Dead horse, apologies..from OS 10.8.5 to OS X Yosemite 10.10

[cbergm7210]

For a host of reasons (like implementing Apple's Family Share plan) and updating all of our iPhones, I'm thinking of making the jump to Yosemite 10.10.

It is a two step jump for me, so it scares the you know what out of me regarding DP and all the VI's installed on the Mac Pro.

Any feedback, good, bad, ugly, would be greatly welcomed regarding this leap. Anyone running on 10.10 with DP 9 with stable success? Any anticipated problems?

(The only reason I cannot go to El Capitan is because Adobe apparently went to a subscription model for their design suite for El Capitan. After paying good money for the suite I can't justify paying a monthly fee to use their software. But I digress...)

I have a late 2009 MP with four internal drives, an OWC Mercury Accelsior E2 PCI Express SSD 960Gb, and 12 TB of external backup storage on 5 drives. 16 Gb RAM.

Ok all you geniuses, Halloran, HC Marcus, Polich, and all the rest...I rely on expert opinions for decisions like this.

Thanks in advance for the feedback!

[mikehalloran]

You survived 10.8.2 so most of your plugs will be compatible. By going to 10.10.5 you miss the growing pains inherent in the early versions of Mavericks and Yosemite.

Unfortunately, I don't know how you'll be able to update to iOS 8 on your iPhones. Unlike older versions of OS X, you can't just pick your version of iOS. Some of the iOS 9 compatibility requires El Cap.

Adobe... Yes, I hear you on that. Acrobat X Pro has no issues but Photoshop Elements 6 (my favorite version) is broken and Elements 10 is on life support although I can get it to do what I need —sorta kinda. Both worked great in Yosemite.

Office 2008 still works but has slowed back down to Mavericks speed. I understand that 2011 is a lot faster but I just never liked that version so I didn't reinstall when I did my clean install last year.

If you boot from an SSD, you no longer need Cindori to enable TRIM. The following command in Terminal is better:

sudo trimforce enable

[cbergm7210]

If you boot from an SSD, you no longer need Cindori to enable TRIM. The following command in Terminal is better:

sudo trimforce enable

Good stuff, mate!

As usual, pardon my ignorance, but could you explain the Cindori / TRIM comment? I admit I am clueless about both of those terms and what that means exactly, in relationship to SSDs and other things.

[HCMarkus]

https://www.cindori.org/software/trimenabler/

I'm using Cindori's software under El Cap on my non-studio Macs. Works fine, and very simple. And I think it is still free for the basic version. I don't know that the Terminal approach is better. My guess is Cindori has written a simple script with a pretty front end that does the same thing.

Why Trim?

CIndori offers a succinct description a the linked page. Simply put, Trim allows SSDs to function better. If you're not running SSDs, you don't need it. But you SHOULD be running SSDs. Life is too short to boot or load projects from spinners. They do, however, serve a very useful function: backup drives.

[Shooshie]

I'm in El Capitan, running Adobe's CS6. I'm running it by way of an older version of Flash, which is not recommended for this OS. I don't know how long that will be possible, and, like you, I don't want to go to the subscription based versions, having already paid Adobe full-price for all this stuff more times than I can remember. (I started with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop in 1988, bought it again in 1993, again in about 1997, again in 2003, and most recently in 2012. That doesn't include the versions I bought for my son and daughter (separately, at different times). That's 7 times I've bought Photoshop and Illustrator, even though a lot of other stuff that I don't use got thrown in with some of them. At least three of those times were discounted to student rates, but most of the ones I bought for me were full price! (I feel like a moron now that I look back on it all)

So, I'm stuck with non-upgradable Flash, and periodically I can't watch a video on the internet, because I get the message "Flash outdated. Click here to upgrade." But I can't do that, or I lose Adobe.

Anyway, my real point here is to tell you that El Capitan is a lot better than Yosemite. If you don't want to go to El Capitan, then stay where you are. Yosemite was a bad OS for me. Full of little niggling inconsistencies and errors. I'm not even sure El Capitan is worth the upgrade, but I know we have to keep moving forward or get stuck in Limbo-Land. The only software apps I lost in El Capitan were Menu-Meters and Adobe, and each has a 3rd party fix. I've got Menu-Meters running as we speak, and Adobe works, if not great, at least well enough.

Welcome to the new Apple where hardware OR software upgrades come at a tremendous cost, regardless of the price.

Shooshie

[edit: Somehow I conflated Java and Flash. The problem was that Adobe would not work with the latest version of Java, not Flash. My apologies for getting those two confused. It's been a rough few weeks, and that upgrade problem happened during the teardown of a house next door, where a large quantity of pulverized asbestos dust was unleashed into the air, all over our house and property. I was doing battle all day every day until that ordeal was over, and the Java thing was a sideline between phone calls and face-to-face meetings with people who were potentially killing us and not giving a damn about it. (The mentality: "why are you standing in front of my gun as I pull the trigger? Can't you just duck when you hear the bullet coming?") THAT is why I barely remember what I did with that OS upgrade.]

[mikehalloran]

Before 10.10.4, enabling TRIM on a non-Apple SSD was a complicated affair with a large number of Terminal commands that changed with OS releases. Cindori kept up with it should be used before 10.10.4. The basic function is free—I gave them the $10. With 10.10.4 and the simple Terminal command, it's redundant. I found the messages a bit annoying and turned it off.

El Capitán is the superior OS, there is no doubt in my mind.

