John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review

TL;DR<p>"In some ways, Mountain Lion is a refinement, enhancement, and yes, a <i>major bug-fix for Lion</i>. But the changes and additions are significant enough that they will inevitably come with their own set of bugs. Let's not forget Snow Leopard, which promised no new features but still brought plenty of bugs in its 10.6.0 release."<p>I hope they fixed memory management - Lion is too swap happy and slow on a decent 3Gb RAM Core 2 MBP. Windows comparatively flies on the same machine but of course suspend resume is flaky and other Win-Mac integration annoyances mean it's not a win-win.

I've suggested this before (and not done much about it), but that is not going to stop me suggesting it again.<p>How about a crowd-sourced 'Siracusa style' review of Ubuntu 12.04? Or Debian Wheezy, or Fedora (large integer, preferably 18 because that is the version that RHEL 7 will be based on)? Or the safe and conservative CentOS/SciLi/PUIAS version 6.3, now being targeted by Oracle. Or <i>your</i> favourite GNU/Linux, or BSD?<p>So many of the free software reviews are shallow.<p>I think the Penguins have done enough work to merit something with <i>depth</i>

This is almost the best part of <i>every</i> OS X release.

Just don't put it on your development workstation yet; XCode 4.4 is blocking the install of Command Line Tools for some developers. This means Homebrew doesn't work, VIM doesn't work (no /usr/include for pyconfig.h), and things are generally horked unless you want to play end-user in the app store.<p>Welcome to release day, Apple style. :)

TL;DR full screen with multiple monitors is still broken <a href="http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/18/#full-screen-multiple-monitors" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/18/#full-scre...</a>

And there goes my spare time... Every OS X release I'm more eager for Siracusa's review than the actual disk (or now download) itself :-)

Some info from Siracusa about the different ways to read the review: <a href="http://siracusa.tumblr.com/post/27978338524/about-my-mountain-lion-review" rel="nofollow">http://siracusa.tumblr.com/post/27978338524/about-my-mountai...</a><p>Sounds like if you buy the Kindle version when it comes out ($5), he'll get a direct cut, which is nice.

"Once the OS has been out for a while, try asking a Mac-using friend who is not obsessively reading multi-thousand-word operating system reviews on the Internet if he has noticed anything different about scrolling in Mountain Lion."<p>...priceless...

Epic review as usual from John Siracusa. Dan Benjamin volunteered to do a reading of this for release in audio format, but I think John Siracusa ruled it out. Understandable as I think too many problems to overcome (images, footnotes, licensing etc), so just a dream really. Would happily have paid for that though. Hope they can sort out the Kindle release, definitely going to purchase that.

Marco made a review of John Siracusa review ;) <a href="http://www.marco.org/2012/07/25/siracusa-mountain-lion-review-review" rel="nofollow">http://www.marco.org/2012/07/25/siracusa-mountain-lion-revie...</a>

I find it fascinating that he "wrote" this piece using Dragon Dictate, a dictation program.

The new iCloud support is interesting. I just edited the same iCloud document in TextEdit on two different machines, and I gotta say that is really damn cool.<p>On the other hand, this new iCloud support sadly highlights another unrelated new feature in Lion, and not in a good way: Automatic Termination.<p>You must use TextEdit to browse your iCloud documents, which is fine, but TextEdit keeps fucking disappearing on you because it has no open documents. Command+Tab away for a split second and it's gone, forcefully removed from your Dock and Command+Tab list.<p>Automatic Termination is a feature that is meant to serve <i>only</i> the most novice of Windows users who are coming to OS X for the first, while it breaks an existing feature of the OS that has been fundamental to Mac OS X and NeXTSTEP for the last 23+ years. And it's not even an option.<p>It is hugely frustrating and hugely disappointing.

Definition of a review, by ArsTechnica : <a href="http://imgur.com/RdohV" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/RdohV</a>

Am I missing an obvious single page link, or do they really want you to pay not to have to click through 25 pages?

My biggest pet peeve with 10.7 (besides the loss of arrows on my scroll bars) is the dumbing down of the Network control panel. In 10.7 you couldn't configure your WiFi to connect to 802.1x networks (i.e. WPA Enterprise.) You had to download the iPhone configuration utility, build a config file, then import it. 10.6 would let you set the configuration in the network control panel. Even iOS doesn't require ICU to connect. I didn't see anything about it in the review so I assume 10.8 is still set up the screwy 10.7 way.

Siracusa really does an outstanding job with these reviews.

Is it just me, or did anyone else notice an increase in graphics performance? I did not measure, but it should be significant, as I am noticing it in normal usage.<p>I'll hook it up to an external monitor later to try and stress it a little bit more.<p>I have a Late 2009 Macbook White, with 8GB and an SSD.

I just want to know if it will be easier or harder to compile ruby and python libraries with native extensions that depend on, say, libxml2.<p>I upgraded to Lion and it took 8 hours off of the installation process for lxml. But nokogiri was still nearly impossible.

If you need to properly prepare for this review checkout this video: <a href="http://patdryburgh.com/blog/preparing-for-john-siracusas-review-of-mountain-lion/" rel="nofollow">http://patdryburgh.com/blog/preparing-for-john-siracusas-rev...</a>

For me, the update to the messages beta app alone was worth it: iMessage on the Mac is so useful to keep in touch with friends, and the beta app was buggy as

The review doesn't say how long it takes to install once downloaded. Is this a lunch break install or a "wait-till-evening" installation?

What's with his obsession with iOS? He makes it sound like iOS is the quintessential operating system.

Why is it when you enable dictation it needs to send your contacts to Apple?

Isn't there a TL;DR;TL;DR;TL;DR^25 somewhere?

&#62; But I walked my dog briefly in the middle.<p>Don't take the article too seriously. If you did, you probably missed the point.