When my friend Thomas Brand announced on Twitter that he was about to downgrade his Mac from Lion back to Snow Leopard, I raised an eyebrow. I remember his enthusiasm about the latest feline from Apple, and I wondered what triggered this about turn, especially because in a few days I’ll probably upgrade to Lion.

But Thomas is a pragmatic guy, and it all boils down to this:

I did not go back to 10.6 for the compatibility Rosetta provides, or the performance gains of an earlier operating system. I reinstalled Snow Leopard because I don’t need the iOS features Lion brought back to my Mac, and can’t see the point of compromising my productivity for an operating system that doesn’t know what it wants to be.

Here are some other quotes I very much agree with. On Lion’s gestures:

Pinching, zooming, swiping, and multi-finger taping is fine for my iPad, but on my Mac I want the control only a keyboard can provide. Macs have keyboards and keyboard have shortcuts. I don’t need carpal-tunnel inducing, talon-hand gestures for getting things done when I have keys to press. With Snow Leopard I have the control I need and none of the multitouch gestures I don’t.

On full-screen apps:

Full-Screen Apps bring some of the simplicity of iOS back to Mac OS X. Unfortunately not all applications support Lion’s full screen mode. When using a computer I like all of my applications to behave the same way. 

On auto-correction:

Wouldn’t it be great if Lion corrected your typing? Wouldn’t it be better if Lion didn’t autocorrect your spelling errors with the wrong word so that the meaning of your sentences was not lost? Turning off auto-correction was one of the first things I did after installing Lion and is another feature I don’t need to worry about deactivating in Snow Leopard.

I know I quoted Thomas extensively, but please go read his full post to get the full context and put things in perspective.

(And, again, I’m seriously considering to further postponing my upgrade…)