For me so far almost every thing is ok with Lion.
I did have a moment when I wanted to dip into the Users Library, and it was not there!!.
But found how to show it again. By using the option key while clicl the 'Go ' Menu. And then draging the folder to the sidebar.

The Biggest thing for me is Full screen Apps.

I have Dual Screens. What was apple thinking when they came up with this method of full screen.
In 10.6 Full screen app work by one screen going full screen and the other staying normal.

Now you get one screen going full screen and the other going blank.

Plain bloody stupid.

With both Isadora and Modul8 I go full screen the same way as before. Maybe this is for Quicktime and DVD Player?
I like Lion so far as much there is to like. One thing I used to do is to put all apps that OS X installs by default and I never use into one folder and zip it. to keep my vast Applications folder manageable. Now I can not do anything even to the Chess that I would not touch with 10 feet pole. All apps are required by OS and could not be modified.

Using Lion on my MacBook Air I have adjusted to schizophrenic scrolling. If I use the scroll bars (which I have set to show always) I scroll in the same direction as before. If I use the track pad gestures I move my fingers the opposite direction to get the same effect. Somehow both methods seem fine.

New system code bugs?
 

>>13 to 38 days feels like an eternity when you've got a mission-critical software application that does not work properly due to bugs in the code. <<

Who would upgrade in that situation? I may be listed as 'Prospect' on this forum, but I have been around for a long time and involved in the computer business since 'System 360' days. I don't know anyone who would ever upgrade a 'mission critical' system without a LOT of off-line testing. If it worked, it worked, and I had better not do anything to screw up my, or anyone else's, paycheck.

Wait a minute, are you trying to tell me that the recovery partition doesn't actually allow offline recovery of the OS? Is it only there to get the user online so that he/she can re-download Lion from the MAS?

That's mostly correct (the Recovery partition can do more than just re-download Lion). Macworld has a good overview of all the Recovery partition can and can't do. For users who are concerned about needing the offline ability to re-install the OS, there are instructions for how to make a bootable drive of the actual Lion installer. To do so is essentially the same as it's always been, just that the one file needed to do this is hidden from average users who wouldn't know where to look.

Unbelievable.

Initially, I was feeling a bit upset about the whole situation even when I thought users could actually recover the OS using that partition. Finding out that it doesn't actually do that, I'm incredulous.

No offline recovery solution out of the box. Users must rely on an internet connection, and are also forced into relying on the MAS exclusively. Totally unacceptable!

At present, there may be ways of working around these new limitations, and making our own unofficial install disk(s), but who's to say that Apple isn't hastily working on ways to preclude that option?

"Who's to say that Apple isn't stealing children in the night?"

There are several pages on the internet about how to make a Lion install disk.
As you can buy an installer disk (flash drive) from Apple, it would be hard for them to preclude this. So you are fear-mongering over something that has not happened, like your prophesy that Apple will prevent us from downloading software from anywhere other than the MAS, which would make OS X lose it's UNIX certification, for one thing.

You seem to assume that Apple is going down this route for some evil purpose. What would that be? Lock-in? We already have Apple hardware, and Apple does very nicely out of the store as it is. Apple has never put any "authorisation" or serial codes on its OS. And you can install Lion on all your machines from one download, if you make a disk.

I genuinely think that Apple just wants to move away from selling software in boxes. (Not just for the reduction in overheads -- there are different legal implications for selling a physical product and a download in some jurisdictions.)

Yes, companies try to maximise revenue and keep the customer paying. But are the management sitting round a table in a sleek modernist hall with swivel-chairs, laughing insanely as they stroke cats, trying to take over the world? No.

You can buy all kinds of software from companies as downloads -- and updates. Why is it such an imposition for an OS to be bought in the same way?

If it is so unacceptable, then perhaps you might like to move to Linux. You can download the OS from.... oh, wait.

All I hope is that Lion / Lion Server get the whole Active Directory/OpenLDAP integration perfectly working and well documented.

