[Adrian Kingsley-Hughes wrote a link bait article](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/os-x-107-lion-is-more-painful-than-vista/14242) one that I was going to let pass, but then I got to thinking about it and — well — I got a little more pissed.
First things first: Lion has bugs. I know this and admit this — I have been using it since the first Developer Preview came out and I know first hand how annoying some of these bugs are.
Kingsley-Hughes writes a hardware column, not a software column. Now this doesn’t mean that he can’t comment on Lion, but perhaps he should be extra careful when doing so and double check what he is really trying to say. Even so he installed Lion on his Mac mini and reports three problems.
Each of these three problems are rare oddities that a vast *minority* are experiencing. The third one, though, is a specific problem with iMacs — yet Kingsley-Hughes claimed to have installed Lion on a Mac mini. Maybe he has both, but if that is the case I — the reader — want to know if he is having the issues on both machines, because that would lead to a far more credible tale.
Kingsley-Hughes’ end conclusion is the Lion is far worse than Vista — oh really? I think what he maybe meant to say is that Lion is the Vista of Mac OS X (still wrong, but a better comparison), but that is *not* what he did say.
I had Vista Ultimate two weeks after it came out, I know what Vista was like. Let me tell you some of the issues I had:
1. There are literally two disks to install Vista with, a 32-bit and 64-bit. So even after I decided between the seven or so different versions I still had to figure out which version of the OS to install. Yay me! Now you maybe thinking well that is easy, what kind of processor did you have. Do keep in mind that Vista came out right around the same time that consumers started to get their hands on 64-bit Intel chips. I actually didn’t know there was a difference in the disks and installed the 32-bit version only to have to install the 64-bit version later on.
2. My sound card didn’t work. In fact my sound card wouldn’t work for another month after the install. Yes, for an entire month that computer had *no sound*. I went out and bought a USB sound card to use for gaming, but it didn’t work either (I can’t remember if I even got it working).
3. Every ten seconds a dialog popped up asking if I would allow access (or something along those lines) to program/process/activity X. That was *fun*.
4. My older games — the games that I ran a Windows box for — they mostly were not useable. After a few months most of the games were patched, but you know that took a FEW MONTHS.
5. It took about a month (that’s being generous) before the graphics drivers were up to speed and fast enough to game with.
6. Oh, did I mention that there was *no* upgrade path from Windows XP Pro and so any Vista user **had** to do a fresh install? [True story](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Upgrading-from-Windows-XP-to-Windows-Vista). Now this was the 32-bit OS to 64-but OS, but just look at that linked table of the upgrade options a user has. Crazy right?
So *even if* Kingsley-Hughes is having random crashing, wifi dropping and “videos freezing iMacs” — even if those are all real — he *still* has a useable computer when those things are not occurring, which is likely not that often despite his best attempts to “prove” otherwise.
With Vista my computer was barely useable, and honestly wasn’t useable for what I wanted to do on it for months.
Lion is not worse than Vista and saying so is a flat out lie.
Note: This site makes use of affiliate links, which may earn the site money when you buy using those links.