Personal Opinion - Is Yosemite worth the effort?

I have a group of about 40 users testing Yosemite now (out of over 1000). Everyone is running a 2012 MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM.

So far, these are our collective impression:

PROS:
• we're seeing better battery life with Yosemite over 10.9 and 10.8
• Yosemite's interface is different, but it's in-line with iOS8 which most ppl are running on their phones
• Continuity works as expected
• it's faster than both 10.8 and 10.9 on this hardware. Faster boot, faster app launch.

CONS:
• some complain the OS UI is "washed out". Settings can be adjusted in Accessibility and General system pref panes
• mixed opinion on Spotlight and green stoplight full-screen buttons; most of this just re-training
• some applications just aren't fully compatible (yet). Shockwave plugin, iProcrasinate, Self Control, SMART (11.4) (workaround is to install the Ruby 1.8 framework alongside 2.0).

Overall, we're fairly happy with it. It's actually been a cleaner upgrade than some we've done in the past. 10.6 to 10.7, for instance, was a debacle, but I suspect that was because 10.7 was so anemic and underbaked.

We'll likely be standardizing our 1200 machine fleet on 10.10.x sometime in the Spring.

Our 2011 models are having issues… lots of PRAM resets to keep them booting normally. Other than that it's been smooth and folks are happy. A lot of people were confused by the Full Screen button change… so yeah, some of the tweaks are just down to re-training folks.

We have had both boot and WiFi problems. I would give it a few more weeks.

I haven't even upgraded my own laptop to Yosemite (although I have it in a VM), due to being in the middle of too many projects. Will do a full wipe and reinstalll after 10.10.2 drops, and hopefully addresses the wifi issues...

I wouldn't say there are any major features our users need, personally I like to try and keep things as up to date as possible (at least from a deployment perspective) so we are ready as soon as the Macs start shipping as 10.10.x only.

@damienbarrett: Thanks for the response. That's some good info. I too have noticed that on bright Samsung monitors the interface looks very washed out.

@davidacland: I'm in your boat at the moment. There are no major features we need. The speed increases that damiuen mention are always nice, however.

Thank you all.

Yosemite is required if you have a need to share iWork documents between iOS 8 and Mac, as Apple made it their minimum OS X version for file compatibility.

@davidacland

...so we are ready as soon as the Macs start shipping as 10.10.x only.

We got a shipment of the iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014), they require 10.10.

Mac OS X versions (builds) for computers
http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT1159

I'm with the hurry up and wait crowd. Of the 3 macs upgraded with Yosemite, they have all, at one point or another, hung at boot requiring various fixes. Also encountering slow boots. This is on the last pre-retina macbook pros.

If I try it again, I think it is time to build a fresh image rather than upgrade our Mavericks image.

Good point @donmontalvo

Ready for now I meant :)

I installed a classroom of iMacs last week, brand new AutoDMG 10.10.1 image, no upgrading. Nearly all started off working ok, then within 24 hour were all hung on a grey screen. Took quite a bit of safe booting, NVRAM ressetting etc to get things going again.

I have rolled out a handful of 10.10 upgrades in the past months. So far those users like it better than 10.9. Seems a bit faster and less buggy from what they are saying. Fixed a nasty printing issue with a model of Xerox copiers we have just by upgrading too.

@lehmanp00: What printing issue was that? We use all xerox printers and haven't had any issues with 10.9.

@donmontalvo: Good information, thank you. However we don't like Apple dictating what software we may use on the equipment so we won't buy it.

@tnielsen][/url

It was just with 1 model of Xerox. The ColorQube 9300 line.

The print jobs would stay in the local print queue and just sit there for up to an hour before getting released. What you saw was dozens of small, 1kb print jobs being generated in the CUPS interface during that time. It was only happening with an LPD install pointing to Windows Server queues WITH the Xerox drivers.

Xerox's solution was to do an advanced install of the printer using the spollss method. That really doesn't work for us if you have multiple users logging in on a Mac each day.

@tnielsen Agreed, the "Original Mac OS X included " (in Apple KB HT1159) is a guideline that we follow to avoid problems later on, along with building images on the latest hardware. But yea, very annoying.