In the next year or so most of my sites will be moving away from OD masters/replica as primary directory more than likely to 80% AD/ 20% OpenLDAP. Just want them to get AD binding perfect so we can drop in a Mac Mini's for Deploystudio,MDM, SUS, Netboot and overall we are seriously looking at just going Linux for most of this anyway but there are still a few advantages with a Mac Server as far as the cost of MDM.

Quick observations for a new Lion install:

1) All user accounts are gone until re-activated. This cannot be happening to everyone, I guess. Files are there, you just cannot log in. See my recent post where I found the solution.

2) vpn dns is not working quite right. The DNS settings are right as far as I can see but it does not resolve the same as in Snow Leopard.

3) Font sizes in mail are annoying. Cannot change font sizes of anything but the message windows as far as I can see.

4) Address book is not nearly as useful as an application because you cannot see the three columns at once. (Multiple posts elsewhere complaining about same thing.)

5) All of my printers stopped working. Both Epson 220 and Canon i850 recovered with Software update. Hp 1606dn is officially not supported; however, an HP employee posted an unofficial workaround on one of the forums which worked! (install latest firmware, re-install printer as Airprint).

6) Both perforce and mysql are missing in action. I can probably get them to work again by re-installing them (I had read about mysql, but perforce was not previously mentioned). I may not need to re-install, but figure out again how to make startup items work. I hear the method is different from Snow Leopard (which was different from Leopard).

7) Oddly, there were not that many apps I use which depend on Rosetta, thankfully. I hear there is a way to make Rosetta work anyway, but I have not tried it.

8) Reverse scrolling was only annoying for about 5 minutes. :-)

9) I need to get rid of the magic scrollbars. I understand there is a way to turn that 'feature' off. With magic scrollbars, I cannot ever seem to be able to click on the last item on the list in finder because the scrollbar covers it up as soon as I stop scrolling.

But at that point I went back to my trusty Snow Leopard until Lion works better for me. I had installed on a SuperDuper clone of my main disk, so going back was just a matter of rebooting, thankfully.

Hope this is interesting (if not helpful).

How many cons are we up to so far? I've lost count, but here's one more for the pile:
Automatic Termination.

According to TUAW, this shuts down and quits any (compatible) apps that aren't active and don't have any visible windows.

Haven't seen it myself, but there had better be an off switch for it if I'm forced to use Lion with my new Mac purchase. (The TUAW article notes that there is no way to turn it off.) Here's an even better explanation of how offensive Automatic Termination really is.

Yet another con for the pile: Boot Camp users are pretty much forced to buy Windows 7 with Lion.

There is a way to migrate an existing Boot Camp partition to new Macs with Lion. I'm not entirely sure how it works, but I'm betting that my Boot Camp / Windows XP backups will not be valid, and I'm going to have to shell out more money than I need to for Windows 7, despite the fact that I just purchased a Windows XP license to use with Boot Camp on my previous Mac. Of course, once I have Win 7 installed, there's no guarantee that my XP backups will be compatible with it, so I'm probably forced to start over with a blank slate.

Should have just kept my MacBook Pro and called it the last Mac that I'll buy.

I have to say that while I was slightly apprehensive about Lion, I'm really enjoying it.
Installation was a doddle - no lost printers, no deleted user accounts. I created a disk image of the installer on a flash drive and used that to install my MacBook.

I tried to give reverse scrolling a fair go, but couldn't quite get used to it. I think it may not have worked with all my apps, so I turned it off. I turned on scroll bars at all times.

I love Resume -- I turn my computer off every night and if I'm leaving the house for a while, so the ability to pick up where I left off is brilliant.
I can see the advantages of AutoSave and Versions, too.

The new Mail has a nice UI; the leather effect on iCal is a bit galling, but I don't feel compelled to fight it.

Lion has also fixed a couple of things that were screwy under Snow Leopard for me, and generally things seem a little faster, more responsive, even on my old 2006 iMac. It does seem to use all the memory whenever possible, but I'm not bothered by that.

