win some, lose some

[kaigou]

Well, wiped the drive & upgraded, and now I have to (a) figure out wtf Mac has changed for all its settings, (b) wtf is up with making me use my admin pw for EVERYTHING, and the most important, (c) MAKING IT DO WHAT I WANT. Sadly, experience has taught me it's the last that'll take the longest (if it's ever achieved). On the plus side, very speedy now! Though I wonder how much of that is because my address book got messed up and/or didn't save to the backup drive, and now... well, that was a lot of addresses. Guess I just need to spend a few days convincing myself that I didn't want to write any of you, anyway. Sheesh. It's always something...

Comments

[thejeopardymaze]

Did you upgrade to Lion? That OS worries me, but I know I'll have to use it someday.

[kaigou]

Nope, not until it's been out a year! Upgraded to Snow Leopard, b/c otherwise I wouldn't be able to upgrade to Lion at all, if I ever chose to. Grrrrr. (I never upgrade until an OS has been out long enough for all the necessary patches, and the ones only discovered once the OS is live.)

Still, upgrading makes me cranky enough as it is... yet another reason to not upgrade for another year. This sucks. Always does.

[thejeopardymaze]

Due to how many applications or upgrades for them will only be made now for Lion, I won't have much of a choice sooner or later-but unfortunately my machine isn't fast enough for that upgrade. It pisses me off, since I don't care for how close Lion looks like iOS, which is a sign Apple plans on merging them. At least it's better looking than the Win 8 alpha monstrosity, but still...

[kaigou]

I suspect by the time I bother to upgrade, upgrading this comp to S.Leopard would've been pointless, since I may have to buy a whole new machine in a few years. Yeah, I put off upgrading that long.

(Also, I've seen the proposed interface for Win8 and... wow. That's pretty bad.)

[thejeopardymaze]

It was like an unintentional tribute to the worst of bloated X11 desktop managers.

Yeah, I put off upgrading that long.

How old is your machine? Mine is a first generation white MacBook with x86, but my memory is a bit fuzzy on whether its one of the first Macs with that type of processor. I'll probably have it recycled, due to damage. Even if someone wants to put a lightweight variant of Linux or BSD, I have a feeling they wouldn't like the keyboarding experience at this rate.

[kaigou]

It's only... hmm, 4 years old? Young enough to be able to handle Lion, though it's been fried by one thunderstorm and had its hard-drive replaced, and it has been in a work-zone while I've renovated. The Mac guy who called to let me know when it was ready for pick-up also gave me a slight talking-to about the insides... but the all-in-one design is really inadequate for environments with three cats, two dogs, and random drywall dust floating through. The screen isn't airtight, for starters, so drywall dust gets in that way, along with in through the intakes.

But I'll probably keep it as long as I can, and if work keeps going the way it does, I may end up upgrading to Lion despite my wishes otherwise. Keeping up and ahead is necessary for my industry.

[thejeopardymaze]

If the revolutionaries succeed I hope the new leaders will make it illegal for software companies that make OS's require more RAM, especially in regards to upgrades.

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

I suppose this is the last thing you want to hear, but I'm grateful to you for the advance report, and for giving me reasons to continue to hold out against making that upgrade myself. I like Leopard. I don't know of anything Snow Leopard does that I actually want, except possibly the ability to run one or two utilities, and I really, really don't like what I'm hearing about Lion.

And thanks to you I can think of my refusal to upgrade as a sensible reliance upon the opinion and experience of a tech professional, and not as some kind of neo-Luddite irrationality. Which is a comfort to me, though not one worth the angst on your side.

[kaigou]

I liked Leopard, too, but I was trying to hedge my bets on the chance that I'd have to upgrade to Lion to keep up with work computers... and I got Snow Leopard on the very!last!day! that it was available. But the only way to upgrade to Lion is from S.Leopard, for reasons I completely do not get. I don't like being forced to upgrade, essentially.

But then, I'm now in a city (and an industry) where Macs are almost standard, it seems. And I can't really claim to know the latest and greatest if I'm two OS behind, so... I guess I consider this a work investment, or something. Even if today, once I finally got my printer/scanner to be recognized in the new OS... I lost all mail capabilities. That's right, I can't freaking mail anything except by going in Firefox, logging into gmail, and mailing from there. I am going to be one seriously pissed customer come the time I calm down long enough to call Apple. Le sigh.

