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[egilson]

Lion problems?  Wishing you were on a prior Mac OS?  Man, I thought the stable and reliable OS that "just works" was the biggest advantage Macs had over PCs!

That has always been the case before, but now it sounds like they have released an OS that stably and reliably implements some terrible auto-save feature that cannot be disabled. People report doing such things as opening photos in Preview, doing some experimental cropping to see how they'd look, and then expecting to close them without saving the changes only to discover that the changes have already been saved. It's hard to imagine anything worse.

[janewales]

Lion problems?  Wishing you were on a prior Mac OS?  Man, I thought the stable and reliable OS that "just works" was the biggest advantage Macs had over PCs!

That has always been the case before, but now it sounds like they have released an OS that stably and reliably implements some terrible auto-save feature that cannot be disabled. People report doing such things as opening photos in Preview, doing some experimental cropping to see how they'd look, and then expecting to close them without saving the changes only to discover that the changes have already been saved. It's hard to imagine anything worse.

Well, it's irritating until you get used to it, but so far anyway, it's non-destructive. That is, you can always revert to a previous version; they show up in a graphic like the time-machine display. I do think that the replacement of "save as" with "duplicate" has caused some unnecessary confusion. Some users complain that the auto-save feature is eating hard drive space (because multiple versions are saved), but I haven't noticed that as yet.

There are many things to like about Lion, though. The newer gestures are something I find very useful, and the implementation of foreign characters is great. On balance, I'm happy, though Mr Wales is still running Snow Leopard, and that's fine too.

[bookishone]

Lion problems?  Wishing you were on a prior Mac OS?  Man, I thought the stable and reliable OS that "just works" was the biggest advantage Macs had over PCs!

That has always been the case before, but now it sounds like they have released an OS that stably and reliably implements some terrible auto-save feature that cannot be disabled. People report doing such things as opening photos in Preview, doing some experimental cropping to see how they'd look, and then expecting to close them without saving the changes only to discover that the changes have already been saved. It's hard to imagine anything worse.

Well, it's irritating until you get used to it, but so far anyway, it's non-destructive. That is, you can always revert to a previous version; they show up in a graphic like the time-machine display. I do think that the replacement of "save as" with "duplicate" has caused some unnecessary confusion. Some users complain that the auto-save feature is eating hard drive space (because multiple versions are saved), but I haven't noticed that as yet.

There are many things to like about Lion, though. The newer gestures are something I find very useful, and the implementation of foreign characters is great. On balance, I'm happy, though Mr Wales is still running Snow Leopard, and that's fine too.

How do you get to the previous version?

[janewales]

How do you get to the previous version?

There's a menu item. In Preview, for example, one of the File commands is Revert to saved. Lion saves files automatically in applications that support Autosave; you can also force a save. Then all these saves become available, in something that looks a bit like the Time Machine interface, when you select "Revert to saved" from the File menu. You pick the version you want from the versions displayed.

[eigen]

I think Lion is best described as the Vista of OSX. It's not unstable, and it has some nice additions and features, but the cost (system resources) to benefit ration relative to the previous iteration, coupled with new interfaces and features people aren't yet used to makes the older version quite attractive.

It's similar to why so many people still run XP.

[marigolds]

I think Lion is best described as the Vista of OSX. It's not unstable, and it has some nice additions and features, but the cost (system resources) to benefit ration relative to the previous iteration, coupled with new interfaces and features people aren't yet used to makes the older version quite attractive.

It's similar to why so many people still run XP.

Oh, I disagree.  From what I read, Vista actually sucked (as in truly unstable bloatware that was well-nigh unusable.)  Lion isn't that by a long shot.  In fact, I really like Lion--some software hasn't caught up with it yet, which makes certain programs run buggily (Word), but overall it's fantastic. 

[infopri]

I think Lion is best described as the Vista of OSX. It's not unstable, and it has some nice additions and features, but the cost (system resources) to benefit ration relative to the previous iteration, coupled with new interfaces and features people aren't yet used to makes the older version quite attractive.

It's similar to why so many people still run XP.

Oh, I disagree.  From what I read, Vista actually sucked (as in truly unstable bloatware that was well-nigh unusable.)  Lion isn't that by a long shot.  In fact, I really like Lion--some software hasn't caught up with it yet, which makes certain programs run buggily (Word), but overall it's fantastic. 

You're both right.

I loved Vista--when it worked.  It rarely crashed, in my experience, at least not in the way some prior Windows versions did, with the blue screen of death.  But it didn't like legacy applications, it ate drivers for breakfast, it occasionally locked up, and, yes, it was a memory hog.  But, the things that worked were beautiful.  Windows 7 is what Vista was supposed to be, and it makes XP look like a poor cousin.

[eigen]

Vista wasn't as bad as most people make it out to be. It was a lot more stable, and it was also a lot more secure than XP. It just was a good bit more of a memory hog.

And there, Lion is similar. It upped the memory requirements significantly- you can run Snow Leopard fine with 2 gigs of ram, but Lion makes 2 gigs the bare minimum with 4 gigs recommended.

Most of the increased system requirements in either case were from added "benefits" that weren't really necessary, but that were nice. Like version saving in Lion, new animations, new gestures, etc.

I got a new computer when Vista was just released, and it was in the gap period when Dell wasn't allowing XP to ship with new computers, just Vista. I specced out the system with the extra memory use of Vista in mind, and it worked beautifully for years. It just needed about twice as much ram as a corresponding XP machine to function properly.