Safari 5.1.10's incessant crashes and inaccessible websites (this one being a particularly odious example) had finally driven me to throw in the Snowy towel and upgrade to Yosemite, stopping short of El Cap I thought, but for some inexplicable reason I decided to take a look at Sidenote's MacUpdate page where I found


Sidenote went belly-up with Lion, I believe, but has now apparently been resurrected with NO action on its dev's part, and although I don't even use it all that much, I'm extremely fond of it, so El Cap, here I come.

El Cap has been good to me except for two issues:

1. SuperDuper clones wouldn't boot.
2. USB keyboard and mouse lost power upon waking the computer. I had to do a hard shutdown and restart to get everything working. This is very erratic; doesn't happen often but happens haphazardly.

The first issue was solved by cloning with Carbon Copy Cloner. The 10.11.2 update may fix the second issue but it's too early to tell.

Otherwise, El Cap is fine for me.

Thanks for the input, Jon, but I've already read so much good stuff from the local El Cap publicity rep, joemikeb , that I'm not at all worried, although I did see an angry comment about Mail and 10.11.2.

I'm just unhappy about leaving Snowy...a GREAT OS.

I intend to run with SIP disabled, so I guess I'll be the local guinea pig in that area.

(I'm not at all pleased about having to spring for $70 for a DiskWarrior upgrade, much of which I feel is bells and whistles designed to perpetuate a utility that's really losing its market...in terms of necessity, that is.)

I, too, have wondered if Disk Warrior is not as useful as before, considering the stability improvements in OS's after Snowy. FWIW, in running DW and Disk Utility, DW found some minor issues that DU didn't, but it probably didn't matter. The best thing about the DW upgrade is that you can create a recovery partition on the DW thumb drive and boot from that to run DW or any of the Apple utilities found on Apple's recovery partition. As an added bonus, booting from the thumb drive is super fast compared to booting from a CD.

IMHO, I wouldn't disable SIP. That's like walking the tightrope without a safety net. As far as Gatekeeper is concerned, you should familiarize yourself with OS X: About Gatekeeper. That will allow you to keep SIP enabled and bypass Gatekeeper when necessary.

BTW, I agree with your assessment of Snowy. That was a great OS.

What!? Artie's left Snowy? Pinch. Pinch. Nope, felt those….it must be true.

I also left Snowy a while back (and agree with you and Jon about how great it was) but I didn't move quite as far forward. I'm in Mountain Lion as it's as far as I could progress without having to dump a few programs I really like, and use a lot. However, I suppose that day is also looming.

I hear you, Ryck. My old Mac Pro could go no further than Lion, so I was stuck. On the upside, my iMac is way faster and more powerful. The moral of the story? When change is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.

Artie, Gifts are (most) always welcome. Sadly, the gifts I typically receive do not reflect what I want, but rather, what I deserve. And I never want that.

OTOH, the OS 10.11.2 update went without issue. And that is far different from 10.11 and to a lesser extent, 10.11.1.

As others have said:
• Use the Combo updater
• First run DiskWarrior
• Disconnect all unnecessary peripherals
• Boot in to Safe Boot mode and run the installer from there.

AFAIK, the rule of thumb is that if an app works on Yosemite, it will work with El Capitán. Still, it is best to check, especially re utilities.

And of course, always have a current & tested backup.

IMHO the rule of thumb for utilities should be DO NOT USE ANY UTILITY UNTIL IT HAS BEEN CERTIFIED EL CAPITAN COMPATIBLE BY THE DEVELOPER. There were a lot of under the hood changes in Yosemite and even more in El Capitan. As far as the non-utilities go I would venture 30% or more have been updated for El Capitan. That doesn't necessarily mean they didn't work but the developers felt they needed to be updated.

I will not apologize for the shouting. I meant it.

Oh, well; I tried.

I thought you were a Sidenote fan from your posts on their MacUpdate page a few years ago (Edit: and if there's a good alternative, I've never seen it listed).

Artie,

You should read How to Fix OS X El Capitan's Annoyances before taking any drastic action. The problem described in the comment about USB may have been fixed by the 10.11.2 update (the article was written before it came out). I have had USB issues and, so far, they have not resurfaced after updating. They were intermittent, so it's too soon to tell.

Yeah, ryck, it's true; I just plain got sick of (irreplaceable) Safari's accumulated inadequacies, and rather than chasing compatibility one version at time I elected to bite the bullet and be a long-jumper.

I actually came out ahead in terms of software (Look for a new thread titled "Resurrected software!"), and got 4+ years of history and 5 upgrades out of the way in one shot...extremely frustrating endeavor, but I'm more happy than unhappy (Edit: even though I hate El Cap) now that it's done.

That "looming day" will likely be as traumatic for you as mine was for me.

Edit: By the way, ryck, I don't know about earlier versions of OS X, but the problem with AirPort Utility not recognizing supported Base Stations that we discussed a while back has been cleared up in El Cap.

Sorry for being slow to get back to you, Jon, but I wanted to finish my project rather than report piecemeal.

As I just said to ryck, I'm more happy than unhappy in El Cap even though I hate it, but having done what I've done, at least I'm still in charge of MY deuced Mac(hina). (I'm beginning to understand what my ex-girlfriend was raving about when she lost DOS to Windows.)

1. Yeah, I'm running SIP-less, but I'm still in a better position than I was in before, because on top of being up to date Security Update-wise I'm no more vulnerable than I was before.

And further, as I've already opined, OS X has only a 7% market share, and I doubt that anyone's going to waste their time developing new exploits that target the minuscule percentage of users of an almost negligible platform that's running with the vulnerability.

2. I've got Gatekeeper permanently turned off, and I feel safe without it; I download only reputable and well received stuff.

Although Apple's attempts to save me from myself are not without merit, I'd rather take Sarah Brown to Havana for lunch.

(See "Resurrected software!" for more.)