is lion ready yet for work?

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Traditionally I've moved up to the new OS X by about.3 or .4 But, I've heard a lot of negative, almost overwhelming about using lion for production in any way.

I use it for web dev/graphics. Programs is the usual adobe CS5.5, I have a couple clients still hooked on contribute (I read a couple issues there.) and I use eclipse, and a whole pile of other apps. I run it really, really hard with vmWare open often running both XP and win7.

Any success stories? I know people using it for personal and/or strict apple apps and a handful of others are ok with it. But, how is it for "I need this thing to really work". Is it there yet?
 
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Really, the only issue I ever ran into with Lion was a reduced battery life issue (well there's an issue with FW800 drives I ran into, but ONLY when the drives were formatted FAT). A clean install resolved a good chunk of battery life.. not quite all. I run CS5.5 on it, without issue, the rest I can't comment on. Perhaps others have more input in that regard.
 
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chas_m

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I depend on my aging 2007 BlackBook for my work. I use it for 11 hours a day at least, every day.

Have had NO as in ZERO serious issues with Lion since day one. One of the very few minor quibbles I had -- a lag in reconnecting to the wireless network when waking from sleep -- got fixed with 10.7.3.

In my long experience, the people who TEND to have issues are the same one who TENDED not to do routine maintenance or have backups. Not saying all problems or glitches are user-caused or imaginary, just sayin'.

IOW, if you've done your maintenance and your backups are up to date, I don't think there's anything to worry about.
 
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all the pro guys I know including myself are all very religious about maintenance and backups. I'm almost lonney about them.

Do you use a very large number of pro apps daily? I'll often run about 15 + on average. This, is the key here, as I do know a few people using lion but don't use it the way I do or many pros do.

Big big difference. If I started getting beachballs etc in photoshop or the handful of client still stuck on contribute (hate that program) I'd throw this thing through a window.,
 
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Lion has gotten a harder rap than it deserves. It had a few little glitches here and there, and a few of us have actually found that a full on clean install resolved a lot of them. In my opinion, the overriding concern with Lion that should be considered is if you need Rosetta to support legacy PPC apps. If you have any of those, then you will have to wait on the developer to get off their butts and migrate to Intel code. Failing that, you will have to either look for alternative apps or stay on Snow Leopard forever. PPC is dead with Lion and OS X will never support it again.

Why not partition your drive, install Lion, then give it a trial to see if everything you use works with it? You can also look over this list to see if the apps you rely on have been tested with Lion.
 

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all the pro guys I know including myself are all very religious about maintenance and backups. I'm almost lonney about them.

Do you use a very large number of pro apps daily? I'll often run about 15 + on average. This, is the key here, as I do know a few people using lion but don't use it the way I do or many pros do.

Big big difference. If I started getting beachballs etc in photoshop or the handful of client still stuck on contribute (hate that program) I'd throw this thing through a window.,

My suggestion is that since you have 8+ Macs, select one for a trial. Upgrade it to Lion and see if you have problems.
 
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Well I want it on my main Mac, but you're right. I got a new own ssd to install, and an optibay, and wanted to decode which way I went. So, if I try this, I'll put the ssd in optibay, and use it as a trial for now.

I'm nervous because of all the negative feedback. It's interesting dysfunctional that 5.5 runs well, do you use it heavily? Dream weaver blows in general, so I'm not worried about that one, I'm using other apps for coding now anyway.
 
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chas_m

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I use a variety of apps, but I'm not a heavy graphics pro these days like I used to be. I mostly use writing tools, Photoshop, some audio editing stuff (for radio ads or podcasts), that sort of thing. A "bad" habit I picked up a long time ago back when RAM was tight was to only have open the programs I'm actually using -- no more than six at a time for me anymore. This "habit" has actually worked better for me over time because apps now re-open in like one second or less rather than a minute like the olden days. :)
 
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ah, your needs are about 1/20th of the average production person like myself. Especially if you use mainly a few apple apps.

Very, huge difference. It isn't about the time of opening photoshop, it's also opening up all of the work you have as well, often 1- to 30 documents. And that's just photoshop. As I said, I KILL and OS. SL has been a total champ.

I'm going to run a trial and see what lion is really made of. It'll be a total fresh install.

But with more things coming that are becoming lion only, I had to initiate this conversation.
 
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I'm nervous because of all the negative feedback. It's interesting dysfunctional that 5.5 runs well, do you use it heavily?

I generally do a lot of photo-manipulation, multiple images open (generally not 30, but with panoramas etc it's a possibility), generally as tiffs from Lr, multiple layers and smart objects etc. It runs (well ran) as well as it did in snow leopard on the same 11mbp. Runs better now that I plunked in 16gb's. That said, I work mostly in Photoshop and Illustrator. I don't do web dev, so no need for any of those apps.

One of the things that remains constant in life is this.. People complain more than they praise. It's human nature, which also means you tend to hear more bad than good about things. Lion does have a higher minimum RAM requirement than Snow Leopard though, so as always.. if you don't have plenty of overhead available for use.. you'll notice it. The best way to know for sure, given your workload and method, is to build a separate Lion partition and try it.
 
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That's the plan. It'll take about a week to properly set up the new os as I'll do a total fresh install of everything as that's the best way to give it a proper chance.

If it can survive me, it can survive anyone. I may get the os install in this eve or tomorrow. It'll go on the new owc ssd.
 

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