Calling OS X "more stable than Mac OS 9.2.2" is perpetuating a myth.

That is not my impression but it is clear that experiences (and tastes!) very greatly among users. Also I think that the term "stability" means a different thing to different people.

To me, a stable operating system means one that doesn't fall over, and doesn't stall (appear to hang and then resume). That means that whatever a particular application does, it does not affect the ability of other processes, whether background or not, to carry out their tasks successfully.

All the Mac OS operatings systems that I've used, from 8.0 through 10.3.2, were stable to a degree. However there was one thing I noticed before 10.0. If an application hung then it would have to be force-quit in order to continue to work on the computer. After force-quitting an application, there was an even chance that the system would be left in a state whereby the quickest, and perhaps only, resolution was to restart the computer. Sometimes I was not able to switch to other applications to save their data before restarting. I got around this by learning to save my documents often (a technique I picked up from Windows at the time).

On my machine, Internet Explorer in Mac OS 9 would crash perhaps once a day. About half the time it did this I would have to restart the computer. Since I was in the habit of keeping my Mac switched on (but sleeping when not in use) this meant a forced restart approximately once every two days.

When I installed Mac OS 10.0 I noticed several things:
1) there wasn't much native software about, unless you only needed to email, browse and play music;
2) the GUI was slow, particularly on a G3 iBook. Window resizes (which were now live) were horriblly slow;
3) Internet Explorer crashed frequently (say, 5 to 10 times per day). But,
4) the OS kept on running! When IE crashed, I simply restarted IE;
5) although the GUI was slow, it didn't matter as much as you would think because the system was very responsive when switching to other applications;
6) Finder fonts were blurry on a CRT monitor, except on IE which was even worse: its fonts were unsmoothed and spidery.

I had some start-up and wake from sleep issues which I later isolated to my SCSI card if a running device wasn't plugged in, but apart from that I noticed that the OS was stable. Applications crashed more frequently than in Mac OS 9, but all I needed to do was to restart the application, not the computer.

Ramón, I for one respect your preference for Mac OS 9; after your experience who wouldn't?; but I can affirm that this user has found Mac OS X to be very pleasant to use, and like previous iterations of the Mac OS each release has got better and better. When I see a Mac OS 9 machine now I have fond memories but I think its look and feel are dated, in much the same way as I think that elements of Windows are dated.

I like the Dock but there seem to be many who don't. It behaves itself much better than the old Application Switcher palette and gives a lot of information at a glance. I don't like the rollover magnification effect and have switched it off, but the bouncing icons are useful because they tell me when a background application is waiting to receive input.

As far as Photoshop performance is concerned I have not noticed a great deal of difference between Mac OS 9 and X, but then I deal with small files so my view of the world is somewhat limited. I'm not greatly concerned about who prefers Mac OS 9 and who prefers Mac OS X: as long as you're using a Mac I'm happy for you.

[edited for typos]

N_Branton

Replied in the following topics

Mac OS9 and OSX / Photoshop