4 questions about Mountain Lion

[8O]

Skip it and go straight to Mountain Lion.

Had the same question a while back as I needed to upgrade from SL and the internet opinion was in favour of just going straight to ML. Have had to buy some replacement utility programs for scanners that are no longer supported by their manufacturers on ML, but apart from that have had no problems... Live and VSTs all seem to work fine so far... See also: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=188574

[Jack McOck]

I've rocked Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion and Mavericks. Of those four, I prefer Mountain Lion. Mavericks bricked my Mac yesterday, so it's a day trip to the Apple Store today.

[8O]

is it much different to Snow Leopard?

Not much - takea a day to get used to the little stuff like reverse direction scrolling and unhiding your library folder and the auto-saving weirdness, but tbh there's nothing much from SL that I miss.

[gnurf]

a day to get used to the little stuff like reverse direction scrolling

Or much less than a day to go into preferences and configure it the way you want :)

[beats me]

a day to get used to the little stuff like reverse direction scrolling

Or much less than a day to go into preferences and configure it the way you want

Yeah I went into the preferences and reversed the reverse scrolling. I don’t need my normal computer use to behave like a flight simulator.

[siliconarc]

i'm on ML because i needed to use software that was 10.8 only, otherwise i'd have stayed on SL.
can't think of a single thing that is noticeably improved, really. Live is slightly less cpu friendly too.
it's not bad, but unless you really need it, i'd stick with SL.

[nathannn]

i'm on ML because i needed to use software that was 10.8 only, otherwise i'd have stayed on SL.
can't think of a single thing that is noticeably improved, really. Live is slightly less cpu friendly too.
it's not bad, but unless you really need it, i'd stick with SL.

Is there a lot out there thats Mountain Lion only?

[Jack McOck]

I believe the App Store is Lion+ only. I picked up Pixelmator for $15—totally worth it. Upgrading from SL will open up a whole host of cheap, quality apps.

[Forge.]

well the inputs on my FW410 have stopped working properly since Lion... I didn't use them soon enough after the update to realise it was linked and just thought it was because it's old, but recently dicovered it works on windows>bootcamp

I switched the reverse scrolling straight off, too many years of using a computer for them to start trying to get me to do it differently. Likewise, I hate the way Cmd+S now works in - I've spent years making my own revision and that's a long term habit

I've already been feeling like I'm not going to bother with maverick...

[Jack McOck]

FWIW, my Mac is now unbricked again. For whatever reason, new Macs can't be reinstalled with any ol' OS, so booting from an installer clone on an external USB drive no longer works. Instead, you have to hold down alt + r when you restart to enter Internet Recovery mode, which allows you to connect to your WIFI and redownload your Mac's factory OS from Apple. This is not well documented, so you're welcome.

It just works.

[rozling]

Because we need that much stress in our lives

That sucks major balls. There must be an offline solution somewhere??!

[Jack McOck]

The team of Apple "geniuses" I had assisting me were... evasive... when I innocently enquired about that.

[Forge.]

was that the developer edition? or is it already out where you are?

[Jack McOck]

DP3.

[gnurf]

My problem with doing it this way is that it's almost like a total clean install, none of apps have preferences the way I want. Live is asking me to authorise and so on. There are no addons in Firefox. iKey has no shortcuts!!

Search for Migration Assistant in Spotlight. It can get /Applications and all your personal settings back, at least.

I could just install Mountain Lion on top of Snow Leopard, but I don't want to do that yet. Do I have to update every app bit by bit, or is there a quicker way? I realise there is an app that can clone the drive, but I don't have room for everything twice.

I've simply installed over the previous OS without major issues (the minor ones are two non-essential programs not saving preferences). Went from Lion (which was an upgrade from SL) to Mountain Lion without losing settings. Live and Komplete had to reauthorise.

See Migration Assistant above for the temporary solution (Logic and Komplete definitely need reinstallation, though).

Basically try to find space somewhere for everything in your user directory (EVERYTHING!) as a backup (if you don't already have a Time Machine drive), then wipe the system clean and prepare to spend some time reinstalling :/

I've got no essential PPC software or 32-bit drivers/plugins, but if you do, a temporary ML installation is probably best. Or just wait until you get confirmation on all software that you use. The OS won't be hugely different, but Spaces will work differently. Most non-Apple products have a way to disable the annoying Versions save system too. I consider most of the changes good, as my old Core 2 Duo laptop didn't seem to slow down at all when I upgraded. YMMV and all that. I guess heavy dependency on certain plugin manufacturers' products would hold you back.

(Sidebar: Internally Lion added a new way to develop audio units, which mostly benefits developers. There might be plugin developers who transition to this for their own sanity, but most are likely to just keep chugging along with their Snow Leopard-compatible codebase if it works. The old AU system was a subset of regular program plugins, which aren't going away. Most reasons to make software 10.8.x only are because of neat GUI stuff, and writing for the new multithreading mechanisms doesn't port so well to other operating systems. Most plugin developers want to support OS X and Windows, so they keep it simple.)