"'Hate' is pretty strong, but I definitely don't like it," replied CapnJackGig. "There are far too many idiotic design decisions, and a bunch of changes that were made just to say they made more changes, often at the detriment to features that were loved in previous versions."

But Lion is just fine for many others. "I like Lion," replied iBunny. "So far so good. No major issues, minor GUI lagging but I'm sure that will be addressed with future graphics drivers. ... It's not Apple's fault that 3rd party developers did not invest the resources needed to make an early transition from SL [Snow Leopard] to Lion."

At least a couple of users on Apple's own support forums said their Mac had inexplicably slowed down after they installed Lion.

"All indexed & finished settling down but man it's sluggish," posted fatpotanga. He runs it on a 2.4 GHz Mac, with 3GB RAM, and "loads of free disk space." He listed what's sluggish: "In Logic I get constant system overload errors on files I [previously] was working on for a week without problem. In design has almost ground to a halt, photoshop slow, internet slow. Slow to boot, slow to shut down. Time machine again really slow to open." He ran through a list of steps he'd taken to bring it up to speed: "Permissions repaired, caches cleared, prebinding updated. ... I've disabled Restore Windows when quitting etc. Activity monitor shows nothing untoward.

"I'm stumped," he said. "I know most people have no issues. I guess I'm just special."