One Month and one day of Lion.
One month after the release of Apple’s new OS, I feel it’s time to publish my humble opinion. I’ve been on the Apple train since Tiger but had come in touch with the OS’es since OS9.
I always thought that Lion would be OSXI (11), and not a sub of OSX. But still I figured the changes made to the OS would be as significant as the changes from 9 to X. Just because of the name, rather stupid of me, but I know that lots of Apple fans felt and thought the same way. Obviously they where not, OS9 to X was (although with the inevitable hiccups) revolutionary, Lion, was just an update for Snow Leopard (which was an update to Leopard).
I really had mixed feelings the first couple of days on Lion, and to be honest, I still don’t know how I feel. I don’t know what to recommend to my fellow Apple users. Until this day, I recommended a no-go to my low level experienced friends, and I did the same to my mid level friends (I don’t know any high level users). People who never try anything, don”t ever fix something, still have the same dock, widgets and Sidebar items, and call me whenever Apple offers updates, those are low level users, People who have tried some stuff, know where to find the users Library and the Root Library, use some Terminal, and have edited some Plists, I call Mid Level users. Login in as Root, editing or creating boot .plist files, fixing grey screens and repairing or modding their hardware (successfully) I call High end users.
Installing Lion was really just as simple as everybody says it is. Open the Appstore, pay for Lion, let it download, press install and wait. I’ve read that it would take some hours for downloading and installing. Maybe all those users did it at the same time, because my install hardly took an hour. 10 minute download and 25 minute install. Almost forgot, I updated Snow Leopard to Lion, so no clean install.
After installing, Lion, friendly as he is, showed me the incompatible apps and moved it to a folder where it would collect all the incompatible apps (luckily for me, I just had one app not working (netstats.app).) After that, not much looked different (and I wasn't expecting much different), Dock added Launchpad and Mission Control. The wallpaper changed, and that was about it.
Opening a new Finder window added same changes, new (grey-only) icons in the sidebar. Another thing i’d noticed was coverflow had not changed, Lion should have a blue-ish-glow backdrop, but it stayed black as night. I figured it would be a setting (but its not). But what was this? No Bootcamp partition? Finder did not show my bootcamp partition, I panicked (without a real reason, I don’t even have game saves on there). Opened Disk-utility and saw that the partition was still there, just not activated. I tried activating it but a no go for that neither, so I was afraid it goth messed up. Rebooting and holding ALT still showed it (and an extra recovery partition for Lion, nice!). And yes, it booted just fine, no worries, Bootcamp was fine, it was Lion who was having the troubles.
Back in Lion, I was going true the system settings, first thing I turned off was the new way of scrolling, I get way Apple did this, and I would have kept it if I used a Magic Trackpad, but with a mouse only, it just doesn’t feel right. Another problem was opening Mission Control settings, it just would not open.
All the rest seemed fine, everything worked, Adobe Worked, Firefox didn’t loose anything, my menu applets worked, ... all good.
After a few days I switched off opening documents automatically, it was driving me nuts!. After doing that, I started to wonder way exactly did I upgrade, and the only reason I could think of was because of my curiosity. All the new stuff I switched of, or it didn’t work correctly, so what’s the deal?
After realizing that, I figured there most have been something wrong with the install, or I should at least try it from zero. When I downloaded Lion for the first install, I saved the installer package and made a bootable DVD for fresh installs. I backed up everything with Time-machine, Formatted my drive completely and started anew.
This time the install went by even faster. Starting from scratch was a good idea apparently, coverflow was up to date, Mission Control Prefs opened without any trouble, everything was running smooth. Bootcamp wasn’t there obviously, I formatted the drive. But after reinstalling my Windows Image it showed up just as you would expect. So all good!.
So now, my system works great, but I still don’t really see a point to the update. Except for the new look for Mail.app and iCal, I love the changes made to them. I do tent to belief I’ve got a better performance out of Lion then I did from Snow, nothing has crashed since the clean install, but thats probably just because of the clean install. Launchpad is fun, but be honest, it’s a sheet full of icons, say, maybe, ... like, eeuhm, Windows Desktop? I get whats Apple doing with this whole Ios + OSX thing, but it needs work, loads of work.
Autosaving will start being cool, only if Developers start to implement it, and so far, only Apple products use this feature. And the way expose made place for Mission Control is nice, but not that nice.
One major issue I found in Lion is a good reason to not recommend Lion to the average user. SMB, or Samba shares, are messed up! Apple had some licensing issues regarding the normal SMB implementation, so because of that, Apple implemented their own, newer, version of SMB. Most of the time, this is not a real problem. But when you configure your Mac as a Samba server, and you want to connect to it with an older, or less-updated systems like XBMC and Boxee, you have a big problem, it will not connect.
The only solution to this is installing the older SMB version, SMB3, it can be installed for free and pretty quickly, but you’ll have to give up the GUI completely, everything happens in Terminal and Plist files, which is a bridge too far for most common users.
So, long story short, ... I like Lion, it’s less then I expected, I see no reason to recommend it other then Apple-Geekyness. Then again, it’s one of the cheapest things that Apple offers, at 23,99 euros or 29,99 dollars, it’s a bargain.