OS X 10.9 has been out for just over a month, and earlier this week we gathered our thoughts and talked about some of our biggest gripes with the operating system (both new-to-Mavericks and those carried over from older versions of OS X).

We didn't nearly hit everything, though—a whole bunch of you took to the comments to let us know what was bugging you about Mavericks. So we've picked a few of the most compelling for you to read about in between eating leftovers and talking your family members out of ill-advised Black Friday purchases.

The dock

Most of the Mavericks complaints were functional rather than cosmetic, but one gripe that came up a couple of times involved the way the Dock looks when placed on the left or right side of the screen. Ars reader maccouch called the white, mostly opaque dock "hideous," while Erica-Jane lamented that it couldn't be made transparent (and that, when on the bottom of the screen, you're stuck with the "3D" dock look rather than a more traditional 2D look). Many of you don't seem to mind change, but you do mind when those changes are made irreversible. This is doubly true when changing long-standing OS X behaviors, as we'll see in our next complaint.

“New. Finder. Windows.”

One such long-standing behavior: in older versions of OS X, double-clicking a folder in a Finder window would bring that folder up in a new Finder window. At some point this behavior was changed, but up until Mountain Lion, it was possible to re-enable it in the settings. That's no longer the case, much to the chagrin of Ars readers like zebostoneleigh and furd_burfel.

"The biggest gripe I have with Apple, and they do have a lengthy track record of this, is removing things which work perfectly fine," wrote furd_burfel. "No, I don't want tabbed Finder windows. If I did, I would have installed one of those add-on apps that added tabs to Finder windows. I just want back what we used to have."

USB monitor woes

All Macs sold within the last few years have included at least one mini DisplayPort or Thunderbolt port that you can use with one or more external displays, but USB-connected displays have also found their niche. Maybe you want a third monitor, but you're already using your display output. Maybe you're on a laptop with only one Thunderbolt port and you have to use it with an Ethernet or FireWire cable. Maybe your USB monitor just travels better than a traditional LCD. In any case, Mavericks has made life more difficult for some users of these displays—Ars reader Pillage says that the feature is "severely borked" and "barely usable" in Mavericks.

We actually covered this issue back when Mavericks was released. According to DisplayLink, the company that makes the driver for many of these displays, some "regressions" in Mavericks have hurt USB display performance, and only Apple will be able to fix the issue. Downloading version 2.1 of the DisplayLink driver may help you out in the meantime, but the list of known issues is still extensive.

Not-so-Quick Look

A handy OS X feature introduced in version 10.5 is Quick Look, which will let you quickly view a preview of a document, image, video, or other type of file without actually opening up the application that normally handles it. Click a file and hit the spacebar—the large preview that appears is powered by Quick Look.

However, both in our comments and on Twitter, we've noticed complaints about Quick Look's quickness since Mavericks hit. In one comment with 35 upvotes and no downvotes (as of this writing), Ars reader GreyAreaUk complained of a two-to-three-second delay when using Quick Look that didn't exist before.

Reader ppayne has filed a bug report with Apple about it and has high hopes that the problem will be fixed. In the meantime, gheritt recommends running qlmanage -l from the Terminal to check out which third-party Quick Look plugins you're using, and this user notes that removing unneeded ones may improve performance.

QuickTime conversions

Finally, one of the most disruptive problems readers complained about involves the automatic conversion of certain videos before QuickTime 10.3 would play them. Reader Fred Duck has a reasonably comprehensive list of file types that QuickTime (and, by extension, Quick Look) will convert before playing. At best, these conversions add extra time to playback; at worst the re-compression may reduce your video's quality. Ars reader truedis notes that the VLC Player opens these video files without the need for conversion, and this user points to an extensive Apple Support Communities thread filled with others who have noticed the change. You may be able to find a workaround there.

As we mentioned in our last article, all new software comes with new bugs that will be squashed over the life of the product. Many of you also took the time to highlight things that you really liked about Mavericks—clearly, not every user will run into every bug in a particular operating system. We couldn't possibly go through every potential bug (especially those being experienced by users of particular Macs), but as reader HerpDerperson pointed out, the best way to make sure Apple is hearing about your problem is to let the company know directly.

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham