Does anyone recommend OS X Lion?

STPoD

I like it

This [my posting on iCloud] has nothing to do with the topic, Lion. If you wish to discus security implications of remote storage then please start a topic elsewhere.

This is exactly wrong. The topic is "Does anyone recommend OS X Lion?" Separating the tool from its purpose is highly mistaken. Lion is intended to turn Macs into platforms for iCloud. iCloud comes with security issues. It's prudent to be cautious regarding Lion based on these concerns.

@ woodmeister50 Regarding the security issues associated with IMAP: find an ISP whom you trust. It doesn't have to be one of the giants that make beaucoup bucks collecting and selling data about you. Find a smaller ISP who is in business to make money simply by hooking you up to the Internet.

Bob, you are wrong for a couple of reasons. If lion was a tool to use cloud & you could not run lion without using iCloud you would be correct. However (1) the iCloud features are not available yet to the masses, yet they can still use Lion, and (2) the purpose of Lion is not to use the cloud, but to enable those wishing to do so. No one is going to force people to use it. It is optional.

So, this has less to do with Lion, and more to do with security and iCloud. The proper forum to discuss this is OS X Technologies.

Oh boy, this thread has turned out to be a record breaker.

Having posted a couple of comments somewhere back in the depths of this thread and making the decsion to leave Lion alone for a while, I had a bit of a re think, and thought I would comment on my experience.

On the basis that my dear little Mini 2.0GHz with a whole 1GB ram was never going to make the grade, I decided to upgrade to a 2010 model (yes I do want DVD capability built in) and found myself a perfect example on ebay with the full monty of 8GB and Snow Leopard which is a scorcher of a machine.

Having set up my clone of the old machine on a seperate partition on the new one I was able to combine the two Snow Leopard systems into one perfectly working one. Then came the urge to see what happens if I install Lion (No I hear you all scream), well maybe not, as many have said on this thread, if you install Lion to a seperate partition and dual boot your machine, it is a doddle to migrate your stuff over from the SL installation and you have the ability to go back into SL for those apps that won't work with Lion.

And whilst I still haven't quite got to grips with Lions quirkes, I have to say that I have yet to experience any major problems (apart from todays refusal to update its software, but that turned out to be Apples fault) and am sort of liking some of its functions. Not sure about the Versions/Resume issue, but as I haven't done any major document editing I can't really comment. So in short, as has been said many a time before, backup, backup again and do a clean install to a second partion, then play away and if you don't like it, dump it.

For the time being though, I think I will keep my dual boot and see how iCloud fairs up when it arrives.

😉

Oh boy, this thread has turned out to be a record breaker.

Actually... no. I've been involved in threads which were longer, both in numbers of posts and in length of time they were active. For example there was a monster thread in about 2006, when the Capacitor Plague hit eMacs, which lasted well over six months and had multiple thousands of posts.

Of course, that particular thread was about real world problems, not about mindless whining.

If Lion causes anyone problems, they can do what I did: revert to SL and drive on. If they had a proper backup it's trivial to do so. I had a proper backup; I rebooted my machine to use that backup and was running in SL in a matter of minutes. From that backup I reformatted my internal hard drive and restored to the internal drive overnight. Next morning I rebooted unto the internal drive and was operational on it. No muss, no fuss, problem done. If necessary I could have used my Time Machine backup instead, but the full backup meant that I didn't need to. I _always_ make a _full_ backup to an external hard drive before performing OS surgery, such as updating to a new OS. Always. Without exception. I backup before doing point upgrades, too. External hard drives are cheap, backup software is cheap or free, and backups can be run overnight where they do not impact your usage. Backups are usefully for far more than recovering after an OS problem, and there is simply no reason to not have at the very least a Time Machine backup, and very little reason to not cover yourself against further problems by having a full bootable clone backup. I have no sympathy at all for anyone who has a problem because he didn't have a backup.

We now return you to the ranting and raving currently in progress.

Charles Dyer wrote:

We now return you to the ranting and raving currently in progress.

😁

I had GSOD the other day on Lion, and no nice messages, just an endless refusal to boot or die, with the MBP getting hotter and hotter. Nothing for it but the 10-second power down, though if I'd been a new user chances are I wouldn't have known about that.

jarturoe

The correct answer is NO - No one in their right mind would recommend Lion aside from Apple Staff

Terence Devlin ! you should be ashamed

I don't recommend it because I don't see the point of it. Snow Leopard is a better OS for a multi-functional, powerful computer. Lion seems to be a step toward bringing iOS and Mac OS into one fold; a day when apps and data will all be run from the cloud and general homeuser computing machines will be mere skeletons of what they are now.