I've not come across the third party solutions for Adobe — any links? I'm going to disable SIP and try to reinstall to see if I can make Elements 6 work properly again — or Elements 10 work better. Because of the massive Internet security issues these days, I will re-enable SIP when done, of course.

Flash is going away. The major browsers have announced they are dropping it end of 2016. Of course, it will take them actually dropping it before content providers finally move to HTML 5. Everyone will howl at the moon (again) but the security nightmare that is Flash Player needs to be gone.

[David Polich]

I thought only El Cap is currently available to download and install. Where does one download
Yosemite?

[mikehalloran]

I thought only El Cap is currently available to download and install. Where does one download
Yosemite?

You can get it from anyone who has ever installed it. Have then download from the App Store — it will be 10.10.5. Compress the file first and load it onto an SDHC card or USB flash drive. It's over 6G.

If the file is not compressed/zipped before loading onto removable media, DropBox, FTP etc., the installer may not work on the new Mac due to permissions/privileges issues. Been there...

[Shooshie]

El Capitán is the superior OS, there is no doubt in my mind.

I've not come across the third party solutions for Adobe — any links? I'm going to disable SIP and try to reinstall to see if I can make Elements 6 work properly again — or Elements 10 work better. Because of the massive Internet security issues these days, I will re-enable SIP when done, of course.

Flash is going away. The major browsers have announced they are dropping it end of 2016. Of course, it will take them actually dropping it before content providers finally move to HTML 5. Everyone will howl at the moon (again) but the security nightmare that is Flash Player needs to be gone.

My apologies. It's not Flash that was the solution to the Adobe problem, it's Java. I explained the probable cause of my conflation of the two in an edit [in red] of the post above.

That said, I agree; Flash needs to go.

Shooshie

[bayswater]

I think the days are over when you can assume your experience with an Apple OS will be that same as a few others you speak to. For me Yosemite is a sweet spot and EC was a disaster. I have no doubt the experience was the opposite for others; both were disasters for others, and both perfect for the rest. Probably the only thing you'll get agreement on is that 10.6.8 was really good.

It is probably worth sampling the more general comments out there in the wider Apple community before you decide. Better still, set up a test partition and see if you like what happens, then upgrade your main partition. Then you have a partition to test the "next big thing" from the mother ship.

[mikehalloran]

I think the days are over when you can assume your experience with an Apple OS will be that same as a few others you speak to. For me Yosemite is a sweet spot and EC was a disaster. I have no doubt the experience was the opposite for others; both were disasters for others, and both perfect for the rest. Probably the only thing you'll get agreement on is that 10.6.8 was really good.

It is probably worth sampling the more general comments out there in the wider Apple community before you decide. Better still, set up a test partition and see if you like what happens, then upgrade your main partition. Then you have a partition to test the "next big thing" from the mother ship.

Yes but didn't you set up a test partition and it didn't work? There are mistakes that could have been made that would cause such a failure. You just declared it a disaster instead of asking for help.

As for 10.6 somehow being the "sweet spot"? Only in that it wasn't as bad as 10.7. Apple broke many things in 10.5 that weren't fixed till 10.8.2. Yosemite, for me, was the first OS as good as 10.4 and I don't consider it as good as 10.11. The fact that there are security holes in 10.10 that cannot be fixed makes it that I cannot recommend Yosemite for any Mac that needs to cnnect to the Internet.

[Shooshie]

It is probably worth sampling the more general comments out there in the wider Apple community before you decide. Better still, set up a test partition and see if you like what happens, then upgrade your main partition. Then you have a partition to test the "next big thing" from the mother ship.

This would be ideal. The problem, of course, is that you'd have to install a zillion things, some of which require 30 DVDs (sample libraries), and that is a problem for a test partition.

But I agree that these opinions are SO subjective. I know mine is specific to me.

Shoosh

[bayswater]

Yes but didn't you set up a test partition and it didn't work? There are mistakes that could have been made that would cause such a failure. You just declared it a disaster instead of asking for help.

I did ask for help. I came across a number of people who had the same experience. The solution suggested most of the time was to check extensions and delete them one a time. That didn't work for everyone, and didn't work for me. Because Yosemite is performing just fine, there isn't really a good reason for me to go any further with it. Maybe when the next version comes along I'll try again.

But my point was not that 10.6 is great, or 10.11 is no good. It was that as you read through the posts here about people's experiences with various DP and OS experiences, there is a lot of variation. Some people always get sticking MIDI notes, other never do. Some get perfect bounces, others get missing sound. Many had problems with DP 9,0 lanes, but they didn't all see the same problems. Some get endless issues with an OS version, others get none. Some have endless problems when they install Waves. Others have years of flawless performance with Waves. And we can't assume that everyone who has a problem with any of these things is just doing something wrong because someone else doesn't have that problem. Even if, in theory we can eventually hunt down the root causes, sometime it just isn't worth the effort.

[HCMarkus]

The reason we see different issues is probably largely because we use DP in different ways.

That, and because we all become attached to different crapware from time to time.

[musicman691]

It is probably worth sampling the more general comments out there in the wider Apple community before you decide. Better still, set up a test partition and see if you like what happens, then upgrade your main partition. Then you have a partition to test the "next big thing" from the mother ship.

This would be ideal. The problem, of course, is that you'd have to install a zillion things, some of which require 30 DVDs (sample libraries), and that is a problem for a test partition.

But I agree that these opinions are SO subjective. I know mine is specific to me.

Shoosh

Why would you need to install sample libraries again for a test partition? I have two (used to be three) boot partitions on my recording iMac but the sample libraries are on just one external drive (with no partition) which is accessed from all boot partitions's programs that need them.