The Macworld Help Desk has a really helpful article about what to expect when upgrading to Mac OS 10.8 (currently 10.8.2) Mountain Lion. The article can be seen at http://bit.ly/10n5gNc
Personally, I haven’t performed this upgrade, but there’s really only one reason for this at this point. I HAVE upgraded to Lion (10.7) and do not particularly like it. It’s GREAT for new users, but for those of us who’ve been using the Mac for a long time, we have to jump through too many hoops to do anything with real control. This is the same issue with Mountain Lion, and from what I see, Mountain Lion has some improvements over Lion. So, you ask, WHY have I upgraded to Lion, and skipped Lion?
Well, I NEED my old applications that run in Rosetta. “But” (you say), “Lion doesn’t run Rosetta either, so how can this be a good reason?”
In my efforts to keep my old apps running, I found the ONE version of VMWare Fusion that allowed us to install Snow Leopard as a guest operating system so I can run my old Snow Leopard installation (my favorite OS so far, btw) in emulation – much the same way I run Windows. Now, I need you guys to know that installing Snow Leopard’s Client OS may be breaking the “letter of the law” unless you use the Server version.
The ONE version of VMWare Fusion that will allow the use of Snow Leopard’s Client (means end-user version) will stop working if I upgrade it, and the old version will not run on Mountain Lion – simple as that!
Oh, and I should tell you that I HAVE tried using the Server version of Snow Leopard in Parallels and VMWare. They work fine, but don’t have the same capabilities as they do when emulating Windows – they don’t allow copy/paste to work between environments, and they don’t allow drag and drop of files from the main environment to the virtualized one (a VERY helpful feature between Mac and Windows – non-existent in Mac to Mac emulation – can you believe it?!)
All this, so you can understand the implications of upgrading your Operating System on the Mac. It may not affect you as most of you have been using the Mac for a short enough time that you don’t have any older programs that require Rosetta. But if you do, you may wish to take heed.