Snow Leopard has the perfect metaphors for everything. This extends to many different areas, so I'll focus on apps as an example:
A Mac OS X app is just a particular type of file. You don't "install" apps any more than you'd install a photo or a PDF. Sure, standard practice is to copy apps to your /Applications folder, but in Snow Leopard, this directory didn't have any unique behavior. A Stack for the /Applications folder was placed on your Dock by default, but users were expected to modify the Dock's contents. I was free to organize my apps as I would would any type of file, and the OS felt built to encourage this. If I dragged an app from /Applications to my Desktop, the app got moved. If I dragged iTunes to the trash, iTunes got deleted.
You can certainly do this in later releases, but the OS will fight you! Dragging apps out of /Applications creates an alias, unless you remember to hold down the ⌘ key. Whereas I used to "install" most apps by dragging them to the same Stack I used to launch apps, doing the same with Launchpad just creates a shortcut, which will break if the original is removed.
Lion is when Apple began trying to make macOS more consistent with iOS, regardless of whether the changes were also consistent with the Mac's original UI paradigm. I realize I'm nitpicking, and to be clear, I'm mostly okay with everything through Mavericks, before they switched to an ugly and low-contrast visual style.
Snow Leopard was also my first experience with Mac OS X, so I don't know how much that affects my opinion. But my god, the first day I booted up Snow Leopard and settled into using it over the next few hours... as dumb as it sounds, I just recall a feeling of pure ecstasy.
> Snow Leopard was also my first experience with macOS, so I don't know how much that factors into things.
It's not just rose coloured glasses... I've used all of the classic Mac OS version and OS X from about 10.3 up to snow leopard, there were good, bad and ok versions, none terrible, all the way through there. But 10.6 was the best of the OS X in terms of stability and simplicity, from that point on it really felt like the whole system was being taken in a different direction, no more tick-tock feature-stability release schedule, and no more refinements, just more pseudo features to flash at prospective buyers, more bugs, more cruft, more unforgivable security mistakes, more bloat and far, far less control - basically turning into a bad iPhone as far as I was concerned.
I retreated to 10.6 for as long as I safely could then moved to a Linux desktop when they officially ended support for my machine deeming it obsolete.
A Mac OS X app is just a particular type of file. You don't "install" apps any more than you'd install a photo or a PDF. Sure, standard practice is to copy apps to your /Applications folder, but in Snow Leopard, this directory didn't have any unique behavior. A Stack for the /Applications folder was placed on your Dock by default, but users were expected to modify the Dock's contents. I was free to organize my apps as I would would any type of file, and the OS felt built to encourage this. If I dragged an app from /Applications to my Desktop, the app got moved. If I dragged iTunes to the trash, iTunes got deleted.
You can certainly do this in later releases, but the OS will fight you! Dragging apps out of /Applications creates an alias, unless you remember to hold down the ⌘ key. Whereas I used to "install" most apps by dragging them to the same Stack I used to launch apps, doing the same with Launchpad just creates a shortcut, which will break if the original is removed.
Lion is when Apple began trying to make macOS more consistent with iOS, regardless of whether the changes were also consistent with the Mac's original UI paradigm. I realize I'm nitpicking, and to be clear, I'm mostly okay with everything through Mavericks, before they switched to an ugly and low-contrast visual style.
Snow Leopard was also my first experience with Mac OS X, so I don't know how much that affects my opinion. But my god, the first day I booted up Snow Leopard and settled into using it over the next few hours... as dumb as it sounds, I just recall a feeling of pure ecstasy.