Of course you can use Lion without using iCloud - a service that's not even available yet - for now. I strongly doubt that is the future Apple have in mind for either. Lion is a testbed, as is the App store and iCloud, for a step away from individual users having control over their own individual s/w and data. The advantages for companies are clear - an end to s/w copying, captive audience paying for services as well as products with a built-in redundancy/upgrade cylce, and central control over technical problems, viruses, malware etc.

If you're happy paying for an annual service, happy about needing authorisation as well as a network to access your own data and even run your own machine, if you're happy agreeing to all the Terms and Conditions that companies like Apple will inevitably impose on you and your use, happy that anyone with what some quasi-legal authority can look at what you're doing, happy that some without authority will inevitably find a way to look at what you're doing, then you'll be happy taking a step forward into the future with Lion and iCloud.

Charles? Mindless whining?

Are you insane?

Whether someone has a backup or not is not the issue. The issue is the amount of dangerous bugs that are in the system in addition to the simply LAME functionality that you can't turn off.

Have you been paying attention to the bug reports?

LDAP servers not checking the login password? That's almost worse than anything I've heard that came out of the Windows court.

And I found out a problem that was plaguing me since my first week of Lion installs; the spotlight indexing process called mdworker, actually launching my applescripts and executing them when it indexes them on my Hard drives. That's huge. That's terrible. That's really dangerous.

Drop an applescript on someone's machine and just wait for it to fire off when the drive indexes. Major security hole. These images? From the eppc urls in my applescripts. Yes, I traced them back to being launched by mdworker. That's just horrible.

http://i.imgur.com/lh650.png

These are critical flaws that indicate the OS should have never gone out in this condition. Makes me wonder what else is broken, but since I'm 100% back on Snow Leopard, I just hope that none of my clients needs a recompile for Lion until well after it's stable.

I had GSOD the other day on Lion, and no nice messages, just an endless refusal to boot or die, with the MBP getting hotter and hotter. Nothing for it but the 10-second power down, though if I'd been a new user chances are I wouldn't have known about that.

Whoa! Watch out! That happened to my Air. I unthinkingly persisted in trying to get it to reboot and the problem got worse and worse. Until it just stopped working.

The CPU had overheated and torched the logic board. The Air had to be sent to Apple in Austin and the logic board replaced, plus the cover (which I didn't notice had been damaged, also), plus the SSD. In other words, everything. Thank goodness for AppleCare.

If you're having profound problems, see your Apple-certified repair shop (I don't recommend an Apple Store). Have them look at it before the problem gets worse. I lost use of my Air for two weeks, particularly during an important trip, and then had to reinstall Snow Leopard lest it happen all over again. That took another week, expunging all the Lion alterations. Now both my Air and my Pro (which I never "Lionized") are on SL and I'm keeping it that way.

We now return you to the ranting and raving currently in progress.

You're so ******* smart, Charles.

Not all of us are so lucky. My Air's DDTL (Dying Due To Lion) was terminal. Most of its firmware had to be replaced and the SSDs, too. I had to reload Snow Leopard from scratch, after purging it of Lion. I used the backup on my Pro's Time Machine. That in itself wasn't too bad. But many other pieces of my software were broken when I extracted Lion. It took me two days to get back to Ground Zero. Then several more days after that to finish the install of SL.

But hey, I've only been using Macs since 1984. I'm not as smart as you. I guess it's my fault, not Apple's? I'm just a whiner, right? How insulting.

I had GSOD the other day on Lion, and no nice messages, just an endless refusal to boot or die, with the MBP getting hotter and hotter. Nothing for it but the 10-second power down, though if I'd been a new user chances are I wouldn't have known about that.

Whoa! Watch out! That happened to my Air. I unthinkingly persisted in trying to get it to reboot and the problem got worse and worse. Until it just stopped working.

Yes, and I nearly made a fatal mistake. Warning to others: don't just close the lid and think it will go into Sleep mode. It doesn't. It carries on spinning and getting hotter and hotter. You must hold down the power button till the screen goes black.

Mindless whining I said, and mindless whining I meant.

