OS X Lion when will it snow…

I use a MacBook since late 2007 when I realized that Linux, is not my OS choice and FreeBSD needs a lot of time to spend, in order to keep your ports up to date.  My desktop needs are not that demanding. Email, web and terminal are my basic daily needs, although a word processor usually comes in handy every once in a while.

At that time the 13 inch 2.2GH Intel Core2Duo MacBook with 1Gb Ram looked very promising.

Bundled with Leopard, the successor of Tiger, it run really well and covered almost all of my needs. I used to get 4 hours of real battery time and I was very happy. Although I always though that the hardware was overpriced. I got so used to that thing that I decided to upgrade the memory because I wanted to run a couple of virtual machines as well. I must admit that with 2Gb Ram the MacBook became really fast. I started installing new software, got mac ports working too!

And then came Snow Leopard.  I was a bit skeptical to upgrade because there weren’t many new features. But it turned out that this was a good thing. In fact, you could say that Snow Leopard was the perfect continuation of Leopard. The OS became much faster, more reliable and less memory hungry. It was for me the ultimate OS one could pay for.

In the mean time, Apple started making tons of money and saw their stock price go high, by selling cell phones. Well, they called them smartphones but if you think about it for a while they are just overpriced cell phones. Those cell phones were based on a closed source hybrid darwin kernel with many bugs. Apple thinks that this new type of software should be passed on to personal computers as well. So, OS X Lion was born…

Why Lion Sucks

Some features that supposedly will change the way you work:

Multi-Touch Gestures

It is so useless that I wouldn’t even mention anything about this. Except Apple who things that is so cool that it has to be the number one new feature in their web side about Lion.

Full-Screen Apps

That was something missing (?) Most OS can run an application in full screen and they don’t need to brag about it. With a Mac it is different because many applications refuse to resize properly in full screen mode. Unfortunately for Lion, and for you, if you try this you will soon end up searching how to escape from this mode. It is so annoying and complicated that I only used it once.

Mission Control

A better version of  “expose”. Nothing fancy, but nice to have.

Mac App Store

This is hardly a Lion feature. The App Store is available for Snow Leopard as well.

Launchpad

I don’t really need a Iphone style application menu. But again it is good to have.

Resume

Here things begin to get ugly. You open your wordproccessor and suddenly the last document you were working on appears. Hey, I am not that lazy, if I need that document I will open it again. It really sucks though when I have to close it just because Apple thinks I will work on it again.

 Some facts that will definitely change the way you work:

•  If you have 2Gb of Ram then you can just forget about it. Lion does very bad memory management and you soon end up drained, swaping for some memory.

• Your battery will drain very quick. I have read a few discussions regarding how Lion needs better battery calibration. Sorry but this is BS. The only reason why the battery time is reduced is because your CPU will work more intensively and your load averages will increase. When this happens the CPU temperature also rises and as a result the fans start spinning like hell. And it all come down to higher energy consumption.

• Be prepared to use the disk utility quite often since you will have to repair disk permissions very often.

• If you happen to own a NAS (Network Area Storage) to store and share your documents you might experience some issues with Samba protocol. AFP seems to be working without problems.

• Generally, you will have to be more patient as it will take more time for your applications to load. But don’t worry you can always get to watch the apple mouse spinning ball while you wait. Sometimes they might even crash also.

to be continued … (till then I switched back to Snow Leopard)