Does anyone recommend OS X Lion?

Installed on 3 machines. No real problems.

safari was crashign occasionally on one machine but once spotlight finished indexing it seems to have cleared up.

I spent two days researching before upgrading. Reading app compatability lists to ensure those programs I needed for productivity worked and that Lion worked as advertised.

Then I took the leap -- with my laptop. I used Lion on it for 24 hours running all my preferred apps through their paces and when I was convinced they did I upgraded the wife's laptop. This morning I did the same for our desk top/primary work computer. no regrets (yet). 😉

I did take the precaution of cloning the desktop computer's drive just in case...

But seriously this seems to be the smoothest transiton I've ever had for a major OSX upgrade. Virtually everythign I needed as far as new drivers was there waiting for me when I went to find it. Even the obscure stuff like Camtwist. I can remember at time with a new version of OSX would arrive and I would have to wait for weeks for a new printer driver or a patch for my banking software.

Only program I've had ot kick to the curb on this install was Passwords Plus (PPC app) but it was painless. I printed out all my data as both a pdf and a cvs file so I still have access to it.

I will say all three installs appeared 'buggy' and slow the first 3 to 6 hours. I assume that's because Lion was doing a lot of background stuff like rebuilding indexes and the like. But a few hours later they are as zippy as snow leopard ever was.

Oh just to add one more thing...

on my wife's laptop and the desktop the installer took forever to do it's job (compared to my first install). The time remaining bar actually went from "5 minutes remaining" to -45 minutes remaining at one time. (Negative time?)

That had me in a panic and I was thinking of doing a forced reboot but I googled the symptom and found that most people who experienced the same thing reported it eventually worked -- so that' what I did. I waited.

About 20 minutes later the installer finished up it's work and all was well.

I only mentioned it because I read a couple of accounts where people got impatient and did a force reboot and trashed their drive/screw things up.

Stephane Cohou wrote:

Mine works flawlessly. How come?

Because that's what it is supposed to do, and fortunatly does with lots of happy customers (about 80% of the customer-reviews are "excellent" and 10% "Good". That must count for something).

The rest is mostly dissapointed because they have not realized PPC-software won't work or other vendors have not done their home-work in time. So upgrading to Lion means not only spending $ 30, but buying other (expensive) new software. Not Apple's fault, but most of them blame Lion anyway.

And a small amount of users suffer from hardware problems (video/hdmi). Now that's Apple fault and those people are angry with a reason. That shouldn't happen. Apple should fix that ASAP.

If you haven't got all that, you just have an OS that works flawless. Congratulations.

PeterVL57, I agree with you 100%. I have Lion running on three Macs. I first installed it on the 2006 MacPro in my office at work because I have high speed Internet access. No problem with the download or actual installation. I then waited a day before I installed it on my 2008 24" iMac at home, but I installed it off a DVD onto which I burned the installer from my MacPro, so I did not have to download Lion at home. No problems there at all.

I then waited until Friday night before I installed it on my current generation MacBook Pro. I installed it off the DVD too. No problems.

My MacPro is my oldest Mac. It had a few PowerPC packages that started automatically that I no longer usesuch as the Palm Pilot software. I disabled them, then Lion ran fine after I rebooted. The worst I can say is that at work, I cannot mount shared CIFS folders on my employer's EMC NAS. As it turns out, EMC has issued a fix for that, which must be applied on the NAS, so I asked my NAS administrator to schedule that installation as soon as possible. In addition, because I have a huge amount of email, the new Mail app took over night to import and index it all, but it worked fine on my iMac and MacPro; I haven't tried Mail on my MacBook Pro yet. I use Outlook 2011 and it works fine on my MacBook Pro and MacPro too. I am not licensed to use Office 2011 on my iMac so I haven't tried it there.

Thus far, all my apps, including the VPN software I have to use at home to access resources at work is fine, even without doing an update. Parallels is fine with Windows XP (I haven't tried it with Vista yet). I have Fusion with Windows 7, but I haven't tried it yet.

Issues with Safari 5.1 are really separate from Lion issues, but I understand the confusion. Since Safari 5.1 was bundled with Lion, it is no wonder many Mac users associate problems with Safari with Lion. Those who stay with Snow Leopard have the opportunity to install the new Safari too. When I first started Safari 5.1 on my MacBook Pro, it too hung, but rebooting it after disabling PowerPC start up items appears to have fixed that problem.

Should people rush to install Lion? I work in IT, and at the university where I work, everyone in my department looks to me for info on Apple's newest OS, so that's why I installed Lion quickly. In general, my approach to all things with computes is if it isn't broken, don't fix it. If you need new functionality that Lion offers, by all means, install it. I suggest you take a careful look at Lion first at any store that sells Macs before you install Lion. In addition, do an inventory of your software to ensure that you do not need any PowerPC applications or that you are willing to upgrade them before going to Lion. Do the same with all your peripherals, especially scanners and printers by checking with their manufacturers to see if they are supported with Lion. By all means, make a bootable backup before upgrading to Lion and verify that it actually is bootable.

Schrodinger56 wrote:

But why should you have to plan ahead, I don't recall having to "plan ahead" for the various Windows upgrades that have transpired over the years? They may have had a few bugs but nothing on this scale if I recall. Listening to the Apple Keynote address that launched Lion the impression was that you simply just went to the Apps store downloaded it and off you went, a great new OS full of great enhancements (judging from the reaction of the invited audience!!) so what could be simpler you didn't even need a disc to fiddle about with! However the reality is (unless you're one of the lucky ones) you have to have detailed knowledge of the intricacies of the way an Apple computer works in order to rectify problems that just shouldn't be happening on the scale they are. It doesn't matter that it's a new OS Apple should have done more to ensure a far less fraught and bug ridden introduction to its new OS especially given all the hype at its launch.

Oh, please. This release of OS X is no more "buggy" than any other release in the past. The only reason it seems that more people are complaining is because they are unhappy that their obsolete software is no longer supported by a technology that was never intended to be a permanent solution to running that old software.

Upgrading your Operating System is major surgery on your computer. Of course you need to "plan ahead" by having a current back up of all your data and have a plan for what to do in case something goes wrong. This is relevant for both Macs and PCs running Windows. Preferably, you have both a current backup via Time Machine and a bootable clone of the HDD from immediately before you installed the OS upgrade.

You're question of "why should you have to plan ahead" is naive and foolish. When upgrading computer Operatiing Systems you always plan ahead. Otherwise you're just asking for trouble.

Michael Allbritton wrote:

Oh, please. This release of OS X is no more "buggy" than any other release in the past.

I was just sitting here thinking, "Didn't we have almost this exact same discussion back when Leopard was released?". 😁

The Apple way ... buy new to stay up

The MS way ... drown in a sea of backword compatibility

Michael Allbritton wrote:

Oh, please. This release of OS X is no more "buggy" than any other release in the past.

I had no "buggy" issues going from Tiger to Leopard then to Snow Leopard, I just stuck the disk in sat back and waited.

All were very smooth transitions.

Walter Johnson wrote:

The Apple way ... buy new to stay up

The MS way ... drown in a sea of backword compatibility

LOL, inorite? Isn't all the backward-compatibility boatware what made XP so... odd at times?

Kittenmommy wrote:

I was just sitting here thinking, "Didn't we have almost this exact same discussion back when Leopard was released?". 😁

Indeed we have, Kittenmommy. In fact weve had the same discussion since OS X v. 10.0 was released and for every major iteration since. People always accuse the new, .0 OS of being "buggy" when in fact they really don't know what that word means. I'm not claming that 10.0 Lion is bug-free, because it is not, but the issues that are still there are, generally, so minior that they really don't matter. Some folks have found a small number of major bugs that didn't get found in testing, but if they call Apple Support they can get more professional help and get it sorted out.

Schrodinger56 wrote:

Michael Allbritton wrote:

Oh, please. This release of OS X is no more "buggy" than any other release in the past.

I had no "buggy" issues going from Tiger to Leopard then to Snow Leopard. All were very smooth transitions.

I lost my entire iPhoto library when I went from Tiger to Leopard. Apple couldn't tell me why that happened. Luckily, Backup (OMG, remember Backup??) saved the day! 😁

But yeah, I was not a very happy or satisfied Apple customer that day, let me tell you! 😠

I see your point, but appearantly the new Apple way is to make me stand at the back of the room with my Magic Trackpad and pretend my Cinema Display is an iPad. Maybe from back there I won't notice the torn edges paper on my calendar, the refection of my face in my glossy monitor, or the fact that my physical-looking address book has a magical electronic search bar. It's Harry Potter's address book, I guess.

I love some of the new UX and UI, and I am confident bugs by both Apple and vendors with get ironed out. But if the trend is to eliminate the desktop UX and give me a cutesy UI, I am going to Ubuntu or Vista or something. This is the first time I can say that both of them have a better UI than Apple, and no one should underestimate the UI/UX for something they work with all day everyday.

Michael Allbritton wrote:

Kittenmommy wrote:

I was just sitting here thinking, "Didn't we have almost this exact same discussion back when Leopard was released?". 😁

Indeed we have, Kittenmommy. In fact weve had the same discussion since OS X v. 10.0 was released and for every major iteration since. People always accuse the new, .0 OS of being "buggy" when in fact they really don't know what that word means. I'm not claming that 10.0 Lion is bug-free, because it is not, but the issues that are still there are, generally, so minior that they really don't matter. Some folks have found a small number of major bugs that didn't get found in testing, but if they call Apple Support they can get more professional help and get it sorted out.

I remember the nightmare of going from 7.5 to 8. My computer hated 8 and I ended up having to reformat and reinstall. Things didn't get better until 8.5. I learned my lesson and have never owned a copy of Jaguar! 😉

So this is nothing new. I bet if one had the patience (and the archives here went back far enough) one could find posts like this re: every single new OS release! 😁

Schrodinger56 wrote:

I had no "buggy" issues going from Tiger to Leopard then to Snow Leopard, I just stuck the disk in sat back and waited. All were very smooth transitions.

And for most people that is the norm.

Cthulhu wrote:

It's Harry Potter's address book, I guess.

Harry Potter's address book would be sentient, have huge teeth, and bite! 😉