OSX Lion: worth the upgrade?

I could start this post the way I usually do; apologising for not having posted in a while, etc etc. However, this time, I actually have an excuse.

On the 20th July, apple released Mac OSX Lion in in the app store. As mentioned in some of my previous posts, OSX lion has over 250 new features, and is distributed exclusively through the app store, rather than being shipped on physical media such as DVD's. Personally, i'm not a big fan of this internet distribution; apple have made lion's installation very easy for new or inexperienced computer users, so much so that it's almost too easy for those of us who want more customisation, such as the ability to do clean installs or customise what gets installed and what doesn't. However, it is still possible to perform clean installs/customisations, if you restore the disc image to a external drive, or burn it to a dvd yourself. Some internet resources are reporting that apple will be selling OSX lion on usb drives in august, though it's looking like these will be pretty expensive.

Apples new method if distribution through the app store also means that, if you chose not to upgrade to snow leopard, you must upgrade to snow leopard before you can upgrade to lion, as downloading lion requires the app store which is not being made available on the older mac operating systems.

So, in my opinion, is this even worth the trouble of downloading?

Yes, definitely. Lion is awesome. Obviously, having been out for less than a week, there are still problems to be worked out, and 1 or 2 things that are almost completely broken. However, the average computer user probably won't notice these things at all.

Some of the things I like:
Full screen apps; full screen apps is an awesome feature. It's especially helpful when making tutorial videos/presentations, as everything (everything) else is hidden so your viewers cannot see the rest of your applications/desktop. You can also have multiple applications in full screen mode at once, and you can switch between them.
The 'all my files' option in the finder, as it's name suggests, shows you all your files. However, they are grouped and sorted automatically, so if you've forgotten where you put a particular file it makes it much easier to find it.
Conversations view in mail makes it easier to sort through your emails, particularly when you have a lot of emails in 1 mailbox, as it groups messages form the same conversation together. You can archive, delete, and perform other actions on the entire conversation, instead of the separate messages.
Safari has had a lot of work done to it. It's got the upgraded webkit engine, so is now much faster, and now no-longer has a pop-up download window, instead showing a button in the toolbar when files are downloading. Annoyingly, there is still no way to have the "do you want safari to remember this account?" box never show up when you log into a website.
Launchpad, apple's IOS-like applications home screen for lion, iso a really cool new feature; when you download an app from the app store, it goes into the launchpad instead of into the dock, keeping the dock free of too many applications.
It's fast; lion definitely has some speed improvements over snow leopard; applications load faster, and the system seams to boot much quicker.

Things that still need to be worked out:
iTunes 10.4, despite it's 'performance improvements', is still slower than i'd like.
the auto-correct sometimes corrects things, even though you told it not too.
The system won't see any of my networked drives, such as my dns-323 nas drive, or any networked windows 7 pc's.

Things I just don't like:
Lion now has a feature that remembers open windows in applications when you quit them, and can also re-open your applications/windows when you shutdown and restart the computer. I find this incredibly annoying, particularly if an application locks up, or if I was watching a video in safari. However, you can press cmd option Q to completely quit an application, there is a checkbox when shutting down or restarting to control whether it re-opens your windows or not, and you can disable this entire feature in the general section of system preferences.
No clean install; I know most normal users aren't really going to care if they do an upgrade or a clean install; however, some of us actually do. Personally, I like to do a nice fresh install of a new operating system, instead of upgrading and having to remove the left-overs of the old system later. Infact, I upgraded my macbook originally, and then clean installed the next day due to loosing a lot of hard drive space because of my old snow leopard system.
The recovery partition - the recovery partition is a good idea, though it does worry me slightly. As anybody who buys a new mac mini will see, the mac comes with no recovery media; no discs, no usb drive, etc. (i'm not sure of the other new macs, i've only seen mac mini unboxings). This is due to the fact that lion now includes a recovery feature, that can be used to perform disc checks, brows the support site if the system is not bootable, or even reinstall lion from the existing hard drive. I suspect that apple are going to start using this method of recovery, instead of shipping recovery media with macs.
However, this means, for example, if you have one of these macs with no recovery disc, and the hard drive crashes, that you can't reinstall your os. It seams to me that apple are doing what the other computer manufacturers are doing with these stupid computer recovery systems that don't generally work, and aren't going to provide some way of restoring the system if the hardware fails. However, apple's system is almost worse, as you will need another mac to download lion from the app store, in order to create a dvd or bootable drive to install it on your other mac.



In conclusion, OSX lion is definitely worth the upgrade. Just make sure you create a bootable copy of the OSX lion installer on a dvd or usb drive in case something goes wrong. Lion has some great new features that will make using your mac easier and more enjoyable, some features that will be great once they're fixed, some features that will get on your nerves (but almost all modern operating systems have auto-correct), and some things that, in my opinion, we're just not ready for yet.