Ubuntu vs. Windows In OpenOffice.org Benchmark 262
ahziem writes "Ubuntu's Intrepid Ibex and Redmond's Windows XP go head-to-head in an OpenOffice.org 3.0 performance smackdown measuring vanilla OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, Go-oo, and Portable OpenOffice.org 3.0. Each platform and edition does well in different tests. Go-oo is known for its proud slogan "Better, Faster, Freer," but last time with OpenOffice.org 2.4 on Fedora, Go-oo came in fourth place out of four. Slashdot has previously reported Ubuntu beating Vista and Windows 7 in benchmarks, so either XP is faster or this benchmark carries a different weight."
Re:First! (Score:5, Informative)
Try disabling java in the settings. Made my version run a whole lot faster.
Another Ubuntu-Windows Benchmark? (Score:2, Informative)
How many benchmarks do we need? Really..
Are we gonna benchmark every single app out there to see our loved Ubuntu beats the shit out of Windows?
Ubuntu Wipes Windows 7 In Benchmarks [slashdot.org]
Java Performance On Ubuntu Vs. Windows Vista [slashdot.org]
Ubuntu 8.10 Outperforms Windows Vista [slashdot.org]
Warmboot faster under XP (Score:3, Informative)
I wonder if the faster warmboot times under XP are due to its prefetching functionality. Another benchmark with prefetching disabled could determine this. Maybe Ubuntu or other distributions can try adding prefetch [google.com] functionality to their distributions and put Windows where it belongs, (at) last.
OS X (Score:4, Informative)
On my Mac desktop I used OpenOffice for a long time. I find MS Office on the Mac to be a train wreck. But OO's performance really sucks on the Mac, even with Java turned off. I switched to Apple's own iWork '09 and it's fantastic, far superior to any alternative on the same OS. I prefer open document formats, but I need to get my job done.
My point is I hope the OO teams can focus more on performance across the board. I realize the difficulty when it's built for multiple platforms, but once performance is improved it'll be a much better contender.
Re:Like Windows users are gonna care (Score:3, Informative)
We have four computer labs totaling 21 computes, soon to be bumped up to 27. These are all three or four year old Dells with OEM XP licenses, but even with educational pricing, I have little interest in spending my budget on any version of Office. OpenOffice.org 3.0 opens most of the major formats, is free (as in "no licensing headaches") and is a helluva lot more like Office 97/2000/2003 than the horror story known as Office 2007.
Re:Warmboot faster under XP (Score:4, Informative)
I've installed 'preload' on my laptop ( Ubuntu 8.10 ) and it almost makes the OOo splash screen obsolete ( it only shows for a second or so ). Isn't that the same sort of thing as 'prefetch' but maybe without aiding boot times?
wtf is go-oo? (Score:5, Informative)
For others (like me) who are familiar with OOo but never heard of "Go-oo", Wikipedia says [wikipedia.org],
Go-oo is a concentrated set of patches for the cross-platform OpenOffice.org office suite. Go-oo is also one of OpenOffice.org variants created from these patches. It has better support for Office Open XML file formats than the official OpenOffice.org releases produced by Sun Microsystems, and other enhancements that have either not yet been accepted into the upstream Sun version, or will not be because of business or political reasons. Some of these changes or enhancements will eventually be part of the Sun version, too; the process of assessing patches, "upstreaming", just takes time.
It's a shame that even the Go-oo website does a poor job of explaining this on the front page (doesn't mention OpenOffice.org until nearly the very end) nor on the "about" page.
Anyone who wants documents readable in 10 years? (Score:5, Informative)
Oh wait. It was a rhetorical question. Sorry.
Re:CPU: AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (32-bit, single core) (Score:1, Informative)
That's all of 3 years old
They were out in 2003.
Re:First! (Score:3, Informative)
(AC that got first post above here)
Already done. It's still slow. One other tip, as well as disabling the Java, is increase the amount of memory OpenOffice can use. That speeds things up, at the expense of RAM.
Having said that, OOo does what I need it to do, but subjectively it's still slow. Slow to start and slow when running. The widgets are particularly bad: flickering, slow to react, and never quite mapped to my theme correctly. Why-oh-why did the OpenOffice devs decide to create a whole new widget library? It's this sort of not-invented-here syndrome that causes OpenOffice to be bloated and slow. That and the weird idea to put the entire office suite into one, big executable.
