I bailed on Lion

@Peter Coleman: I am using for the first time my Apple ID, just to say that I agree with everything you said. I spent a whole week trying to like something about Lion, and trying to accustom myself to all the bugs, and trying to put up with the inexcusable slowness of Lion. I used the System Preferences to disable features, I used the Terminal to disable animations. But I have had enough, and I am going back to Snow Leopard, like you did.

Lion lasted less than a day here. Once I realised I cannot fix the butchered iCal and Mission Control is a sad immitation of Expose and Space, I went back to SL. Fortunately I had the foresight to install Lion on an external drive so moving back to SL was a no-op (and a no brainer). The only thing I miss from Lion is the ability to resize a window from all sides which unbelievably had taken Apple over 20 years to implement. I dread the day when Apple make their ios development tools Lion only and I'll have no choice but to move.

Like a fair number of people, I installed Lion on my 2009 8GB iMac as soon as it was released, following Apple's instructions and ended up with a computer with significantly worse performance. After combing these and other forums for tips and tricks to clean up the less than good installation I am now almost back to where I was with SL re. system responsiveness but there are still far more spinning pinwheels than I ever saw with Leopard or SL.

I don't plan to bail entirely - I'll wait to see if 10.7.1 (or 2) improves things - if not, I may resort to a completely clean installation. I am neither wowed nor appalled by Lion's new features and don't mind adapting to new ways of doing things even if they do not seem obviously better. I do mind that this upgrade was far more problematic for me (and many others) than the move from Leopard to SL and that overall system responsivess has been degraded.

While there is a lot of helpful information here it is amazing to me the degree of slavish devotion to all things Apple that I see here among folks to don't work for the company. Apple does get things wrong sometimes. This is one of those times - perhaps not to a major degree - Lion is no disaster overall (except for some people), but if nothing else, the installation process engineered by Apple is not robust and leaves many users with a mess to clean up. And not having these kinds of problems is what users expect from Apple.

"...then found I could change most things I didn't like eg iCal and Address Book skins, startup screen, settings for Mail..."

Intrigued! So exactly how do you change the pathetic iCal 50's mock leather look-a-like iCal back to something resembling a computer based calendar?

I do not agree on the UI changes as I see them as mostly consistent with the iOS platform. That being said, I would like to add my 2 cents worth as a 35 Year UNIX veteran at the kernel level as well as at all other levels above the UNIX kernel. Here it goes in a nutshell: LION IS EXTREMELY BUGGY AND LION IS REALLY SLOW SO IF YOU ARE THINKING OF UPGRADING -- DO NOT UPGRADE UNTIL AND UNLESS 10.7.X FIXES THESE THINGS. I HAVE NEVER EVER, EVER, EVER MADE A COMMENT LIKE THIS ABOUT AN APPLE UPGRADE SINCE OSX WAS IMPLEMENTED. THIS IS THE BIGGEST WARNING: IF YOU USE MICROSOFT SHARES VIA SMB THEN THINGS ARE EVEN WORSE. APPLE DECIDED TO REWRITE/REPLACE THE SAMBA SOFTWARE TO PROVIDE MICROSOFT SHARES AND I CAN SAY UNEQUIVOCALLY THEY DID THE WORST JOB I HAVE SEEN FROM APPLE EVER. I AM STUCK AND I HATE IT. Do I clean off my two computers and put snow leopard back on? Do i not buy the mini mac for my wife because it comes with the Cra**y Lion microsoft networking. I cannot even connect to the network sometimes with my VMWARE Fusion. I would like to revert everything except the new email and swiping gestures. Camino crashes running Java. Apple really messed this one up bad.

I've been with OSX since the beginning. Each iteration a step forward. This one is not...

- Mission control is a fail - expose was much easier to understand and use

- Launch pad is a fail - much easier to use the application folder in the dock as list (yes, like Windows does)

- UI graphics are sketchy, they're slow and add nothing to the overall experience

- Versions is a step back - it assumes I want to save everything I ever create when in fact, it's the opposite (I like to save the drafts that mean something to me), so now I have to close windows one at a time and discard each window (vs. just closing the app and being asked if I want to discard)

- Safari keeps all these windows open - I often surf with a large number of windows open, closing is the easiest way to rid myself of them... but now Lion thinks it knows how to work better than me, so it just keeps re-opening them - forcing me (not the application) to close each one

- It's not stable ... for the first time ever, I can't believe I'm saying this about my Mac - I don't trust it, when waking from sleep it takes forever, I login and can be logged right back out (no disernable reason); my Wi-Fi connection drops for minutes at a time; mission control can't display things in a consistent manner

At end of day, I reverted back to Snow Leopard. It's the right thing for me to do. They (glitchy) eye candy and "I know better than you what you want to save, open, and display" attitude of Lion is just intrusive. It's a step backward.

My first Mac OS Was 1.1 back in 1984. I always enjoy each upgrade.

The only time I skipped an upgrade was from OS 9 to 10.2. (I skipped 10.0 and 10.1)

Sad to report, I have now gone back to 10.6.8. (Snow Leopard)

In the Windows world, which I am sadly forced to use occasionally, I wisely skipped Vista, and went from Windows XP to Windows 7.

I was able to get over most of the technical problems with Lion. I felt that the interface was “dumbed down” and harder to use and missing some features (Bounce was removed from mail).

Then for you SL is probably the end of the road:

http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/the-end-both-the-desktop-os-and-mob ile-os-upon-us-168915

I notice that apple have brought out some Software Updates to Snow Leopard to fix some problems associated with data loss on converting to Lion.

I am reading about all the faults and waiting until the major faults are fixed before I pay out any cash to upgrade.

I particularily want my 6 Western Digital high volume discs to work on Lion: see http://roaringapps.com/apps:table/tags/_w/index_tags/_w

All my photographic( stills & video), music, web design production files, desk top publishing (I'm a magazine editor) are on these disks. And I notice that UK Apple stores are selling WD external disks. I hope they are informing purchasers that the disks are reported as not working ( see link above, and goto section W.

I also require Guitar Rig 3 to work - there is no information on this version at the moment, version 2 works, but version 4 doesn't, according to the above link.

Well, I obviously can't sit on SL forever

You won't have to. At some point, fixes and improvements will be made. I know many people who are running three and four-year-old versions of the Mac OS. There happy as clams.

That would be Tiger at the oldest and they are happy until they buy an iDevice. And there are no more fixes or improvements being made to Tiger.

I am still on 10.6.7 waiting to see what reviews Lion will get before I consider it ... after reading many bad reviews it seems Lion is a no go zone for me.