What is the worst OS X version you've used?

[iHorseHead]

Hi!
I remember when Lion was released people called it "Apple's Vista" and saying that it's the worst OS version ever. Now that I think back I wasn't a big fan of Lion either. It was slower on my Mac than Snow Leopard or Leopard. Launchpad had no search function it was the first time ever my Mac had kernel panics and to be frank, I don't have good memories of Lion. The wallpaper was nice though, but then again I remember people hating on Yosemite and El Capitan as well and Apple trolled us with iMessage.
After Beta, Messages Will Be Exclusive to OS X Mountain Lion - it was very cruel thing to do, Apple. I'll never forget + dropping bunch of Macs, including mine and then discover than the patched version of OS X Mountain Lion ran on my unsupported Mac better than Lion ever did. I still haven't forgiven Apple for dropping the support on MacBook 4,1 so early. I'm 100% sure it could've ran Mountain Lion, even Mavericks ran on my MacBook 4,1 perfectly. El Capitan and Yosemite not so much. I'm 100% sure Apple would've been able to support Mavericks officially on that white plastic MacBook. This is even worse than MacBook Pro 7,1 not getting night shift feature in High Sierra, yet flux worked perfectly and Windows 10's Night light worked out of the box as well.

I don't care what anyone says, but Leopard was the best. It ran The Sims 2, which Snow Leopard didn't (still have the DVD somewhere), the battery on Leopard lasted longer than on Snow Leopard and it was awesome and looked futuristic. In fact, I bought my first Mac because of the Leopard's wallpaper and Dock.

If I saw Mac today for the first time I'm not really sure I'd buy one.
But yeah, I have the worst memories with Lion. How about you guys?

 

[Nermal]

For me it was probably 10.15. I'd skipped 10.14 as my old nVidia-based computer couldn't run it, and then ended up with 10.15 when I bought a new machine. I was shocked by how far things had fallen in just a couple of years: while previously I'd reported a couple of bugs a year, I'd found maybe a dozen within the first few months under 10.15. Many still haven't been fixed as at 14.5.

I remember seeing a lot of complaints about 10.7 at the time, so I never bought it.

 

[bousozoku]

Leopard on PowerPC was the worst, especially after 10.4.11 got everything working. Suddenly, several of my games no longer worked. Catalina was good but killed gaming almost completely. I'm glad I skipped Ventura. It sounded like a daily disaster.

 

[iHorseHead]

Leopard on PowerPC was the worst, especially after 10.4.11 got everything working. Suddenly, several of my games no longer worked. Catalina was good but killed gaming almost completely. I'm glad I skipped Ventura. It sounded like a daily disaster.

When we come to the Apple Silicon era, then for me Big Sur was the worst. I bought an M1 MacBook Air and my MacBook used to crash constantly. Even on the desktop and out of the blue as well. It was very common for my Mac to restart randomly.. Suddenly the whole screen went purple and restarted itself. Reinstalling the OS did no good. People on this forum told me that my MacBook is broken and it's not software's fault and told me to take it back. My gut feeling told me that they'd just reinstall the OS and it'd happen again. It sounded like a lot of hassle.. When Monterey was released then the problems stopped and I haven't had an issue with my Mac till this day. Ventura ran good on M1 MacBook Air, but I'm not the fan of the Settings panel. Knowing Apple we'll never get System Preferences back.

Never used Leopard on a PowerPC, but it ran very well on Intel, so that's surprising to hear.

 

[bousozoku]

When we come to the Apple Silicon era, then for me Big Sur was the worst. I bought an M1 MacBook Air and my MacBook used to crash constantly. Even on the desktop and out of the blue as well. It was very common for my Mac to restart randomly.. Suddenly the whole screen went purple and restarted itself. Reinstalling the OS did no good. People on this forum told me that my MacBook is broken and it's not software's fault and told me to take it back. My gut feeling told me that they'd just reinstall the OS and it'd happen again. It sounded like a lot of hassle.. When Monterey was released then the problems stopped and I haven't had an issue with my Mac till this day. Ventura ran good on M1 MacBook Air, but I'm not the fan of the Settings panel. Knowing Apple we'll never get System Preferences back.

Never used Leopard on a PowerPC, but it ran very well on Intel, so that's surprising to hear.

Snow Leopard was reasonably good on Intel, but Leopard was the beginning of good for Intel and the end of PowerPC.

Monterey was my first experience with my M1 MacBook Air and it was consistent. I'm happy with Sonoma as well. Big Sur was a POS. I'm glad that Ventura ran well for you. I didn't want to try it.

My mid-2012 quad-core i7 with GeForce 650M is stuck on Catalina, which works just fine, without any of my games, of course.

System Settings will improve. I just hope that the people at Apple realize that people other than them use these machines and require a stable environment, not buggy new features.

 

[Pakaku]

10.9 was probably my least favourite.

 

[curnalpanic]

The 10.0 developer beta was quite slow. Even on a G3@450MHz. I'd have to go with that one.

 

[ducknalddon]

The 10.0 developer beta was quite slow. Even on a G3@450MHz. I'd have to go with that one.

Even the 10.0 final release was a bit of a dog. I remember it would crash if I pulled a USB stick out even though I had already ejected it.

I know people here like to whinge about how bad macOS has got but that doesn't match my experience. Current releases are so much better than stuff from the early days. The main problems I have now come from third party hardware and software rather than Apple.

 

[eyoungren]

Tiger.

I will however caveat that by saying that most of my experience with Tiger was in a mixed PC/Mac environment with Windows servers.

