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The myth of Snow Leopard

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Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#91

Post by speed_spread »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #57
LegNeato wrote: post #40

Oh, this again. I should put a website with this up... I was the person who personally ran 10.6 security updates at Apple (10.6.1+), the "DRI". My team in the Updates Program office and I reviewed every single bug to determine if it should go in a security and stability update or wait for the next major version. Seriously, every morning we group triaged all Mac OS X bugs, both incoming and those nominated internally…

> That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8. There was something else going on during that time period though. Consumer operating systems in the 1990s were pretty bad. Windows 9x and MacOS Classic didn't even have protected memory. They crashed a lot. Microsoft fixed this with Windows NT (delivered to consumers as Windows XP), Apple with BSD/NeXT (delivered as OS X). It was the point when ordinary people first got…

Ahem, the best version of Windows was 2000 / 2003 x64 server. It had all the improvements from real world experience gained by NT 3.5 and 4.0 and none of the consumer crap pushed in XP by the abandonment of the Win95 line.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#92

Post by mcphage »

jogu wrote: post #51
keeganpoppen wrote: post #35

i blinked. did i miss the part where this post had any content beyond the title calling it a “myth”?

Yeah, there's a sentence about how they downgraded twice!

There's also the bit where none of us cold be old enough to remember it in person, and so everything we say about it is just vibes that we picked up from the internet.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#93

Post by ch_sm »

Amorymeltzer wrote: post #7

YMMV. I ran Snow Leopard on a couple of machines for years —bought it off CraigsList for $10, handed off in Times Square—and it was far and away the best OSX experience I had, and, at least in my experience, the best/smoothest/most stable until El Capitan, 10.11. And yes, maybe I'm thinking of 10.6.8, but I don't see why that's a problem. The myth part, is of course, a myth, and good marketing. Snow Leopard was super…

> bought it off CraigsList for $10, handed off in Times Square

haha that‘s a nice nostalgic image. I remember installing it on a friend’s laptop with my DVD in a café, to „fix her macbook“.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#94

Post by waffletower »

This article is revisionist and lost -- it decidedly disagrees with my direct memory. I had Snow Leopard on a vm for years -- not because I was misguided, but because it was a very stable release in many dimensions and deserved its status.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#95

Post by frollogaston »

ndiddy wrote: post #86
frollogaston wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a brand new PC that came with Vista on it, it was terrible. Not just slow but also BSODs and bad UI. School PCs were higher end than mine but also had BSODs.

The BSODs were largely because Vista changed the driver API so everybody had to write new drivers. I remember seeing an article saying that Microsoft's telemetry showed that ~30% of all Vista BSODs were caused by the nVidia graphics driver. Windows 7 came out a few years later with the same driver API, so by then everybody had gotten most of the kinks worked out of their drivers.

Yeah, it was that. Win7 became stable but kept some or all of the Vista bloat, but people noticed less because PCs were faster by then. I barely use Windows but could see XP as the best-ever version of it if they'd kept it up to date.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#96

Post by dwaite »

steveBK123 wrote: post #39
mymacbook wrote: post #2

I don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule. I also don’t know what he’s looking for, as someone who worked at Apple during this time quality improved substantially in 10.6 Snow Leopard and continued. Most bug fixes don’t get a marketing line item or even much fanfare. We were all users of what the OSX guys were doing and lived on the dogf…

> don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule. Call me an old man, but I'm no longer sure that annual major OS upgrades are even desirable. Adding features is great, but half of the changes feel like product manager brain "changes to show we made changed things". I actually don't need buttons moved around in photos/mail/finder annually. I do…

One big source of both delays and bugs is the feeling that your work (which has compatibility impacting changes) _has_ to make it in the current release, because otherwise it will languish for years until the next train leaves.

Likewise, if a fix requires a behavioral change that impacts third party developers, that fix may not feasible to deploy until the next release. Apple had some pretty fundamental things like Cocoa outline views broken for multiple years because the fix required API changes.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#97

Post by frollogaston »

mepian wrote: post #5
pico303 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s red flags I look for in articles like this, and a FreeBSD partition on your MacBook Pro is one of them. Tells me the author is probably hypercritical of MacOS because it’s not a GPL OS. That’s fine, but as someone who likes MacOS, I don’t share the pessimism. Snow Leopard was a great experience for me. So much more stable, and the OS felt tighter, like lots of the little wonky things got sorted out. It well d…

FreeBSD is definitely not a "GPL OS", the license is right in the name!

Guess he meant non-free OS. I still don't get the point though, cause someone who cares so much about FOSS wouldn't be criticizing SL vs Leopard, he'd just not use Mac OS.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#98

Post by frollogaston »

"As we speak I’m downgrading the Snow Leopard partition on my trusty old Core Duo 2006 MacBook Pro back to Leopard"

Those early MacBooks had 32-bit CPUs. Wonder if Snow Leopard was problematic on those, since that's when Apple started the transition to 64-bit, finalizing in Lion. Would still be bad if this were the reason, but might also explain why other people had a better experience.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#99

Post by frollogaston »

VCFundedGenYer wrote: post #24

I don't agree, as someone who lived that era. Snow Leopard was the best OS X release in terms of performance, made immediately apparent by the disastrous release of 10.7 Lion and several years beyond. You have to remember that 10.5 was a bad and slow release. 10.6 cleaned that up, and gave you a lot of storage space back alongside the fixes and improvements.

I remember 10.6 being good too, but wasn't 10.6's storage refund only because they dropped PPC support? Makes that part a lot less impressive.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#100

Post by nkotov »

I still have a MacBook from that era and to this day - it boots up and runs apps fine without issues (though a bit slower than I'm used to). It's been my little time capsule of how my life was in middle school / high school.
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