A few weeks ago, I finally made the jump from Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) to 10.11 (El Capitan) on my primary computer. I had been using 10.11 at work for months, but not at home. I was probably one of the last holdouts on hardware that could be updated. Some of the reasons were:
- software that wouldn’t work after the update, such as Quicken 2005 (have no replacement yet), Office X (using LibreOffice), and Parallels 5 (using VirtualBox)
- worry about privacy concerns with a more “connected” OS
- possible problems updating iTunes and iPhoto libraries
- possible problems with such a large jump
- general update time and problems
- possibility of worse performance
- disliking some of the direction Apple has been taking
- lots of EULA reading material (yes, I’ve been reading these lately)
There were many reasons to do the update though:
- 10.6 hadn’t been updated for security since 2013 and for general bugs since 2011
- Safari stopped receiving updates when the OS did, at version 5.1. Not my primary browser, but before the security updates stopped, I had used it for secure transactions to segregate them from my normal browsing.
- Chrome stopped providing updates in March 2016, version 49. Not my primary browser, but still.
- Firefox finally stopped providing updates in August 2016, version 48. This was my primary browser and definitely a concern.
- Calibre stopped receiving updates at 1.48, which didn’t have support for my kobo.
- Quicksilver stopped receiving updates in 2013 and some things had broken when it tried to auto-update.
- Atom, my primary text editor at work, never was released for 10.6, leaving me on Sublime at home.
- Occasional bugs and probably older versions of macports
- Other software also stopped receiving updates or couldn’t be installed.
Also, the OS had received updates in the years since 10.6, some of which I liked, such as:
- Finder tabs, long desired.
- File tagging, also long desired, though maybe not implemented as well as I would like and not portable across OS’s.
- Sidebar thing, quicker and better than the dashboard for looking at a few things (I have weather and stocks there)
- mission control is an improvement over exposé, though it took a while to win me over.
- bluetooth was really slow on 10.6, and seems to be better now
- lots of other bug-fixes, tweaks, and polish
I was certainly getting to the point where security was a potential concern. But the Calibre update was what finally won me over: I got some e-books from the 10kapart contest that I wanted on my e-reader. Much easier to read there.
I am not yet done with the update, but I have most things working that I need regularly. The update went very smoothly, surprising for jumping that many versions. I just had to download from the App Store, and the install went smoothly. I am mostly pleased with the results. Installing a new OS version always gives a nice, new feel, sometimes more-so than hardware these days, and can be fun configuring.
I have a partition set aside for installing 10.6. I will either use that for running older software on or use one of the old iBooks I have sitting around.