• Having to remove the majority of the server security so that Macs running Tiger could connect to server shares.

• No more than two Finder operations to and from the server at once. And God help you if you issue a copy command and a delete command around the same time. Otherwise - SBBOD.

• Archaic print server.

• Apple's non-standard version of SMB. This forced installs of DAVE (by Thursby) and/or AdmitMac on the server.

On my own personal Macs, Tiger was okay. However, I had the misfortune of going from Panther to Tiger right around the time of the Intel transition and a lot of devs started abandoning Tiger for Leopard. A lot of the apps I wanted to use would no longer work in Tiger.

Leopard was one of the better upgrades.

(Dis)honorable mentions…

Lion - Lion changed the minimum Finder window width. To get Finder windows at the width I was accustomed to, I now had to use an Applescript.

Mavericks - SMB3 bug, which forced the use of SMB2, which threw out the whole reason to have SMB3 at all. The bug I speak of did not allow client Macs to maintain connections to a server share for more than 24 hours. So, you'd go to save a file in InDesign and the app would quit out because Mavericks had terminated the server share connection (even though it was still showing as connected). Your only recourse was to reboot, because disconnecting the share and then reconnecting to it didn't solve the problem.

 

[eyoungren]

Never used Leopard on a PowerPC, but it ran very well on Intel, so that's surprising to hear.

I loved Leopard, but one of my biggest issues became QuarkXPress. When Quark hastily put out QXP 6.0 they did NOT redesign the type engine from OS9. But by QXP 7 and 8 they had done so. But guess what? Quark optimized the new type engine for Intel Macs, but NOT PowerPC Macs.

So, dealing with 11x17 pages of text at 6pt font size became an exercise in frustration in QXP8 when running on a G5. I used to work for a newspaper, so this was our legals section I am speaking of. I took to just going back into QXP 6 to do just the legals.

This was Quark's fault, but at that point they were not going to fix it because the Intel transition had already happened.

 

[iHorseHead]

10.9 was probably my least favourite.

What?! I am shocked to hear such a thing! Shocked! What else must I hear before I die?

 

[Spock]

10.0 was terrible, it was slow and lacked a lot of features that Mac OS 9 still had and looked terrible on lower res screens like the clamshell iBooks.

 

[GMShadow]

Lion or Venturda, though Big Sur wasn't great on Intel. Sonoma hasn't been great either but it was generally less bad than iOS 17 was for the first four months so I was less annoyed with it.

I'll probably settle with Ventura.

If I'd had a Mac that could run a current OS back in 2014-2015 I'd probably have said Yosemite though. The one-two punch of iOS 8 and Yosemite was bad.

 

[Mac mini power user]

Catalina was the worst for me in terms of stability, subsequent releases have been mostly stable.

 

[SecuritySteve]

Yosemite (10.10) gave me enough grief (and the hardware was not up to par on the desktop level at that time) that I switched to Windows until Mojave (10.14). Been happy ever since really.

 

[Larsvonhier]

10.0 was terrible, it was slow and lacked a lot of features that Mac OS 9 still had and looked terrible on lower res screens like the clamshell iBooks.

Yeah, Puma sucked. First really usable OS X was imho Panther.

 

[dmr727]

10.0 is my vote. It showed a ton of promise over 9 - it really did feel like the future - but ultimately it was exceptionally slow and limited in functionality. 10.1 was a massive improvement.

 

[aespana]

In my era with Mac, from High Sierra to Ventura, Ventura is just a disaster for me. Horrible UI, horrible performance on Intel, just horrible.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

Lion was a bit of a dip, but Mountain Lion was a nice improvement. For me, Mojave was the high point. It broke SMB and screen sharing, but otherwise it was pretty solid. Every release after that broke much more major things, making parts of the Mac wholly usable to the extent but I could no longer use a single Mac to do my work but rather two were required, and then sometime after big sur & monterey three were required. Then switching to ARM broke 100% of everything so at least that finally put a stop to it.

 

[Pakaku]

What?! I am shocked to hear such a thing! Shocked! What else must I hear before I die?

It was either 10.9 or 10.10 when they started trying to do flat design, which I think is probably the second-ugliest looking OS theme they've ever made (iOS 7 was their worst), especially after being used to how good 10.8 looked on a retina screen. I remember lots of ugly white backgrounds and thin text. The move to Helvetica for the system font was also awful.

 

[mansplains]

Tiger is the worst I've used, but it wasn't its fault necessarily. I was on a vintage machine (PowerBook G4) with a broken drive, so I couldn't update to Leopard and use the software I needed to, and I was stuck with rather limited options. Up until devs stopped supporting Tiger, it worked well.

 

[ojfd]

It was either 10.9 or 10.10 when they started trying to do flat design

Not only that, they also broke the Finder - 'Open folder in new window' no longer works as it used to. I've fixed the System font / low contrast / fugly colors issues on my 10.10, but broken Finder drives me nuts even up to this day.
So, IMO, everything past 10.9 is bad and getting worse after 10.11 because of SIP, Notifications and all that iPhone-like nonsense.

 

[Bustycat]

You mentioned "OS X" so only versions 10.8 to 10.11 are qualified.

 

[f54da]

Every version since 10.9 keeps getting worse, as in they keep adding more bugs and don't fix them. It surely doesn't help that they're rewriting every core service in swift as well.

 

[casperes1996]

Probably cheetah. Ironic for its name but it was pretty slow. 10.1 improved a lot