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You are here: MacNN Forums > Software - Troubleshooting and Discussion > macOS > Impressions with 10.11 beta so far

Impressions with 10.11 beta so far
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Ham Sandwich
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Sep 10, 2015, 08:44 AM
 
I definitely prefer 10.11 over 10.10, for a number of reasons. Many of the bugs/delays in Safari are remedied in 10.11. Safari is much faster. Battery life seems to be 5% longer on my 2015 Pro Macbook 15". The new font, I can get used to it.

I did see a few "beta" bugs, etc., I had to reinstall TeXShop. Photos crashed the iGPU when playing a newly converted video. And of course printer driver issues, but I can deal with those in beta phase. The UI lag with opening the Applications folder which was introduced in 10.10 is still there. Preview is still ultra dog slow with color controls, especially Sharpness, and has been this way since 10.7.

Comment: I wish 10.11 came with a Siri button.

(On a side note, iOS 9 still has the Reminders-crashes-when-updating-items-when-no-wifi-is-availanble bug that has been around since iOS 7.)


For those of you on the public beta (such as myself), what are your impressions?
( Last edited by Ham Sandwich; Sep 10, 2015 at 02:45 PM. )
     
OreoCookie
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Sep 11, 2015, 10:12 AM
 
I tried installing it yesterday, but somehow the install wouldn't complete and left me with a broken kernel. I'll try it again after I found out what went wrong.
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Charles Martin
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Sep 12, 2015, 02:07 AM
 
For, the El Capitan beta was kind of a mixed blessing. One the one hand, it is noticeably more responsive (snappier!). I haven't taken advantage of all the features yet, but broadly speaking it is exactly what Apple claims it is -- a polishing and tweaking of Yosemite.

It was painful, however, in that until the GM, the beta wouldn't let you access your iCloud account for it usual purposes (Mail, Contacts, Calendar) in OS X, and that made me realise quite quickly that I'm more dependent on iCloud than I realized. This last week I tried going on El Capitan full time, but I would often have to boot back to the Yosemite drive to do stuff.

El Capitan also (apparently) makes some notable under-the-hood changes which have broken a few apps I like. Most of that got fixed in the GM release, but a few are still broken (to be fair, they are old programs that haven't been updated in a long time, so this is to be expected). I am a little annoyed -- and I say this as someone who is 95 percent fine with Photos -- that iPhoto works perfectly in El Cap except for Photo Stream (apparently, haven't fully tested it). I don't mind my iOS snaps going to Photos on the Mac instead of iPhoto so much, but I'd prefer to have the option of specifying since iPhoto on all other fronts I've tested continues to work.
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Mrjinglesusa
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Sep 12, 2015, 11:59 AM
 
Originally Posted by OreoCookie View Post
I tried installing it yesterday, but somehow the install wouldn't complete and left me with a broken kernel. I'll try it again after I found out what went wrong.
Interesting. I had the same issue. Install appeared to go fine, but it eventually got stuck. I left it for hours and it never completed. Forced a restart, and it got to the same place and stuck again.

At some point, I got a kernel panic with a bunch of scrolling text on the left side of the screen.

Restarted in safe mode and just made a bootable USB to install from. Ended up just formatting the drive, installing fresh OS, and restoring from Time Machine backup.
     
OreoCookie
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Sep 13, 2015, 01:08 AM
 
Originally Posted by Mrjinglesusa View Post
Interesting. I had the same issue. Install appeared to go fine, but it eventually got stuck. I left it for hours and it never completed. Forced a restart, and it got to the same place and stuck again.

At some point, I got a kernel panic with a bunch of scrolling text on the left side of the screen.

Restarted in safe mode and just made a bootable USB to install from. Ended up just formatting the drive, installing fresh OS, and restoring from Time Machine backup.
I didn't even force a restart, I let the installation run over night. With 10.10, there is a well-known bug of the installer that makes the installation for people with large /usr directories extremely slow. It took me 11~12 hours on a late 2013 13" MacBook Pro Retina whose SSD can transfer >700 MB/s. So by all accounts, it's not a slow machine.

According to a friend of mine, though, this has been fixed in the installer of 10.11. Now that I'm a bit skeptical, I'll probably wait for a few days until trying it again. I find it a bit curious to leave 3 weeks between making OS X 10.11 GM and releasing it to the public.
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Ham Sandwich
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Sep 13, 2015, 12:27 PM
 
That's odd... I remember the issue with large /usr folders and installation on 10.10. My /usr/ folder currently is 9.2 GB and I have Homebrew and LaTeX installed and it took less than an hour to upgrade to the 10.11 beta installed (when it was public release 5). I'm not sure what libraries you have installed in /usr/ that are causing a conflict.
     
OreoCookie
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Sep 13, 2015, 07:23 PM
 
Originally Posted by And.reg View Post
That's odd... I remember the issue with large /usr folders and installation on 10.10. My /usr/ folder currently is 9.2 GB and I have Homebrew and LaTeX installed and it took less than an hour to upgrade to the 10.11 beta installed (when it was public release 5). I'm not sure what libraries you have installed in /usr/ that are causing a conflict.
As far as I understand, it's not a conflict, but the OS X installer insists on moving the files one-by-one. The fix is to move the user stuff out of the /usr folder (you can verify this by pressing Command + L to open the log window). I am not sure why in your case it takes a very short while but in mine and others it doesn't. (The only software I am aware of that populates my /usr directory has been installed via homebrew or the MacTeX installer.)
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badidea
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Sep 14, 2015, 08:06 AM
 
Originally Posted by And.reg View Post
(On a side note, iOS 9 still has the Reminders-crashes-when-updating-items-when-no-wifi-is-availanble bug that has been around since iOS 7.)


For those of you on the public beta (such as myself), what are your impressions?
No problems with the latest version of 10.11 beta.

iOS 9 beta is still giving me a hard time!
Right now it tells me to update everytime I log in even though there is no update available.
And Apple Music still doesn't work as expected: when I unplug my headphones and re-plug them again after a while, it's always exciting to see what will happen when I start playback with the headphone remote - it usually never starts the app and track I listened to when I unplugged the headphones. When I listened to a song in Apple Music, Podcasts will start with an old postcast. When I listened to a podcast, Music will start with the first song in the library!

I hope that this bug will not be in the release version because it drives me nuts!
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