are having is related to the state of their installed system. Hard to know what is causing a problem if you install over a previous OS X release.

 

[chambone]

Clean installs are overrated. I can't remember the last time I did one or used a dvd, and in fact I clone drives between laptops just to save time and effort. In my experience it doesn't matter in the slightest.

 

[newellj]

This. I believe that some of the issues people are having is related to the state of their installed system. Hard to know what is causing a problem if you install over a previous OS X release.

Clean installs are overrated. I can't remember the last time I did one or used a dvd, and in fact I clone drives between laptops just to save time and effort. In my experience it doesn't matter in the slightest.

This Mini had some issues after an upgrade install that disappeared after an internet recovery installation. I doubt it's necessary in most cases but it can be a good tool for machines that aren't behaving they way they should.

 

[Jayson A]

I have a regular Apple Wired Mouse and it scrolls way too fast on almost any setting. The only 2 settings that are slower are WAY too slow. There is no middle ground.

 

[jbarley]

It was nice to give up on Windows all those years ago. It seems I'm almost back there now.

Two things I'd try if this was my problem.
First download and run Etrecheck and see if it finds any problems,
second restart in Verbose mode and maybe see where the boot process is stalling.

 

[Sabretooth78]

I gave it a go for a little more than 2 months and tried to like it, but I just did a clean install of 10.9.5 last night on 2 of the 3 household macs.

I didn't necessarily have the same issues as the O.P., however. Boot times were great (of course I installed Yosemite upon also installing a new SSD so there's that). Yeah, Mail has stunk ever since they broke Gmail sync a few iterations ago but I don't typically rely on it (more for viewing things that don't look good on a phone). I think its been claimed to be fixed but it's still not right.

Some of my issues:

...Sporadic but often enough lagginess in just about every app, especially Preview. Sometimes (every few days) I would open something (or attempt to) and it would end up taking the whole system with it requiring a hard reset. Other times, launchpad wouldn't work - it would come up but clicking on an icon would do nothing. Still other times a mid-day reboot would solve problems. Shades of Windows. Far cry from the 10.5-10.8 days when I could leave the thing running for over a week with nary an ill effect.

...Time Machine. Every so often, usually in the 1-2 week range, it'll prompt me that the backup drive changed and I would have to reconfigure it. My backup drive is an external attached to a Mini that never goes anywhere and is pretty much always on. The past few days, however, I have gotten varying messages saying the disk is full (it's a 2TB about 55% full) and that the sparsebundle couldn't be opened.

...HDD activity on my MBP. Maybe it's because I moved the HDD into the optical bay (carrying my user files) and it's less "insulated" in the chassis than in the "official" HDD bay but it seems to me that I'll hear it chugging away a lot more than I ever used to. Reminds me of my Windows machine that would be chugging away when otherwise idle.

...A host of other nuisances not worth mentioning as well; that and I still don't like the interface. It's not so much ugly as it's just inconsistent and half-a__ed looking. The contrast in folder flyouts on the dock is terrible, was well as in other places. I still have decent eyes but they're just starting to show effects of aging; I can't imagine somebody 20-30 years my senior trying to look at this.

So last night I took my MBP and the Mini down and reinstalled 10.9.5 clean. Officially, I'm doing it as an experiment to see if I can isolate these problems. Maybe my TM issues are due to a drive in the early stages of failing. Just weird that it would happen at the exact same time. The only other thing I changed was to create admin accounts on each and take those privileges away from my normal user profiles. Maybe that's having some weird effect. Let's find out.

I will be leaving 10.10.2 on my wife's MBA for the time being as she's not having the same degree of problems (except the TM recognition issue). That and I hate causing the inconvenience; I tinker enough as it is. The cynical side of me says this is Apple's way of forcing their seemingly adopted model of planned obsolescence via software - gear it toward the 2014s but make the older machines choke on it. If that is the case, well, you gotta get up pretty early in the morning...

I tried to like it, I really did. I've never been a downgrader in the past. Check that, I ditched Windows ME for 98. Now THAT was a bad OS. I will miss Helvetica Neue in the menu bar, at least. Dialog boxes and elsewhere not so much but it definitely looks better than LG up top.