I know Mountain Lion's coming out in summer, but I'm already sceptical about Lion.

My first true Mac experience was at school, when I was using a white Macbook with Snow Leopard. I was like "HOW THE HELL DO YOU RIGHT CLICK LOL" because I was a Windows guy, and my Windows laptops have a right click button. I got used to it though, especially rotating in iWork (which was amusing and fun, twisting your fingers to rotate it ^_^)

I want to know the experiences of Lion, espeically newcomers of the Mac brand and anyone who moved from Snow Leo to Lion. Why? My aunt is getting a MacBook and she wants me to set it up for her.

I was a Snow Leopard user since release day back in 2009, and I've had nothing but good experiences with Lion. 10.7.0 (the initial RTM release) was a little bit buggy, but at this point they've squashed all of the obvious bugs and everything is rock solid.

Lion is better, and Mountain Lion is so much better.

I recently bought a MacBook Pro with Lion preinstalled. I found it okay, syncs with iCloud, but lacked some things. I now run Mountain Lion, which I find is much better.

I'll have to wait and see when its released! (GMA 950 support has been dropped in Mountain Lion, and I don't have a paid developer account so...)

I'm still using Snow Leopard here. I really don't see the point in upgrading till Apple forces me to do so. Snow Leopard provides everything I need to browse the Web, web processing, programming, photo editing and etc. It's not necessary to upgrade. My first experience with Lion was negative. Things weren't working as great as Snow Leopard therefore I didn't upgrade. Maybe Mountain Lion would be much better. I really think Apple needs a major revamp of Mac OS X instead of just minor upgrades.

Same with Windows 8. It's not a necessary upgrade of Windows 7. I bet most people won't upgrade unless MS provided a $30 attractive price. MS done this for Win 7 with university students, maybe they can do it with the public but I really doubt it.

I haven't had the best experience with Lion, both at home and at work. Overall it just seems glitchy under the hood.

Lion doesn't play very nice with Windows based networks. We've gone out of our way to setup a Mac server to link our AD with Open Directory, but we still have plenty of connectivity issues with users on our Mac Lion machines. Policies don't download correctly, shares don't always work, scripts don't aways run.

However, Mountain Lion is a completely different story. It works perfectly fine!
We've confirmed this to be the case through side by side testing with a clean installation of both OS's.

Definitely consider upgrading your aunt to Mountain Lion once it's available.

Snow Leopard is much definitely faster, however it's best to just go ahead and upgrade. Lion has a lot of cool stuff, but as we all know whether you're a Mac, Linux, or Windows guru the more "cool stuff" you have the slower the machine. Lion works well, and actually is working nicer with my Windows Network at home since I upgraded. Just like any OS it has it's good share of downfalls, but it's rock-solid for the most part. I honestly have no favoritism for it like most Mac users, to me, it's an OS - nothing more.

I've got a pretty complex web of a Windows network going on around here and I haven't had an issue connecting to it since 10.7.0. Not discrediting your experiences in the slightest, just adding another take on that.

I had bad experiences with Lion so far.
A lot of software didn't work and the overall performance got a lot worse, SL's performance (specially the RAM hunger) was a lot better for my Mac Pro 2,1.
I'm mainly using 3D and video software.

I've avoided Lion as it doesn't allow PowerPC/Legacy apps to run.

Although by coincidence today I managed to find an oh-so-easy workaround and now have Final Cut Studio 2 running on Lion, so it's not all bad.

I only hope Mountain Lion lets me do the same.

Lion isn't bad. There are a couple things you will probably notice right away though that you should be prepared for: 1) the way Finder shows files is much more different, it tries to show them in a "intelligent" manner instead of the traditional filesystem topology so that takes some getting used to and you'll probably waste some time when looking for files initially 2) The mouse wheel scrolls in the opposite direction now, throws a lot of people the first couple times but you get used to it.

blehch just avoid and go with windows 8. works better though if you must keep with mac, why not keep doing snow leopard? or upgrade to mountain lion for more modern techs.

Because 10.6 is already slowly becoming unsupported, not just by Apple, but by third party program manufacturers?

yeah but if it works it works. upgrades are totally irrelevant when what works works and is working for a reason.

They are completely relevant for keeping up with support and adding new features. In this day and age I couldn't stick with Pro Tools 7, not with the stuff added in Pro Tools 9+. There's an excellent reason why people upgrade and it's completely obvious, otherwise it wouldn't be done and most Mac OS users would still be using 10.4.11. 10.7 is now a polished OS and there's no reason not to upgrade to it. 10.8 will be heading that way soon.

The same applies for everything on sale really. Why did man upgrade from the village pantry to a fridge? It offered more security to someone's consumables. Why did we upgrade from an original Rickenbacker "Frying Pan" to a Les Paul? It was a much much more practical guitar, being lighter and the world's first solid body guitar offering richer tones. Why did we upgrade from CRTs to LCDs and Plasmas? LCDs and Plasmas are much smaller, quieter and efficient, and are now up to the colour standard of CRTs.
There's something in common here: they offer more features and improvements over the older. Granted there are those that still play Rickenbacker "Frying Pans" and those that still use CRTs, but that's down to personal preference. We can continue the argument with any other product that has gone on sale and has been superseded.
Though it is worth mentioning, some products aren't worth the upgrade in some people's opinion, again, general preference. I.e. Canon EOS 40D to Canon EOS 50D etc.

If that was the case, we would still be using MS-DOS. It worked. So why not keep using it and not make anything else? Not only that. We would still be living in caves, eating animals alive and dressing in skins of dead cats.

Your logic (which is by no means a logic, but anyway) is severely flawed. People change and make new things. That's called revolution. But who am I speaking to? You should already know that with your Harvard degree in.....I don't know what.....

Mountain Lion is certainly better than Lion, and the new Dock looks awesome too...
However, up until 10.8.3 I experienced heaps of bugs, such as the Notification Center getting stuck, and updates to apps (through the Mac App Store) would often get stuck when installing
All fine now and Lynx seems to be Apple's next release, can't wait for the betas!

Lion was good when I had it, I didn't use it very long.

Mountain Lion is much better feature wise. Some things do glitch. Updates for things I don't have appear and go away in the app store, right now I have a few icons that wont delete on my desktop because I put too many characters in the filename or something, and a handful of the time when I make a new note in notes it will close itself after typing a few letters.

And now for the long wait to WWDC this June where Apple *should* announce OS X 10.9

OS X Lion isn't really too bad but i would prefer OS X Mountain Lion because it more in sync with icloud and all of my ios devices