Q: How do I downgrade from Mavericks back to Snow Leopard?

David Bullock wrote:

 

I am unlikely to stick with Mac after this botched upgrade. This is as bad if not worse than the poorest MS upgrade. I am really angry because I paid a premium when buying Mac to have a system that didn't need endless troubleshooting.

It's you, not Mavericks. I have installed OS 10.9 on five of my Macs so far, any other than the iBooks and Maps icons in the dock, I can honestly say I feel like I am still on Mountain Lion. Which is great!

Good Luck

Pete

Peter, we can't assume that just because Mavericks is working for us that others aren't having legitimate problems. Having said that, David, it would have been more helpful if you could have at least mentioned the problems you were having rather than just calling it a 'botched upgrade'. I looked at your other post though and see it has something to do with Mail not opening. If you haven't done so already you might want to go back to that thread as someone has posted a solution which seems to be fixing the problem for people.

Mavericks seems to be getting mostly positive feedback (look at the reviews on the App Store), and my own experience has been mostly positive, but you never get a true sense of that on these forums because people tend to come here only when they have a problem!

For those who are interested on a real review of Mavericks, you won't do better than John Siracusa's review on Ars Technica. He always does a very thorough and critical review of each OS X release and goes more than skin deep, looking at the underlying changes and what they mean for performance, security, etc, etc. His review of Mavericks is mostly very positive.

Yep these same issues pop up for a few people every OSX release. And it generally always comes down to incomparable third party apps or failing hardware. We need more information generally to find why some individuals have disastrous experiences.

Pete

We need more information generally to find why some individuals have disastrous experiences.

I'd call not being able to access email a pretty big deal. Not just new email but existing email stored on disk. If you use gmail, which is only 9 years old, you may some problems. A third party app — Airmail — works fine. So we can't even point the finger at Google. This is all Apple. Import it? Nope. Access it on Gmail's servers? Nope. Mail.app didn't even work properly until I deactivated the Google account. And this has gotten a lot of play at other sites as well, so it ain't just me.

How about iTunes Radio? Hope you don't want to hear more than a few songs before it just hangs. Quit/restart iTunes or switch stations, so an easy fix, but annoying.

Both of this glitches are absent in Mountain Lion which I am running now from an external drive.

I've used every release of OS X since the public beta while there have been some teething problems at times, they usually got better quickly, either a patch or some other solution.

I liked the improved speed of Safari but it comes at a high price.

As for this: I can honestly say I feel like I am still on Mountain Lion. Why would you recommend it? "Hey, it's no different" is hardly a great sales pitch, especially to people who have found it to very different.

Many options have been suggested here. Me, I go by the rule that any OS upgrade can and will screw  something up, more so if you have a lot of applications installed. It's almost guaranteed that something will break.

I partition my drive into two. I never do an OS upgrade. The new OS is installed on the second partition which allows me to try both OSes side by side. Once I'm happy I just trash the old OS and free up space. No slowdowns, no buggy apps or freezing, ever.

In contrast, every single in-place upgrade I've made right from Snow Leopard has given me grief. Snow Leo to Lion was the worst.

Another tip: Though the native apple apps like Mail, etc are nice, many features are deeply tied to the OS. An OS upgrade can break stuff here - just look at the number of posts here talking about Mail not working, people losing access to all their old mails and so on. I'd recommend using stable third party apps like Thunderbird for mail, where you can simply copy over the ~/Library/Thunderbird directory to your new OS (or even to Windows or Linux) and it just works.

At the end of the day it's not how sexy your new OS or apps look, but the ability to access your data.

It's under the hood. Not much in the GUI. Breaking all records for an OSX download, but only a handful of people with issues and I can gaurentee if they gave more details then other users here would be able to help them. Your post is a classic example of this. All whinge and no details.

Cheers

Pete

There's lots of good stuff under the hood. But I'd say there's quite a bit to see too. New apps. Offline dictation. Finder tabs and tags. And sweet blessed relief from all that leather bound nonsense Lion introduced—skeuomorphic eye candy that actually detracted from usability.

Nothing affecting my studio workflow. These comments crop up with every OSX release and disappear soon after. Except for the odd whinger, but history just repeats itself in this regard.

Pete

I've been affected by Mavericks' App Nap feature—it screwed with the timing mechanism on the software I depend on in my studio for timesheets and invoicing. If I hadn't noticed that it was giving me incorrect times, it might have cheated me out of quite a few dollars! But thankfully it's an easy fix—you can turn off App Nap for a specific app in the info panel. It's a shame the developer of this app didn't fix their software to work with Mavericks during the developer release period. So if you're using timesheet software, you might want to just check that!

Having read about App Nap in that review I linked to earlier and the extra battery life it delivers, I'm grateful for it.

No thanks. Been there, done that and ditched it.

Pete

All of you have really great stories of bad & good.

BUT NONE OF YOU HAVE ANSWERED THE QUESTION OF HOW TO GOT BACK TO MOUNTAIN LION OR WHAT OTHER OS WAS WORKING ON THE NOW GROSSLY INOPERABLE MAVERICKS INSTALLED COMPUTER.

I do video editing. It is imortant to preview the many videos that come in to sort out which goes where. I cannot do that as mavericks will not preview MANY video formats now.

I also require for sorting to be able to open things in seperate windows, and not have to hold the cmd key to do so.

The computer is now 2-4 times slower over all. and not from indexing, or other normal backgroud work,

I, and others need a listed way of going back. Not rhetoric, not childish ridicule or snotty remarks. Just info on how to go back to operational systems.

You may think Mavericks is great. That is fine. But to many of us, it is like being forced to use a Win ME system after being forced out of a solid NT or XP environment.

Take a deep breath and then have a look and see that the question was answered. The OP linked to this article among other comments: http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11181?viewlocale=en_US . A second person even linked to it again on page 3, just in case you missed it the first time, and in the answered question section on page 1.

Sorry for the snotty remark but you really were asking for it. ;-)

Hi all,

Great to come across this forum. Just downloaded Mavericks and now suffering through a very slow computer, especially when using Word 2011 (new updates and all).

I'm going to rollback to OSX Mountain Lion following these instructions. That said, my last time machine backup is a bit old (early September) so there are some files that I will have to replace which I can only back up from the Mavericks OSX. They are all Word files. Is that going to be a problem? Is there any reason why having run Word 2011 on Mavericks and rolling back would corrupt files modified while running Mavericks? Doesn't seem like there would be since Word is not a Mavericks app, but just wanted to cover my bases...

Thanks,

S.A.

As long as the version of Word you have on ML is the same and as long as Word didn't do anything different on Mavericks the files should be fine.

As always make backups of everything just in case.

Not to jinx things, but this roll back trick using a prior Time Machine copy and a copy of Word files that I had used and backed up while running Mavericks seems to have worked. I thought the sluggishness of Mavericks was maybe in my mind, but I am a lot happier with 10.8.5. The computer seems so much more responsive; there's a noticeable difference. Thanks for the help!