Q: Any reason to upgrade OSX beyond Mountain Lion ?

How about better security?

Mountain Lion is currently still getting security updates.  However, if past history is an indication of future behavior, then when El Capitan is released, Mountain Lion will be dropped from support.

On the other hand, Apple has said, in the last WWDC, that they are using "Metal" in El Capitan to speed up the graphics performance, which should affect all the Apple GUI apps.

So it is possible El Capitan, when released, may be faster, or at least livable on older hardware, where Mavericks or Yosemite might have been sluggish.  HOWEVER, this will only be known when El Capitan is released.

So if you keep your ear to the ground after El Capitan is released, you may learn it is a good operating system choice.

kenackr wrote:

 

I've been operating on Mountain Lion for several years with no major problems, but at times it seems sluggish. Is there any reason I should upgrade OSX beyond it?

You really have to check your applications/printers/etc to see if they are supported past lion - also check this site using the search to the right of people to see what complaints exist past Mountain Lion on the Apple applications.   Its what is in it for you - I didn't see anything after SnowLeopard.

I hope Apple is right.    Ideally the spinning beachball could be replaced with a dialog:

The application has stopped responding, save your last successful tasks, wait X seconds (letting you fill in the number of seconds you are willing to wait till the dialog pops up again, or force quit the application.

Note: this idea is free for distribution.

How much RAM installed on your Mac.

How full is your Mac's hard drive?

Locate your iMac's hard drive icon on the OS X desktop. Click the icon once, then use the keyboard key combination Command-I. This will give you additonal info about your iMac's internal hard drive.

How many applications do you run simultaneously in the background while working in another application?

If you have a long list of user login/startup items that launch at startup/login, you need to reduce the amount of these to around 6 or so items or less, if possible.

Do you have any unnecessary antivirus installed on your iMac?

Have you updated all of your installed software and updated all connected third party device software and drivers?

Have you updated all of the various web browser plugins you that have installed within your web browser?

Do you use Google apps, like Chrome and Drive?

Ditch ALL Googlewares. They are ALL a serious resource hog on the OS X system.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95319?hl=en

https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375081?hl=en

If you do not like Apple's Safari web browser, download, install and try Mozilla FireFox, instead.

The current, up-to-date version of FireFox is fully compatible with OS X and is regularly updated by the great developers of the Mozilla group.

I have, also, stopped using the Google search engine, regularly and use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine.

It would help us to help you if we could have some more technical info about your iMac. 

If you like, please go ahead and download, install and run Etrecheck.

Etrecheck was developed as a simple Mac diagnostic report tool by a regular Apple Support forum user and technical support contributor named Etresoft.

Etrecheck is a small, unobstrusive app that compiles a static snapshot of your entire Mac hardware system and installed software.

This is a free app that has been honestly created to provided help in diagnosing issues with Macs running the newer versions of OS X.

It is not malware and can be safely downloaded and installed onto your Mac.

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck 

Copy/paste and post its report here in another reply thread so that we have a complete profile of your Mac's hardware and installed software so we can all help with your Mac performance issues. 

Thank You.

You can always experiment with the free to upgrade Yosemite (Mavericks too if you downloaded a copy before Yosemite came out).   Actually I would suggest at least downloading a copy of Yosemite just so you have the option in the future.

When El Capitan comes out, you can also download and experiment with El Capitan.

Since the Mac Pro has 4 internal drives, you can either partition one of the drives for an experimental OS install, or get another driver and swap out a drive for the experiment.

Also you could consider replacing one of the drives with an SSD, which will jump up the speed of Mountain Lion as well as any of the newer operating systems.  I have given my 2009 iMac new life by replacing the DVD with an SSD.  It was a great improvement.

Just some thoughts for extending the life of your Mac Pro, either as a Mountain Lion device or with a newer operating system.

You mentioned that OS X Mountain Lion seemed sluggish at times.

WIth 32 GB of RAM your Mac shouldn't be sluggish, at all.

I wanted to see what in your system could be causing the occasional sluggishness of your Mac.

Hence, my questions and hence my asking you to run Etrecheck so we all can see exactly why your Mac is having performance issues.

So, perhaps, you can run the diagnotic app to confirm what exactly you have on your Mac Pro and paste its results here.

If your system is having issues, an OS upgrade isn't going to solve those issues. It will just make those issues worse.

Dear Kenackr

Please can you say if you decided to upgrade and whether you recommend it?

Thanks,

Peter

iMac L2009 12G RAM Mountain Lion

MacbookPro M2015 16G RAM El Capitan

Odds are if he has not responded for the last year, there is very little hope of him answering you now.

My suggestion is to phrase up your own questions and start your own thread with that question.

I still stand by my original answer of security.

You need to determine, first, if your current software will still be compatible with the current version of OS X El Capitán or macOS Sierra.

There aren't anymore security updates, that I am currently aware of, for OS X Mountain Lion.

So, if you are still using the OS X Mountain Lion version of Apple Safari, it is no longer a secure web browser under OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and you should cease using that version of Safari.

Same issue/problem with Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox which both ended support for OS X 10.6-10.8.

Mozilla Firefox just ended its web browser support and its last full version issued (ver. 48.0.0), for OS X 10.6-10.8 can still be used for awhile longer.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/desktop/

OR

Mozilla is continuing security support (no more new web browser feature support) for the Firefox web browser through their Firefox ESR program, (which you CAN download, install and use) that will continue security only support for Firefox until next April 2017 for OS X 10.6-10.8.

You can use these ESR versions. Ignore the enterprise/educational support notes.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/

OR

Look at SeaMonkey.

http://www.seamonkey-project.org/

OR

Waterfox.

https://www.waterfoxproject.org/

So, if you feel the need to upgrade your OS X, if your system and software can tolerate it, these are legitimate reasons to move on and upgrade to an new version of OS X.

I have a lot of older software that won't run past OS X 10.9 Mavericks and can't afford to upgrade these expensive applications to use on the latest. OS X versions, so there is nothing for me with Yosemite, El Capitán or the upcoming macOS Sierra. I have El Cap on an external hard drive, but do not use it.

Good Luck!