
How Snow Leopard became synonymous with reliability - artsandsci
http://www.loopinsight.com/2018/02/01/the-mac-the-myth-the-legend-how-snow-leopard-became-synonymous-with-reliability/
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Finnucane
I ran my iMac on Snow Leopard until El Capitan. So about six years. At that
point I really didn't have much choice; I couldn't get updates for anything
any longer.

~~~
gargravarr
Same. I ran my MBP until El Cap came out, then upgraded to Mavericks (by that
point, Apple had stopped letting me decline the upgrade...). Hated Mavericks
from the start, too many UI changes, iOS features I'd been avoiding the newer
versions for, reversing half the multi-touch gestures, and some instability in
the mix too from running on old (but officially supported) hardware.

The MBP came with Leopard, which I found great on its own, and Snow Leopard
was an OS I actually paid real money for. It wasn't exactly expensive (£23),
and to this day I don't regret it, because it was a truly brilliant OS.
Stable, intuitive, and above all, usable. Nice, non-invasive UI with no
superficial differences to the previous release, reduced disk footprint, more
efficient use of the 64-bit CPU, and it just worked, year after year. SL felt
like a very polished OS that Apple were actually proud of. My company uses
Sierra, which is passable, but High Sierra (which by its naming scheme should
be an SL-like release) is the antithesis of SL - unfinished, buggy as hell and
with stupid security holes. I have thus far refused to upgrade any of our
Macs, and am pretty sure we're going to skip it for the next version.

If anything, I wish Apple had changed the name to OS 11 with Mavericks, rather
than continue with OSX for a while. It would help disassociate the current
poor-quality OSes with their ancestry.

