Some time has passed since the release of OSX 10.7, and it’s been running on all my home (personal and work) machines for at least a week. Yes, my entire considerable fleet of home computers is already living on 10.7, which includes 3 MBPs of different generations, an iMac, and 2 Mac Minis. Based on results and impressions - overall this is a quite successful update. In my understanding, success is measured by the fact that it’s not particularly destructive. That is, by and large, this update almost didn’t interfere with my work and didn’t particularly interfere with other computer activities. Perhaps this doesn’t sound very optimistic, but the fact that this kind of update causes many problems - this, alas, is a fact of life on any OS, and the transition to fresh stuff always happens with varying degrees of pain. For example, the transition from RHEL4 to RHEL5 was oh so challenging, and about the transition to 10.6 I grumbled and complained loudly in my time. About the “transition” from XP to Win7 I don’t want to talk at all, because it won’t work without profanity.
The path from 10.6 to 10.7 also wasn’t paved with roses, but I expected worse. From the point of view of a simple, uncomplicated user - everything is simple and works immediately. I’m judging by my boy. He really likes 10.7 precisely for those things that leave me indifferent. For example, he’s thrilled with the strange Launchpad, loves the inhuman gesture direction, and claims that the new Mission Control finally allowed him to understand what all these spaces and expose are for. And when my 10-year-old daughter uses the laptop with Lion, she doesn’t really notice a particular difference. Says “it got prettier” but doesn’t specify what’s prettier.
For a more demanding user, the transition is also quite gentle. The update occurred without any loss of personal data. Practically all programs from the personal use area continued to work. Some programs (for example Evernote) still don’t have everything right with compatibility, but that’s more on the conscience of these program developers and not Lion’s fault. Many programs are actively delivering updates and promptly solving compatibility problems, but I repeat - there are very few such problematic ones, somewhere on the verge of visibility.
With my work programs everything turned out somewhat worse. Starting with the fact that Java now doesn’t come included by default and, what’s even worse, after updating to Lion simply evaporates from your computer. Returning it is easy, for example by typing “java” in the terminal or trying to launch any Java-requiring program, but what gets installed as a result is far from a complete package. On the internet you can easily find a list of additional manipulations and additional files for additional installation. Nothing complicated here, but it takes time.
With programs that are installed from ports, some things also break with Lion installation. By this moment a new version of macports for 10.7 has already been released, and possibly it fixes problems, but in any case - it needs to be installed/updated. There were also problems with mercurial. Both the one in ports and the one from the official site for 10.7 worked very partially for me. Both cases are apparently being fixed, but so far I couldn’t make version 1.9 work stably, although I haven’t had time yet to investigate what it’s missing. Apparently the subtleties of OSX’s transition to Python 2.7 are at play here.
With Eclipse not everything went smoothly either. On one of the computers after the update, the workspace that had served me faithfully for the last couple of years stopped opening. What was there - I have no idea. I “solved” the problem by transferring from another machine. On the iMac after updating, Eclipse started hanging and freezing out of nowhere, which hadn’t been observed before. Complete reinstallation helped. Yes, we’re talking about Indigo, so possibly these are bugs of the fresh Eclipse, although on SL everything worked quite decently.
On modern machines (i7 MBP) impressions about speed in Lion are most pleasant. Everything is fast and very fast. I of course didn’t measure, but subjectively everything works faster than in SL, or at least not slower. But with “old” computers it’s exactly the opposite. The iMac with 3.06 C2D started working slower. This is again a very subjective impression not backed by tests and measurements, but I know what to expect from this computer and got used to certain speeds on SL. The only place where I could measure this slowdown was a full processing cycle of a heavy podcast. Here the speed drop is noticeable to the naked eye. From 5x (processing speed to real time) this metric dropped to 3.8x. Who’s to blame here is hard to say, possibly some audio plugins should update for Lion, but for now it’s slow and that’s a sad fact.
In general, in the audio area you can observe a whole series of annoying, although probably very exotic for most people, little problems. On a machine with several audio interfaces, Lion “got confused” and partially lost information about default interfaces and their characteristics. What’s particularly unpleasant - OSX shows everything correctly and all settings are in place, but in fact - everything is wrong. This is easily fixed by reassigning all parameters, but of course this is not good. System sound “capture” programs also stopped working on the fly, but this was actually expected and often happens even with minor OSX updates. Usually, after some time, these programs update and fix the problem.
Another not most successful area in Lion is working with multiple screens. Full-screen mode and mission control are implemented very unsuccessfully and thoughtlessly. Complete impression that the developers simply didn’t test these things on 2 or more monitors.
On the other, bright side, there are two reasons for me that justify both the hassle of updating and allow me to accept the annoying shortcomings. This is the new Mail and the new full-screen mode. I spend considerable time in email and Mail.app for me collects both work emails from Exchange and IMAP, as well as other/personal ones via IMAP. I managed with this processing in the previous version of OSX, but the new mail program is noticeably more convenient and simplifies very many moments. The powerful search is especially pleasing.
Full screen is important and pleasant for me mainly in remote access programs. Having a full screen of a remote machine in a separate “virtual space” and switching there by pressing a couple of keys - this is not just pleasant but also useful for my productivity. And of course, full-screen terminal is also extremely cool (and with tmux it’s absolutely wow), if of course you know why you need a terminal :)
But about the server update I can’t say a good word. Unlike the regular, non-server version of Lion, it couldn’t even properly install on my two Mac Mini servers. In one case the update process hung at the “import OD …” stage for several hours (restart helped), and in the second - the system simply didn’t come up after reboot :( Had to restore from Time Machine, and on the second try the update went through. In general the server became much more primitive. Before, its interface allowed those who understand to configure many things without leaving the cozy GUI. Now this GUI is designed for complete housewives and doesn’t allow you to do absolutely anything I need. Many services simply disappeared from it. I suspect because of the impossibility of simplifying them. From VPN there’s a stub left where this VPN can be enabled, enter an address range, set a password and assign users. The ability to choose protocols, set routing, choose DNS and everything else that was in SL server - all this simply disappeared. With NAT it’s even worse. The only thing you can do now is turn it on. And Lion itself understands what you meant by this, and in my case it “brilliantly” guessed that I want to take from Ethernet and distribute via WiFi. But I wanted something completely different. All DNS control capabilities that were quite nicely done in SL also disappeared. Of course, I understand that all this can be configured properly, in a geeky way through proper configuration files. But if so - it’s easier for me to install Linux and geek out with it. OSX Server for me was a decent and quick option for a simple server without complications and without brain strain. Now it causes no brain strain at all, but only about 20% of functionality remains, at best.
Regarding more minor and internal crippling changes - they “broke” SMB support. That is, it’s not broken, but on the contrary - improved. Unfortunately, many third-party clients perceive it precisely as broken and don’t support it yet. For example, XBMC on ATV2 stopped working with Lion SMB shares and when it will work is still unclear. There were also more changes with NFS, which didn’t break everything in sight as badly as with SMB, but can also seriously spoil your blood.
Conclusions: I see no reasons not to update new (i5/i7) Macs to Lion. As always, waiting for the first update and only then transitioning - this is a wise idea, and I always advise it to everyone, although I don’t follow this advice myself. On old machines it’s probably also worth updating, especially if you have a compelling reason. For example, if you actively use Mail.app. The server, in my opinion, shouldn’t be updated and is even categorically contraindicated. Personally, I’m going to roll back both my Mac Minis to SL Server in the very near future.
This post was translated from the Russian original with AI assistance and reviewed by a human.