The interface is a little grey, and I would prefer the hard drives at the top of the Sidebar list, rather than at the bottom (I think you can hack the .plist); but generally, I have few complaints and would say "come in, the water's lovely".

I had already phased out PPC code when I installed 10.6, so no problems there.

Any reason a VM wouldn't work for you? As far as I can see, if you're going to run more than one OS, VMs are the way to do it.

I've certainly lost count of how many are valid complaints.

Hmm. It does seem a bit pointless, as the processes are still in memory, but merely removed from the App Switcher and the Dock's list of running processes.
I can see the logic that with Auto-Save and Resume, whether an app is running or not doesn't really matter. There are at least six different ways to activate an app, of which App Switcher is only one.
To be honest, I use TextEdit and Preview extensively, and have certainly closed all the windows several times in these apps, thus activating Auto-termination; but until it was pointed out here, I hadn't noticed the effect.

Or what...?

"but until it was pointed out here, I hadn't noticed the effect."

Neither have I.

2 out of 3 (active) machines running Lion and I have not seen this once.

I read TUAW daily and, except Erica, the writeups and reviews leave a lot to be desired. Only have to read a few comments to see that. I amazed that they are on Apple's *****list, they are so fawning.

Ho hum, happy days.

I like the concept of sandboxed applications. Still tinkering with Lion myself haven't had a lot of hands on with it yet. My biggest out of the box complaint is not by default all wheels on mice (or two handed gesture for scrolling on track pads) are inverted....

My next set of complaints come from an IT standpoint not really an end user one.

Gaming performance and stability, traditionally, has sucked while running under a virtualized OS. If that is no longer the case, then I'll happily run my Windows XP games in a VM.

I'll simply have to find another computing environment to call "home". That is the ultimate fallout that Apple will have to reckon with if they continue messing about with the Mac platform.

Some people are less observant than others. I feel that I certainly would have noticed it, especially if the app were part of my workflow and kept being closed on me. My Mac should not be making these kinds of decisions for me. I'll close it myself when I'm good and ready to close it.

Bug fixes of this nature, in my mind, should be offered for little to no charge, and without forcing users to upgrade to the latest OS.

The only difference between TextEdit and Preview running and not running, after being auto-terminated, is an (optional) white dot in the Dock. It takes no longer to reload.
So I'll take your "less observant" jibe, as I'm actually getting stuff done on my computer. And here's the essential bit:

Remember when you had to allocate memory to programs individually? Just look at the last 25 years of computing, and how much the computer now does for you that you used to have to learn about and manually do.

Opening and closing apps is essentially computer admin, and -- like loading cupsd when I access a print menu -- is something that I don't need to do myself. Think of all those daemon processes that you never launched yourself!
It's so easy to get bogged down in the trivia of computing and forget what computers are for: getting stuff done. If the computer wants to handle file saving, backups, application launching, and anything else that is subservient to doing the things I want to do, then that is a Good Thing.

The history of personal computing development is about advances that allow the computer to take care of itself, and allowing the user to get on with creating, using, viewing, writing.. whatever it is.
Ensuring that the relevant apps are launched is a subservient task to what I use my computer for.

In an ideal world and an independent Scotland, maybe. Apple fixes plenty of bugs in updates for free, but every commercial software company charges for a new version which includes both bug fixes and new features. And frankly, $29.99 is little to no charge.

I would have gladly paid that amount for a bug fix package for Snow Leopard, sans the Mac App Store, which would run on the latest Mac hardware. Of course, Apple doesn't offer that because they are trying to incrementally push users down a pre-designed path that benefits Apple and doesn't necessarily benefit end users.

Granted, but if the app wasn't a permanent resident in the Dock, then it would have since disappeared from the Dock. The user would have to find it again and essentially re-launch it even though it was still running. The time it takes would be trivial to some people, but the distraction alone is reason enough not to auto-terminate apps.

Thanks for the retrospective on personal computing. I never really understood extensions in Mac OS 9 and prior OS versions. I'm glad I don't have to worry about that stuff anymore. There are plenty of things that Apple has simplified for the better. This is not one of them.