Comment by gord288 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gord288 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

As I recall, there were plenty of legitimate user gripes when the very first iteration of Snow Leopard (10.6.0) was released. But by the time of the very last point-release (10.6.11?), the OS was rock-solid. It was only after all the initial bugs were ironed out, that Snow Leopard achieved the legendary status that it has enjoyed ever since. The blogger doesn’t take this factor into account.

Mavericks played out similarly as far as I can recall. Earlier releases had issues but by the last minor update it was quite solid.

10.9 my personal “Snow Leopard”. It has most of what made the Aqua era releases good with some QoL/polish improvements. If I could patch it with non-flat scrollbars and 10.5/10.6 2D grid spaces it’d be perfect.

It was 10.6.8 v1.1. They didn’t want to increment the version number so they made a version number on top of a version number.

That number 10.6.8 is burned into my brain because I was on that release for so long.

This is true, but it’s also true of many other OS X and MacOS releases over the years.

You’ve definitely hit on the core of the issue with the Snow Leopard myth, though: comparing the final battle-hardened bug-patched version of an OS, to a newly released version. Seems like “Snow Leopard” always gets trotted out whenever someone is unhappy with the latest release.

See also: Windows XP.

Upon release it was a security/stability CF. Today there are retrocomputing forums dedicated primarily to it. What they are gazing rose-coloredly back on is likely Windows XP SP3, not how the OS was upon its release.

Until recently, no reasonable person ever expected a major new OS release to be rock solid before its first major point-release. And actually nothing has changed, except that what we used to call a "point-zero" release is now called a Public Beta.

Windows XP was sufficiently reliable by SP1, sufficiently secure by SP2, and sufficiently prepared for an extended lifespan by SP3.

Because it was followed by garbage that didn't get taken out until 7, which was soon after followed by permanent forced garbage.

Vista wasn't garbage. In fact, Vista and 7 precisely parallel Leopard and Snow Leopard both in timelines and in release quality—a somewhat rushed, haphazard release of a new OS with tons of new features, many of which were considerably more resource-intensive than the previous release. 7 was more or less Vista SP3. The design language didn't even change except the Start bar.

People had bad experiences on Vista because they tried to run Windows Aero on 2001 hardware, and hardware vendors for once strong-armed MS into certifying their half-decade-old hardware as 'ready for Vista'.

I had a brand new PC that came with Vista on it, it was terrible. Not just slow but also BSODs and bad UI. School PCs were higher end than mine but also had BSODs.

The BSODs were largely because Vista changed the driver API so everybody had to write new drivers. I remember seeing an article saying that Microsoft's telemetry showed that ~30% of all Vista BSODs were caused by the nVidia graphics driver. Windows 7 came out a few years later with the same driver API, so by then everybody had gotten most of the kinks worked out of their drivers.

Yeah, it was that. Win7 became stable but kept some or all of the Vista bloat, but people noticed less because PCs were faster by then. I barely use Windows but could see XP as the best-ever version of it if they'd kept it up to date.

Windows 2000 was peak.

Windows XP was when they started putting the activation bullshit in, which was just a little too much for privacy-brained me. I had migrated to Linux pretty much exclusively by then.

Indeed. Just like OSX 10.6.8, Windows XP SP2 was the version that made Windows XP actually stable, and then SP3 added on top of that. But initial Windows XP (not even SP1) sucked big times indeed. Although not like Windows Millennium :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com