How long should I wait?

I would go for it. I did in fact. Although, like you, I waited for a few months and then took the plunge.

One way to test Lion is to create a new partiton and install Lion on there, running alongside your current OS, SL.

That way you can break in any suspect apps to see if you have any issues.

10.7.2 seems OK, but there are a few minor irritations. But, knocks on wood, I personally haven't had any MAJOR issues at all. However, my flat mate, who took the plunge on day one, has now started to see a few kinks in his system. Issues with waking from sleep, whereby the screen remains black and the audio fails to initiate. However, he's a lazy bugger and rarely turns off or maintains his system.

The choice is really up to you.

Best of luck.

Message was edited by: RáNdÓm GéÉzÁ (Typo)

Dogs 'n Front wrote:

how long should I wait until I upgrade to Lion?

I tried it for about a month after it came out, and by the end of that time I was experiencing so many issues with it that I went back to Snow Leopard, which has far greater capabilities for what I need to do.

At first sight Lion is almost exactly the same as Snow, except that the interface is uglier. I doesn't do anything Snow couldn't do (unless you're interested in the Cloud). In fact it does less (such as not running PPC applications).

After using it for a while I found that I was running into a whole range of problems, the worst of which was the frequent beachballing/total system freezes.

I still have Lion on another computer, and I fool around with it occasionally when I can't think of anything better to do.

IMHO it needs at least another 4-5 updates. I'm hoping all the issues may be ironed out by Easter 2012.

If you decide to install Lion, it is vital that you first

(a) make a complete bootable clone of your hard drive to an external FireWire hard drive

(b) do not run the Lion installer until you have copied it to a USB drive (because it self-destructs in the act of installing itself, leaving you without a copy).

If you are aware of the changes that have been made in Lion and have checked compatibility of all your apps and hardware, and there are no issues for you on hose fronts, then go for it. Any bugs still present at this point are minor, and most of the serious issues people have are either because they didn't do their homework beforehand or because of problems like installing over a damaged system or bad third-party software.

Note that Tom in London is a fairly notoriously negative person on these forums, and his advice should be taken with a grain of salt. However, I will also say he's absolutely correct about the precautions to take beforehand. I'd also add that you should repair your hard drive wih Disk Utility before installing, to avoid the possibility of any corruption in the disk causing problems for you.

Is there a way to keep up to date with the updates and monitor the progress of Lion to see when I should convert?

What I wrote above is only my opinion, based on my personal experience with Lion. You would probably find it useful to explore the Lion discussion forums to see how others feel about it.

The way I keep up to date is: I keep Lion on another computer and fire it up once in a while. If there are any software updates I download them directly into Lion.

As to monitoring progress, you could sign up for regular email updates about new Mac software, for example at CNet.

Also read the many Mac-related websites and non-Apple discussion forums, such as this one. There are many others.

Thomas A Reed wrote:

Note that Tom in London is a fairly notoriously negative person on these forums

Wrong. You ought to read the 100s of posts where I offer useful advice.

My post was a perfectly honest account of my experience with Lion.

You may wish to remove your personally offensive remark.

Although it's more likely you'll make an even more offensive one now.

I'll leave it up to dogs'n to decide who's being rude to whom. Sorry dogs'n but not there are a few people on this forums who spend most of their time personally attacking others. I guess they have nothing else to do with their time.

😎

You make it sound like beach balls and freezes are known bugs with Lion, when they aren't. That is a sign of some problem, such as bad third-party software, insufficient RAM, corruption in the system or hardware problems.

The fact is that I don't recall the last time that I saw that you had anything kind to say about any change Apple has made to anything. If you truly don't like anything Apple has done in the last few years, that's your business, but posters should be aware of that before taking a complaint too seriously.

I'm glad I am keeping out of the nit picking here...

It's really up to you Dogs'n... Try it and see... It's really all about personal preference and as mentioned above, homework and a little preparation.

"Fail to prepare, prepare to fail", as the old saying goes...

Dogs 'n Front wrote:

i appreciate everyone's advice. Sounds like it's a 50/50 in terms of whether or not to upgrade now.

Hi Dogs, I'm on the positive side. No problems at all since installing when it was first released. Just as a clue, the level number under the posters name is for - Higher the Number, more that poster has helped. Higher the points, well they are points given by posters for correct and helpful advice, so obviously there may be a great variation like ten times more helpful answers given by one poster compared to another.

Just something else to take on board. I come from an Apple family and pretty much an Apple community and although there are a few gripes over interface changes from a couple, none have experienced any system slowdowns or any other issues.

Good Luck

Thomas A Reed wrote:

I don't recall the last time that I saw that you had anything kind to say about any change Apple has made to anything.

He just won't stop. I think it's congenital. Dogz- you get the picture.

If you are concerned, then wait until you are no longer concerned.

Or get an external disk and install Lion on the external and experiment with it (or partition your boot disk and install Lion on a separate partition).

Or get one of the virtual machine products (VMware Fusion, Parallels, VirtualBox) and install Lion in a virtual machine and experiment. Assumes you have at least Snow Leopard, more than 2GB of RAM in your Mac, and enough free disk space to hold a Lion virtual boot disk container file.

Hi..

Also take into acount, that this forum is where many people who are having dificulties / issues will seek help. Most of the users that have no issues are not here. 🙂 They have better things to do.

Then there are the group of users who have no issues, but roam around in here trying to help others.

So, if say 50% are either negative or positive on something or other, that really dont't tell you anything usefull.

/Dennis

(No issues 🙂)

Running Lion here on two iMacs and a MacBook Pro, without issues, the iMacs for many months. The MBPro is very recent and of course came with Lion. I was aware of the loss of PPC Applications. I still have SL on an external drive attached to the older iMac but I have not booted from that since converting to Lion on day one of its release.