[Spheric Harlot]

They added folders to the Dock, which completely eliminated the need for FruitMenu IMO.

I never use those, either, though, since they made Spotlight such a damn fast app launcher in 10.5 (or 10.6?)

Mac OS X 10.2.8 was the best and still is.
The pinstripe design was awesome, the swift blue desktop was really neat, and the error/warning sound was very futuristic. And if you wanted more themes... no problem, you could customize the hell out of OS X! The whole system was fast and it worked, minus a few Finder crash bugs.

10.3 Panther sucks, so many stupid annoying Finder bugs, and I hated the sidebar and interface changes. I actually downgraded back to 10.2.x until I got an iMac G5. I also hated the dial-up bug that came with 10.3... you had to wait 5 minutes after booting your computer before you could connect via dial-up, or else when you first connected, you had a 50% chance of getting booted. This lasted through 10.4 as well, which pissed me off. I repeat: PANTHER SUCKED. Ever since the end of 2003, Apple has not put out a decent, bug-free OS. I've been waiting 10 years for a decent OS since then, and I haven't found one.

10.4 Tiger is total horses***, more Finder bugs. I downgraded to 10.3... but in the process, all the Mail that I had stored in Tiger's Mail program got lost when I re-opened mail in Panther. I was so pissed that I lost all my friend's mail, way to f*** up Apple! So now I transcribe all important mail by myself to text files, so I can upgrade/downgrade/switch platforms with ease and not be constrained to Apple's stupid Mail program. Besides, I still prefer webmail since I don't want big crap messages downloaded to my computer.

10.5 was all right, though I hated that Apple made the OS look like the days of Mac OS 8 and 9 all over again. I mean, seriously, grayscale? Are we back in the 90s?
10.6 Snow Leopard kind of sucked, but they kept improving TextEdit and Preview.

10.7 Lion almost SUCKS! Preview is now a half-assed, crash-prone pile of s***! Finder is also buggy than ever and crashes more than it did in 10.1. The whole Lock/Unlocking of files confused the royal bleeding crap out of me, and my first week of using Lion I lost so many files because of Apple's auto-save shenanigans. I'm so used to Command-W and "Don't Save" from all my applications, but now I have to remind myself not to do that with Preview and Textedit, and instead manually create a duplicate file and edit that, then get rid of one of the files afterwards. SO STUPID!!!!

The only thing I like about 10.7 is that with TextEdit, I can convert from raw to rich text formats and not need to rename the file.

[Salty]

I remember being very excited for Jaguar, Panther and Tiger. Leopard I wasn't as excited about and Snow Leopard was a yawn as far as excitement goes, though it was an awesome OS compared to the competition. Lion had me genuinely excited. I think Mountain Lion will be great though there aren't many killer features for me so much as I'll stop being annoyed that notes isn't a separate app and so on.

I really wish there was a way to make Mission Control work more like Expose all windows, or even just add that as an additional option. I'll also say though that I HATED expose (I'm on a Windows comp at work so I can't make the accent.) in Snow Leopard since they added that gaudy blue glow around the edges of the Window and make it look terrible.

[Curiosity]

I would say Snow Leopard with Tiger a close second.

[lpkmckenna]

Originally Posted by Andrej 

The pinstripe design was awesome ... 10.5 was all right, though I hated that Apple made the OS look like the days of Mac OS 8 and 9 all over again. I mean, seriously, grayscale? Are we back in the 90s?

I hated the pinstripe theme; it was just too bright. The move to uniformly-gray windows was my favourite UI change, which is part of the reason I hate the gaudy new iCal and Address Book so much. Apple was finally doing it right, and then they messed it up again.

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally Posted by Salty 

I really wish there was a way to make Mission Control work more like Expose all windows, or even just add that as an additional option. I'll also say though that I HATED expose (I'm on a Windows comp at work so I can't make the accent.) in Snow Leopard since they added that gaudy blue glow around the edges of the Window and make it look terrible.

What I hated about Exposé in Snow Leopard was that they abandoned proportionality.

If I know I'm looking for a small window, it doesn't help me that they've zoomed it up to be the same size as the huge Safari window next to it.

However, they've fixed that in Lion, so I'm reconciled.

BTW, three-finger scroll upwards for Mission Control, and THEN TWO-finger scroll upwards over an application's windows to see them fan out and help you choose the right one.

Originally Posted by lpkmckenna 

I hated the pinstripe theme; it was just too bright. The move to uniformly-gray windows was my favourite UI change, which is part of the reason I hate the gaudy new iCal and Address Book so much. Apple was finally doing it right, and then they messed it up again.

I actually disagree. I hated the icky gray/stripe theme, it just looked so "low res" and fake.
Everyone seemed to hate the leather iCal update but I liked it... just made iCal feel classy, and especially since Apple made it so much easier to change colors with iCal.

I don't use Address Book. I've lost contacts so many times from backing up and reinstalling my OS. If I don't remember to open Address Book, then download and export a vCard (whatever that is), then I'm screwed, and I have to ask for everyone's contact info all over again. That's yet another reason why I don't trust Apple's software. I have everyone's contact info saved as text files in folders organized by name. It's easy to manage everyone.

[ariellauthentic]

Tiger was my fave for performance. I wished I could have stuck with it through more modern hardware.

For features and performance combined, Snow Leopard is great.