Lion, the great new hope of the world and savior of all computing. Hear it roar! Or, as the case may be, perhaps rattle a bit in the lungs while it tries to take a breath and then a bit oh wheezing while the formerly concerned gazelle looks on in amusement.
You may guess that I’m not impressed. This would be an understatement. I have now upgraded two of my macs to Lion, and I can conclusively say, without a doubt in my mind, that Lion is the worst thing to happen to any mac I’ve ever owned, and that includes the one that got cracked in half. (at least that was repairable and it was all shiny again after the ordeal)
My G4 Powerbook doesn’t pinwheel-of-death this much even to this day, and I can’t believe the number of annoying little bugs hanging around. Wifi refusing to reconnect, “fast”-user-switching hanging at a gray screen for 2 minutes, the “input type” indicator at the login screen being utterly incorrect, keychain refusing to unlock or be repair, and network mounts failing to connect are some of the things that are clearly on the “bug” side of things. I’m willing to forgive the “we just lost our minds” details like iCal’s new interface, the fact that multi-monitor support is really not a priority, and maybe even fact that Spaces did a 180 from awesome to useless. The pinwheeling though, is just too much.
My laptop is a current model 15″ MBPro with 8GB of RAM. I’m not using legacy hardware here. It came with Snow Leopard but only had it for a couple weeks before the Lion upgrade. If it weren’t for the fact that my main purpose for this laptop is development I would go back to Snow Leopard in a heartbeat. I don’t think I’ve even really gotten any advantage out of the “new” features yet, and there certainly aren’t any that I would find myself missing if they were gone.
So, in short: my experience with Lion so far has been utterly underwhelming. I’m about to install the latest update on it and cross my fingers that things have been improved. Hopefully my Wifi doesn’t conk out halfway through the download. Let’s cross our fingers.
iCal is still gonna be painfully ugly though, and the new spaces is still going to be useless. Ah well, I guess that’s just more of an excuse to spend the time on my other laptop, a nice little 12.5″ Lenovo running Linux.