[mrng]

> My OS X Lion System finally (finally!) stabilized > around 10.7.5, stopped kernel panicking, beach balling, > and just outright hanging.

May I ask what you've been doing? Old Unix/NT guy here (Unix from 1988, NT from 1994), using OS X since 2008. Never had such a problem with my 17" MB Pro (early 2008)

[Osmium]

Just wanted to second this. Regular kernel panics = something seriously wrong. Either a hardware fault, or a bad kext or something. If anyone reading this has problems with OS X and stability, try running this:

http://khiltd.com/software/consultants_canary

It'll give you a list of every "non-standard" thing you have installed (e.g. kernel extensions), and between that and log files, it might help pinpointing the issue.

Apologies for being off-topic, it just seemed to be perverse to me to avoid upgrading because for stability reasons, when the new version should generally be more stable not less.

[ghshephard]

I think we can all agree that 10.6.8 was delightfully stable, and the first few versions of 10.7 were a bit of a clusterf*ck. My pain just went on a bit longer than most people. Lesson learned.

[ghshephard]

The Transition from Snow Leopard to Lion was a Fiasco. Six months in I was sorely tempted to see if I could revert back to Snow Leopard, and in hindsight, I wish I had.

Late 2010 13" MBAir (Best Laptop I've ever owned) - lots of KEXT issues, VMware Fusion interaction issues, FTDI Serial Driver Issues, Recovery from Sleep, and lots of beachballing on Mail.app.

Things started to get better on 10.7.4, and they returned to circa 10.6.8sh Snow Leopard Stability on 10.7.5. About the only thing that causes this laptop to Kernel Panic now is pulling out the USB Cable when it has an FTDI Serial Device and I'm running VMware Fusion - Kernel panics used to be a weekly thing, and, with the exception of the FTDI/VMWare thing - it's now been two+ months since I've seen one. Beachballing, also, is down to what you would normally expect.

Anyways - I'm happy now, and I'm one of those guys who will wait a year (or two) before moving to Lion. Or maybe I'll just buy a new laptop, and keep the old one for work, and wait for the new one to stabilize. Anyways, no new operating systems for me.