Most of us know that, if a piece of hardware shipped with a previous OS in the past (i.e. Mavericks), but the specific device you received came with newer (i.e. Yosemite), it should be possible to install the older OS on the device. Just don't expect Apple to support you if the machine has issues.

Only new hardware models released since the new OS was released (or on the same day) will require the new OS (i.e. new Mac mini and 5K iMac apparently do).

We advised our users to not upgrade until we made it available in Self Service (it's not yet) but we don't have any app restrictions in place or anything. Some have upgraded through the App Store and as of today we have just over 300 systems running 10.10 and haven't seen any major issues. Our configs are pretty light touch and no AD.

@tanderson interesting that you've got no issues and no AD. we support lots of different casper (and non casper) sites, the only ones with the major 10.10 bugs that we've seen are the ones using AD logins.

Could just be a coincidence though.

late 2012 iMacs here - yosemite is one of the more stable OSes we've tested recently. Been testing since 10.10.0. However we're noticing everything iMac13,2 and lower freezes on boot and requires a PRAM reset, and sometimes a boot to SUM and fsck. Some have firmware passwords, some do not, most have brandy new HDDs.

Haven't tested on the 14,2 model yet, but I would hope it's more stable on that model since unless you start buying retina iMacs, that's what you're getting… for now.

The upgrade process has been fairly painless however, thanks to @gneagles createOSXInstallPkg and some creative LaunchDaemoning®. Overall I'm (mostly) happy with how Yosemite is turning out, but 10.10.2 can't come fast enough.

We have issues with AD on Yosemite (and the usual bootup/FileVault issues), but otherwise Yosemite is fine. I still prefer 10.9.5 personally.

The problem we are facing with Yosemite is system lockups (requiring a hard reboot) that sometimes occur after connecting to our internal network. Opendirectoryd is running massive LDAP querying, looking up the DN of EVERY member of every group the user is in (as well as inherited group memberships) to the tune of 50MB of data downloaded from the Global Catalog every time a system connects to the network. Wifi goes down for one second? Coming out of sleep? Queries all over the place. We have a large domain and a lot of large security groups, and opendirectoryd is choking on it and causing performance issues with AD.

Anyone using Yosemite with Centrify?

We are using Centrify to bind to one domain but use AD Creds from another for logins

I'm liking it personally but being an edu, we won't upgrade our campus until the end of the school year. Our testing environment is rather promising despite some weirdness in full screen mode on a number of apps. That said, we're prepared to launch at any point and hanging steady on 10.9.5/4. No deal breakers here so to speak. I'm currently packaging all of my installers in Yosemite just in case. You never know when you'll be forked either and we're ready to jump on that too ;-) Besides, if you're Apple heavy, you really need to keep running just as fast into the future as you can. So why should you upgrade to 10.10 at the earliest reasonable point? To prepare for 10.11 of course! That or whatever else suddenly comes down the path without warning.

P.S> Personally, I'm still trying to decide if I want 3+ devices letting me know I've got a phone call.

We aren't running 10.10 much except a few power users and some dev stuff. My machine has been running 10.10 and has been quite buggy. I have a Macbook Pro w/Retina that screamed with 10.9, now it seems to struggle with things at random including booting. I actually zapped the PRAM on it the other day to get it to start up. It's been a while since I have done that.

Also, the spot light in the middle of the screen is great unless you want to actually see what's being it.

All in all you need to look at the value of moving to Yosemite in your organization.

Anyway, that's my two cents.

@alexjdale how did you go about discovering these issues? I get the feeling that some of our computers may be exhibiting this and I'd like to confirm.

Also, has anyone out there seen this issue with resolving ".local" addresses on Yosemite:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6611817?start=0&tstart=0

@davidacland It could be. We stopped putting ours on AD a few years ago for a few reasons that made sense in our environment (ie, ~80% are issued to students who take ownership after graduation). It's working out well and it seems to make life a little simpler at upgrade times. Our public use systems, like classrooms and labs, are still on AD.

@tanderson We eschew AD account binds for the same reason. I'd be interested to know what else you're doing for authentication. We don't worry about it so much but I'm about to start playing with the API to connect our inventory system to the JSS for record keeping purposes. I just haven't yet had time to sit down for a bit and figure it out.