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Comment by percept | Hacker News Reader

Related to this, how have people found running Yosemite compared to Mavericks, performance and compatibility-wise?

Are you sorry you upgraded? (I'm asking for a friend.)

I recently got a mac mini that shipped with Yosemite. It has the nice feature of completely killing the WiFi interface when you attach a USB hub - googling around it seems a Yosemite bug. I have been told that also using bluetooth devices (such as the apple mouse) can trigger the same behaviour. So I'd say I'm sorry that the mac shipped with Yosemite, except that at least I received the fix for the privilege escalation bug.

I had this bug plaguing me for a while. My WiFi connection would drop every fifteen minutes or so, requiring me to turn off the WiFi and then turn it on again. I was able to fix it by doing a clean install of Yosemite (from a bootable drive).

It isn't just Yosemite... I had exactly this behavior with Mavericks on a new MacBook last year. Fired up a Bluetooth mouse, and next time I opened the lid wireless had completely gone.

I've managed to get it working after a fashion, although not reliably, and have come to the conclusion that Apple just don't do wireless well.

My personal computer is a late 2008 MBP, and Yosemite runs fine on that. It's been upgraded to 8 gigs of ram, and that's enough to smoothly do dev work in vagrant environments.

I have the exact same setup with 8GB of RAM, and it's still going strong. I wish I could upgrade to 16GB to extend its life even further.

If you're seriously concerned, why not use an external drive of some sort and install Yosemite to it? (Bonus points: clone your internal disk to it first, and upgrade that.) Boot it up, test out your critical functions, and then update your main volume if it works out for you.

Would using an external drive make it noticeably slower, making performance non-representative?

Not if you get one of these:

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Portable-250GB-External-MU-PS2...

That would depend on which interface and drive technologies you use. A SSD connected via Thunderbolt would likely be faster than an internal hard drive.

This + SSD (Crucial IIRC) gives me 200+Mb/s write, 400+Mb/s read speeds: http://amzn.com/B00FCLG65U

USB 3.0 is pretty fast. Without TRIM performance will probably degrade but that will take time.

You need to do the Bonus points version of your recommendation. Running an OS off an external will just make everything feel sluggish (unless you have a lightning enclosure and spare SSD laying around).

I upgraded. I haven't had any problems that I wasn't already having in Mavericks (Anyone else have kernel panics when sleeping with a thunderbolt monitor attached?).

Yes! (although minus the thunderbolt monitor)

I also have a problem with a Dual-link DVI adapter. If I sleep with it connected, at some point it wakes up and "kernel_task" takes up 100% CPU (all 8 cores) until I put it to sleep and wake it up again. Sucks coming down in the morning and finding my Macbook burning a hole in the desk.

I haven't had any issues with that, and I have two thunderbolt monitors attached in daisy chain mode.

The only kernel panics I've experienced so far have been Parallels Desktop bugs that crashed the system. I'm regularly stressing my Macbook Pro to the max running vagrant images through Parallel Desktop with full integration tests running inside, and this tends to be pretty effective at finding strange bugs in Parallels Desktop.

I've been running with a Thunderbolt Display for a few years now with few problems. I've had zero problems on Yosemite.

Among other things upgrading (to 10.10.3) will do, it'll fix the issue in the article.

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