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Comment by pgtruesdell | Hacker News Reader

While it looks dated, SL has a far more intuitive UI, in my opinion. I don't recall any major issues with this release. It seemed to "just work." Big Sur seems like a toy by comparison.

An anecdote, I still remember installing Snow Leopard on my Polybook; it was the first OS update since switching to a Mac. I received the physical delivery since it was still distributed by disc, so I left my house. I was able to install it a few hours later while waiting on an appointment sitting in the car, all while on battery power! It was like magic.

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I actually like the look of Big Sur, but the bugs... oh god the bugs.

That new notification center looks real nice. Shame my first experience with it has been it repeatedly hanging, gobbling up RAM and CPU cycles, and generally not displaying notifications.

(Extra fun if it hangs while notifications are still on screen; then they just sit there forever. 'pkill NotificationCenter' has been my friend lately.)

I get every notification double. And they took away the snooze options on calendar notifications but they are still there for reminder notifications.

It’s kind of interesting because in the Snow Leopard era you didn’t have OS level notifications but you had Growl. And the Growl API was extremely well supported, and arguably better supported because it wasn’t limited to App Store apps.

Further, Growl allowed the user to customize look and feel, persistence, the types of notifications, etc which allowed you to create a notification system that was far more effective than anything available on the Mac today.

It’s easy to argue that 12 years later notifications on Macs is worse than what it was in the late 2000s.

For me SL was one of greatest release of OS X.

It's so easy and sleek that i miss good old times!

Agreed. It’s an odd thing to say, but I’ve been using Macs since the early days, and something about SL felt like OS X had finally arrived—like the platform had reached the point where Apple wanted it to be.

Not that the earlier versions were notably bad or anything, but something about them still felt new and experimental. I remember thinking Snow Leopard was the point at which X graduated to “the new normal”, for lack of a better way of putting it.

I agree Big Sur is a big step back. They've changed all the icons in System Preferences again, and the new sound-levels UI in the menubar is very confusing.

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