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

Wow, I did not know either that they were going to pull Snow Leopard from the market or that it was going to be impossible to skip a version to do the upgrade to Lion, assuming one wants to upgrade to Lion. How . . . irritating.
I suppose if it comes to that I'll be able to borrow the intermediate OS installation disks, but the whole thing seems irrational and unlike Apple. In the old days, after all, you could go straight from OS9 to Panther, and never miss a beat or lose track of a file.

[kaigou]

Thing is, I'm not sure if this means you can't do a clean from-fresh install of Lion... or not. The way the propaganda sounded, it made it seem like you could only upgrade to Lion, not new-install-from-nothing. Which meant you had to have Snow Leopard, to do that upgrade. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me -- normally a new version must also have a fresh install from scratch method -- but hellifino. The only plus side was that Snow Leopard was only like $30, which is painful but not nearly as painful as the days of new versions being $150 and up.

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

Hmmm, well . . . It occurs to me that even if it turns out you do need Snow Leopard, it ought to be possible to boot from a drive that does have it and use that to jump through whatever stupid hoops Lion requires. Unless I'm deluding myself, and there's something even ickier going on than insisting that we have to buy things through the apps store, which doesn't work without goddamned Snow Leopard. Which was one of the only reasons I ever even considered the intermediate upgrade.

But the more I try to contemplate this, the odder it seems that they wouldn't keep SL available -- surely they want people to adopt the new OS? And one of the reasons some of us are loyal to Apple is the way their high-end laptops are solid enough machines so that they'll be functional through many generations of OS; it's not as if all their users whose machines came with Leopard installed are going to be looking at new computers before Lion itself is obsolete.

[kaigou]

Honestly, I have no idea. The irony about the complaint I'm about to repeat is that it's now moot (since my laptop died a quiet death right when we arrived at the hotel, two weekends ago, while travelling) -- but only with Snow Leopard did I discover that my laptop could no longer be upgraded. Like, at all. Improper type of harddrive or whatever, I can't recall now. Essentially rendered obsolete by the company's own OS, which was a first for me, at least in terms of Macs. Then again, most people I know don't have laptops that are ten years old & still working fine.

Well, was working fine. Now it's just... spontaneously dead. Though it does seem suspicious to me that it went through TSA's box o' microwaves and then it died. But still, I got ten years out of it, so I don't think I can complain all that much. Relatively speaking.

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

I suddenly feel a powerful sense of kinship. My Pismo currently lives with friends in New York, so that I can travel there and bring only a portable hard drive if necessary, but it still works and I still use it from time to time. I haven't even tried to upgrade the OS beyond Panther, and it is true that the chip is really too slow for .mkv video. But otherwise? Last time I looked, it was still working, and I will mourn it when the day comes that it doesn't.

[aldanise]

Heh. That sounds remarkably like my upgrade from Ubuntu Maverick, complete with the WTF did you do to the settings and the important data not backing up properly. And, hey, it's nice to know that Ubuntu isn't the only OS idiotically merging its mobile and laptop versions.

(Which is to say, you have my deepest sympathies.)

[kaigou]

Heh, thanks... and Snow Leopard isn't even half the issue that Lion is, when it comes to merging the iOS/OS versions. Though in Lion's defense, several of my Lion-using friends said that once they got over the hump of the touch-pad interface and the backwards movement, it became much more intuitive. It's just that our previous interfaces were counter-intuitive, when you think about 'em.

That said, Lion doesn't have Spaces (the mac thing where you have four screens, and can move between them) -- and my brain just works better on Spaces. The top left is for Firefox, and all web-application stuff (jEdit, FTPing, text editor), the top right is for Safari and LJ/DW journaling, the bottom left is for visual design (Photoshop, Illustrator) and the bottom right is for media (iTunes, VLC, SimpleComic). It's like, it focuses me to know that in this Space, I'm doing X, but I can move to a different Space and not have the distraction of the windows in the background... but it doesn't "feel" like they're gone, unlike the Lion interface where it just hides them, and then lines them up all together. I don't want them lining up. I want them staying where I put them.

On the other hand, this would all be solved if I just had a second massive screen the same size as what I've currently got. Oooooooh. Oh, hold on, I think I'm drooling. Sorry.

[christeos-pir.livejournal.com]

I'm holding out for when they release Yamapikaryaa.

[kaigou]

That's next year.