OS X Yosemite public beta starts tomorrow

It's interesting that ~15% of OS X users are on Snow Leopard (I have an old iMac that doesn't support Mavericks running 10.6, but I mostly use it as a local server)

How many of those users are still using Safari 5.1 (as opposed to FF/Chrome/Opera)?

PS: It's even weirder that people are still using Lion when apparently any Mac that runs Lion can run Mavericks (and 10.9 in my experience is much more stable than 10.7).

I am running beta 4 (14A298i) on a mid-2013 11" MacBook Air. It sometimes loses the WiFi connection, but reconnects automatically. I've noticed the laptop will restart itself with PowerNap turned on, and plugged into an external display and external drive. Turning off PowerNap seems to fix it. Everything works pretty well. Handoff is a little funky, but you'll probably not be running iOS 8.

I'm using it on some older hardware (2011 MacBook Pro) and it's been working just fine for me. It's maybe a bit more sluggish than Mountain Lion on the same hardware, but the difference is small enough that that might just be in my head.

It has been fine for me. I've been using things like Xcode, sublime text, mamp, codekit, git, mail. Haven't used virtual machines much though so can't comment on that. I typically find the OS X betas easier to work with than iOS

Using the developer preview for about a week. I have a 2012 Air 13". DP3 was mostly ok, but would freeze and immediately reboot once or twice times a day. The newly-released DP4 seems stable enough though.

There's also something weird about Safari on Yosemite. Sometimes the tab bar would just hide completely and to get it back you'd have to reopen Safari. (The tab switcher and cmd-{ cmd-} would still work.)

Using it on a mid-2010 MacBook Pro, for about a week. OS X itself is stable.

However, WiFi with unreliable internet connection (like tethering over a phone) is very flaky – the WiFi connection itself keeps dropping.

Safari has trouble with some video streaming sites – YouTube at 1080p, Netflix. This can be because of my older hardware, but never had any issues with Mavericks. Also WebGL does not seem very performant. Chrome does all of this perfectly fine, though.

If you use virtualisation with VMWare Fusion, note you need 6.0.4 for it to work under Yosemite. 6.0.3 will not run.

The new dark mode menu bar and dock are nice, but there are some rendering issues. It seems 3rd party menu bar icons are also not compatible yet, so most will be invisible or broken in dark mode.

GCC is essentially broken, rendering compilation of standard packages impossible.

https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=61407

Our team was on Yosemite but we all had to move back to Mavericks to actually do work.

I was trying it out for a while, but had to go back to 10.9 because of some Photoshop issues. So be careful if you use Adobe apps.

I've been using it for a bit. There are a couple of snags, but nothing has stopped me from getting work done. Most of my issues have been with homebrew formulas that aren't updated to work with 10.10 (mongodb is the one on the top of my head). Other than that, the only real issue I've had is with installs. Each update has taken upwards of an hour and a half to install while it constantly tells me 4 minutes remaining. Post install, pretty smooth though.

Things I'm regularly using without issue: PyCharm, Thunderbird, Chrome, Firefox, Subline Text 2, and iTerm

If you use Audio Hijack, and you boot to no sound, disable it (GIYF).

Other than that, for node / homebrew / mongo etc everything's been fine.

Interactions with XCode have been frustrating. Can't install XCode 5.1.1, and the XCode 6 beta has been a little crashy but usable.

I use it daily : Emacs, Illustrator and Photoshop works quite well; Safari has gone a long way and is now a pretty cool browser (except it crashes often, but I guess this is what betas are for). I had no problems with my homebrew packages. Indeed I've just realized that I've installed a dual-boot Mavericks/Yosemite but I'm no longer using Mavericks.

Been running it since beta 2 or so. Latest build is pretty good. Wifi drops out every once in a while and something weird is going on with my audio routing where it keeps trying to route to airplay devices that may or may not be present. VMware fusion works now if you use the technology preview release.

I use it full time for iOS dev and casual use and haven't had any showstoppers. I have my old mavericks install in a second partition and rarely reboot into it.

Otherwise it's in good shape for a beta OS that's still a couple of months from GM.

You may want to wait for the release notes from the public beta before condemning them to not fixing anything in DP4. Odds are some if not many of these things will be addressed before they let the public use them.

I'm not sure if there's been any changes regarding signing, but I can confirm that VirtualBox has been working fine through Vagrant for me.

They do. This broke Viscosity VPN software for me between DP3 and DP4, and the Viscosity guys say they are waiting for their key to be signed before they can release a new beta.

This also broke AT&T AllAccess (software for my LTE USB modem).

About half of our team is on Yosemite with no issues so far with Python or various Python packages.

It's flaky at best. Sometimes calls show up, sometimes they show up a few seconds later. Often times, they don't disappear when you accept it on your phone.

Definitely not as polished as in their demo yet.

It worked at beta 3 for me :)

iMessages still don't alway sync correctly for me. How are they going to manage phone calls?

The SMS thing works ok - I can receive but not send. Phone calls have never worked for me which is a shame as this was one of the features I was really looking forward to. Mail is pretty unstable. Other than that, I've been enjoying using Yosemite from Preview 1.

Worked for me in beta 3, but they removed it in beta 4. Also, sending SMS from Mac doesn't work anymore.

I am very interested in the spotlight improvements. As of now, 10.9.x, my external HDDs are not indexed and unsearchable. :(