1 the LDAP problem does not happen with most machines. I know this because when _I_ was testing Lion _I_ connected to numerous servers... or at least tried to. I did not see any such problem. Rather the reverse, in fact; I had a serious problem getting Lion clients to talk to servers in the first place. The inability of the SMBX protocol to talk to WinServer 2003 servers (which, make no mistake, use LDAP) was one reason why Lion was nixed around here. We'd have noticed if the thing had a hole that size.

2 mds does not, repeat, does NOT cause the problems you say you have with most other systems. We ran testing on more than a dozen machines, from Mac minis to Mac Pros. _NONE_ of them showed any such problems. Other problems, yes. Anything at all like what you say, no. Not even one. Yes, you have a problem... but it's _your_ problem.

I don't know what is causing your problems, but whatever it is, it's not an inherent problem in Lion 'cause we took a _long_ look at Lion around here on multiple machines and did not see anything close to what you report.

And, of course, even if you are 100% correct in your statements, there's a simple solution: drop back to SL. Problem done. That is what we did.

Please note that since I first saw your report about MDS causing Applescript to go crazy I dug out a Lion installer and reinstalled Lion on an external drive and booted this very machine up in Lion using that drive... and in 12 hours of testing I did not have one, not even one, Applescript launch that I didn't want to launch. I did not have one, not even one, application launch that I did not want to launch. And, oh, I _still_ couldn't connect properly to the WS2k3 server. There was an improvement; this time the system would bind to Active Directory, and I could detect the server and start to log in... I just couldn't actually get to a network share and do anything. Who knows, maybe by the time 10.7.2 shows I'll actually be able to log in all the way. Be still my beating heart.

And, oh, the fact that I have bootable clone backups is one reason why I can actually test things without messing up my base system. I can just build a clone and install on the clone, and if things don't work out, well just wipe that external drive and the problem goes away....

We now return you to the ranting and raving still in progress.

Charles, you are simply making excuses.

What if "most machines" wasn't one of yours? Would you be so kind? If we saw this in Windows, wouldn't we slam the OS for not being secure?

You're being an apologist with the attitude of a Fox TV reporter.

Just because it "doesn't happen in your machine" doesn't mean that it's not a real problem. When my OS screws up like Lion has, it impacts my productivity. I'm a software architect. I don't have time to perform the test cases as if I were on the Lion Engineering team. I have my own work to do. I'm just lucky that I didn't upgrade my main work machine at all and only my brand new 17 inch laptop and 1 year old 27 inch iMac.

You may have the time to track down every problem, but I don't. If the OS doesn't work for me as the previous one did, then I have no choice to go back to what works.

Did the mdworker problem happen? Yep. Sure did. Could I reproduce it? Yep, sure could. Did I create a reproducable rest for you? No. I'm not getting paid by my employer to address Apple bugs.

Do you remember my data loss bug in Safari? Submit a post to a web page like this one, misspell some words, press command shift semicolon, and then click ignore. Your page reloads and you lose your data. Could I reproduce this bug? On both of the machines that I had that ran Lion? Yes. With submissions to this forum and to Reddit.com.

So, is this raving just because I didn't create reproducable test cases for you, even though I found the bugs were reproducable before mentioning them?

If you doubt my ability to do this "testing thing" or "development thing", I was the QA Archtect for Macromedia's (now Adobe) Shockwave and was Macromedia's first QA Architect. Recently, at Verizon, I was one of the guys that created FiOS TV, where my software touched every product in the FiOS TV suite and happened to file 9 patents in the process. And so on and so on.

I'm not a chump when it comes to these things.

What I don't have is TIME to deal with a misfunctioning OS that is similarly screwed on the two macs that I installed it on out of the four macs that I own.

If you have 12, yes, 12 hours to test, then GREAT. I don't. If you have EVER professionally done QA or development before you will know that just because it works in your backyard, doesn't mean that problem doesn't exist.

Apple's not my employer. I expect, for a point release, that the changes NOT be this severe and no matter what I pay for it, I expect it to function as well as the previous release.

On two modern machines, it hasn't, it doesn't and it isn't.

Say what you want, but people don't pay me 6 figures because I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to developing and delivering software.

When other people have valid problems with your favorite company, do not be an apologist, a denier and eat your own dog food. Consider yourself fortunate that you don't have the problems they have, and demand better quality from your favorite company. When you insist everyone else is just crazy you're missing the point that the software simply has to be better to work the way that we all need it to.

I'm sure the people who have the fried MacBook Airs think Lion's a gem! If you actually have a problem with their reports, then, well, you're simply not worth listening to.

Enjoy. I'm going to sleep.