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Time for a new Snow Leopard!

Avatar Michael Corgan
This article reassures my feeling that SL is prefereale to both Mavericks and Yosemite, despite the extra features in the new OS's. Who agrees? (I'm guessing that Euan won't!)

http://www.tekrevue.com/yosemite-bugs-time-for-another-snow-leopard/

Re: Time for a new Snow Leopard!

Avatar Eric Jervis
Me me me!

Re: Time for a new Snow Leopard!

Avatar Tony Still
Apple should be ashamed of the state of both Yosemite and iOS 8. There are so many bugs, some of them quite disruptive, and most of them visible to any professional testing regime. However, I disagree that it's unusable.

As to a new Snow Leopard, I agree with the principle. Snow Leopard was a 'year out' for the software teams to sort out what they had instead of piling in new features. That's desperately needed: you can see even from this distance that they're overworked and losing sight of the big picture and that's dangerous. It's very easy to lose control of a big software project and very hard to regain control so I do hope they get their year.

But Snow Leopard isn't better than Yosemite. Its quality, function for function, is much better but it's much less capable. It won't run on recent machines and it has no security updates, never mind the missing functions, so it's not a viable choice. We have to hope that Apple sorts Yosemite...

Re: Time for a new Snow Leopard!

Avatar John Surtees
Talking of Yosemite, and Mavericks for that matter. It was only when I needed to key in a bullet point recently, that I noticed that although Zaph Dingbats are shown in the Font Menu they cannot be entered. You have to go to the Character Viewer and double click on an item from there. Likewise Wingdings and several other fonts. And they call it progress!

Re: Time for a new Snow Leopard!

Avatar Roy Rainford
I agree with Michael and this comment from the link given above applies in my case: " I’ve had too many crashes, too many freezes, too many reboots to rely on the operating system to get my work done in a timely and efficient manner". This has happened since my OS was updated to Mavericks from Snow Leopard. The writer of that article turns to a PC as a solution but I don't want that so what can be done to improve matters?

Re: Time for a new Snow Leopard!

Avatar Trevor Hewson
I haven't upgraded to Yosemite, but have to say that Mavericks has a been crash-free on our iMac. it's always hard to tell when instability after an OS upgrade is due to the new OS or to the upgrade flushing out some latent problem with the machine, installation or particular app.

Re: Time for a new Snow Leopard!

Avatar Mick Burrell
You all know I'd love to help or at least suggest something you can try but the three machines I have here running Yosemite have not had one program crash let alone the whole Mac. I've no idea what I've done differently to the rest of you. I haven't brought any 'disruptive bug' to the surface either. I'm sure it was the same running Mavericks and as far as my ageing memory allows, Mountain Lion & Lion too so I don't actually miss Snow Leopard.

Can any of you reliably reproduce a crash?

Re: Time for a new Snow Leopard!

Avatar Euan Williams
Like Mick, I have found very few issues with Yosemite (total partition erase, new install, and migrate data seems to promote digital health and hygiene). Around the Mac world some have had issues with WiFi (though not here) and 10.10.2 seems to be undergoing some pretty thorough testing - so perhaps it will ease the path for Yosemite users who have been inconvenienced.

It helps not to try to run new system software on minimum specs, especially RAM, and to keep 12-15% of your drive free as a minimum. Keep your apps fully up to date too, and, should you have an issue, work on that digital housework you meant to do...

Re: Time for a new Snow Leopard!

Avatar Roy Rainford
Thanks for all the comments above. I wonder if there is a conflict somewhere in my software that causes problems. The iMac is a 27-inch Mid 2010 model OS 10.9.5. and when crashes/freezing occur I am nearly always running Photoshop CS5 Extended v12.1 x 64, Bridge CS5.1 and Lightroom 5.7. Since I no longer need the full capabilities of Photoshop CS5 I will try using Photoshop Elements9 instead and see if things improve.

Re: Time for a new Snow Leopard!

Avatar Euan Williams
Hi Roy. It may help to update Photoshop Elements from your proposed v9 to the current v13.

It's worth noting that GIMP runs beautifully under Mavericks and Yosemite with the advantage that it's open source, free and has been developed over many years.
> http://gimp.lisanet.de/Website/Download.html < offers maybe the best current version for Macs.

Your Photoshop CS5 (Extended) version should run happily with either Mavericks or Yosemite.

Re: Time for a new Snow Leopard!

Avatar Roy Rainford
Thanks Euan. I have downloaded Gimp and will have a closer look.

Re: Time for a new Snow Leopard!

Avatar Douglas Cheney
I am running Yosemite on an iMac which is a iMac (21.5-inch, Mid 2011) 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5.I installed Yosemite over Mavericks not on a clean disc, and I am having no problems at all with it

Re: Time for a new Snow Leopard!

Avatar Eleanor Spenceley
I am running Yosemite and there have been very few issues on the 4 Macs which run it. Likewise Mavericks on 2 others.

You need to bare in mind what is happening on your Mac, is it the operating system which is not connecting to WiFi, throwing kernel crashes, not seeing other Macs on your network... etc...?

Or is it an Application (which is not made by Apple) which is crashing?

If it is the latter then, are you running the latest version of that application which has been updated for that version of the OS? Older versions of Apps will probably not be properly tested and certainly not fixed to run on newer versions of the OS. If you intend not to upgrade your software to the latest version designed and tested to run on your current OS, I recommend you do not upgrade your OS. The older your App to the current OS, the more likely it will have stability issues.

This said, I do not think Apple is getting enough time to squash the minor bugs before they rush into the next major OS upgrade cycle. Developers are not getting enough time to fix their minor bugs to their own apps before they are pushed into supporting all the new features of a new OS.

My main issues have been, occasional loss of keyboard/trackpad when unplugging from Thunderbolt monitor and missing Macs on my network. These happen once every 2-3 weeks mind.

But that's the price of getting all the new features. Going back to 10.6 Snow Leopard now would be like going back to Mac OS 10.1 if I was running Snow Leopard now... No thanks... I love all the new iCloud/Doc syncing/iOS integration features too much.

Re: Time for a new Snow Leopard!

Avatar Peter Shepheard
Roy,
I seem to remember you saying that you only had 2 or 3 GB spare on your hard drive. This is well short of the 10% that I think is recommended. If you are working on large photo files it is probable that the software is trying to write to your hard drive and there is no where to put anything. Yosemite may have made matters worse by taking up more space? Can you clear out some space on your drive?
I am running Lightroom and Photoshop CC 2014 with a 320GB hard drive 78GB free space and 4GB RAM using Yosemite and I have had no problems.
Peter

Re: Time for a new Snow Leopard!

Avatar Roy Rainford
Thanks Doug., Martin and Peter for the comments. Update on my iMac: I am still on Mavericks and my hard drive has a capacity of 999,5 GB with 622.79 GB available. I seldom boot up my other old iMac so that is unlikely to be the problem. It does seem that Martin's point about non Apple applications crashing could be the case here because tonight, whilst processing images in Photoshop CS5 Extended there was yet another crash. I had to Force Quit then close down with the power button because the 'spinning wheel' kept spinning!

That crash occurred after about two hours of processing in Lightroom 5 which is up-to-date. One thing I noticed was that the top of the iMac was quite warm to the touch, along the upper edge. Is that normal?

I don't plan to go back to Snow Leopard and will have to look at the applications update possibility.

Re: Time for a new Snow Leopard!

Avatar Eleanor Spenceley
Roy,

How much RAM does your Mac have? When working with images, more RAM is always advised. I assume you are using a min of 8GB for Photoshop/Lightroom work. Personally, I find 16GB RAM removes any caching worries especially if I am processing very large RAW images (~20MB) and holding 10,000's of images in Lightroom.

Re: Time for a new Snow Leopard!

Avatar Roy Rainford
Martin, re the iMac - Memory 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3. (2GB in each slot).
In Photoshop - Memory Usage - Available RAM is 3477 MB and "Let Photoshop Use" is 2433 MB (70%).
This morning I have been using Photoshop Elements 9 without any problems. I can get by with PSE so might stop using PS rather than install extra RAM.

Re: Time for a new Snow Leopard!

Avatar Tony Still
Roy,

Next time you have a crash, it would be worth looking at your System Logs. They may point to the culprit. You access the logs by launching the Console app (get to it via Spotlight, I suggest, by typing Con... until Mac OS suggests it). The entries are somewhat cryptic but they all carry a timestamp so you can see what was happening around the time of the problem. It's also worth looking at the logs from boot-time but Yosemite throws so many diagnostics that it's a little difficult to see the wood for the trees there.

The machine getting warm while you're running a heavyweight application like Photoshop is not surprising. Try running round the block carrying the Mac and see if you get warm ;-))

I personally doubt that lack of RAM is your problem. It's true that 4GB is a bit tight for big image processing but it should only manifest itself as a slow-down rather than a crash (and Mavericks/Yosemite are a bit more frugal with RAM anyway). If you launch Activity Monitor (type Act... in spotlight) and look at the Memory tab you can get an idea of how bad things are:
The memory Pressure graph in the middle at the bottom will be green, amber or red (from my memory) - you can guess what's a good colour. The bottom left number - Swap Used - is the amount of RAM overflow (page-outs) that you have had; small is good but unless it's going like the clappers (that's a techie term) towards a big number it's normal, though less than ideal, operation. If it keeps climbing, that's the time to worry. The other figure of interest is in the bottom right box, being Wired Memory. That's RAM being using to sustain the system and can't be reclaimed by the Virtual Memory (so it's gone for this session); mine is 1.04GB as I write and, from 4GB you wouldn't want to see it approaching 2GB.

Finally, I'm sure you're minimising the number of applications you're running in parallel. I have seen Yosemite's Safari using vast amounts of RAM (it clearly has a memory leak provoked by particular web sites) so that might be one to quit but any running application consumes memory, including some RAM.

And one more thing: there is a hardware test shipped with every Mac. If you suspect it could be the machine (including a physical RAM error), this would be an option to try.

Re: Time for a new Snow Leopard!

Avatar Tony Still
Just to explain my comments on Yosemite quality. Apart from minor bugs (usually not reproducible and just irritating but symptomatic of poor software testing), I have three issues that disrupt me on a daily basis:
* I run my MacBook Pro with an external monitor as a second display and several Spaces. Where windows and dialogue boxes open is unpredictable; they don't follow Apple's stated design intent, they don't follow the previous 'persistence' design and I have yet to discern a pattern. A favourite example is deleting a track from iTunes. This generates two successive dialogues (are you sure? what to do with the file?); these often, but not always, appear on different physical displays. Inspectors also like opening on the opposite display to their 'parent' window.
* My Bluetooth (Apple Magic) Mouse has days when it simply won't connect. I can sometimes circumvent this by running Bluetooth Explorer (a developer tool) that clearly changes the mode of the hardware. Other days it just connects, as it always did with Mavericks. (The Bluetooth stack will have had significant work to implement the new Hand-off feature in Yosemite).
* Calendar sync (Mac/iPhone/iPad and shared calendars with my wife) is unreliable and unpredictable. It 'usually' works, something that causes lots of work checking results and which I have previously associated with certain other OSs.

All of this, I expect, is down to overwork/over-ambition in the software development teams. I hope Apple will take a 'Snow Leopard' moment and regroup to overcome this.

Re: Time for a new Snow Leopard!

Avatar Roy Rainford
Thanks Tony. I will look at System Logs on the next crash. I confirm that I minimise the number of applications running. Also confirm that I am on Mavericks.
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