OOo has plugins now. Maybe it would be an idea to strip-down the core office suite, by moving features not everyone needs into plugins. Then provide a dirt-simple interface for searching and installing new plugins. Not sure how this should be locked-down for big corps though.
Re:One phrase invalidates the whole shebang... (Score:5, Informative)
No it isn't. It's written in C++. Look, you even contradict yourself with this quote:
Note that it doesn't say "The JRE is required for OpenOffice.org". You can install and run OO.o without installing Java, provided you don't want to use OO.o Base
Re:Big surprise (Score:5, Informative)
Ubuntu gets 25% longer battery life on my netbook...
XP...has a 3 hour batter life to ubuntu's 4 hour.
Isn't that 33% longer?
Re:First! (Score:5, Informative)
Why-oh-why did the OpenOffice devs decide to create a whole new widget library?
Portability. Remember that OpenOffice comes from StarOffice, which came from a company called Star Division (good band name, eh?). Star Division developed StarOffice back in the early nineties, before even Windows 95 was available... and they used their own C++ cross-platform library that was meant to make GUI development easier between Windows, OS2, Mac, and OSF/Motif.
Re:Big surprise (Score:1, Informative)
I noticed a big jump in the flash-video performance on my netbook (HP Mini 1000, Ubuntu) when I right-clicked on the flash-video and disabled "hardware acceleration". So yes, maybe there is something going on with the videocard drivers in Ubuntu.
Re:Big surprise (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps not directly, but you could send a message to the videocard/netbook maker to inform them, and they might be able to either help you then (might have an 'experimental' driver or something) or possibly soon after.
Or, perhaps contact, or even browse Ubuntu forums, or one of many other distributions forums and downloads pages, you might find a driver that comes with the original Debian, or RedHat, or one of the netbook specific distro's.
But for starters, if you haven't already, you could at least go into the BIOS (if it's accessible) see if there is anything to improve it there, or the videocard settings within Ubuntu, and start clicking some checkboxes.
Or you could get really adventurous and dig through the drivers (at least the INI and INF files) that XP is using, compare what's in those with what's in the Ubunto ones, could be a simple identifier string.
Re:First! (Score:5, Informative)
Modern systems only load the memory pages of executables that are actually needed, so it doesn't matter how big the executable is -- what matters is how much of the executable actually needs to be loaded.
Re:Big surprise (Score:3, Informative)
OOo is not a native Windows application, though. (Score:3, Informative)
OpenOffice.org is a unix application rigged into running on Windows, sort of like Pidgin or GIMP on Windows.
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Windows [openoffice.org]
And if you go over each of the official build services, you will find that one of the big differences between go-oo.org, StarOffice, and OpenOffice.org vanilla is simply build engineering. Specifically, if they're building with cygwin, it provides some major performance issues. Although Windows has some native POSIX support, you don't use it quite the same way as you do in Linux or Solaris- rather than accounting for these differences, OOo uses a POSIX emulation layer in order to avoid extra work. Despite the fact that Windows is the primary platform for distribution, it's simply too much trouble for Sun or Novell to screw with it. I know Novell is trying to move their build service (go-oo) into a straight GCC cross-compile solution, so the speed issue will not get any better on Windows.
My point is that this is built with Visual Studio 2005 as more or less a standard Windows application, not a Vista/7 application- it's not using the NT 6+ API's, so it's invalid as a true performance test. This would be similar to us testing Microsoft Office 2003 (I don't think OOo is quite feature comparable to 2007) on Windows vs. Wine and then declaring that Windows is the hands down superior platform.
So let's talk about Platform inequities. The Microsoft optimizing C compiler is a better compiler than GCC-- but GCC is really not half bad anymore. Visual Studio's really superior because of its debugging, refactoring, and profiling tools, not so much JUST its compiler. I think this is part of why Firefox runs faster in Wine than in native Linux. In fact, by writing your application in like vim and debugging with gdb then just using Visual Studio as a build slave, you're really getting the short end of the stick in both directions. But I digress, a native unix application like OOo is a native unix application, and I wouldn't expect you to get tremendously better success in Windows unless you're running it on Interix or something. Of course, that's not to say Windows doesn't do unix tasks like NFS better than UNIX, just that it doesn't necessarily run direct unix code better.
But this is all fluff, the fact of the matter is that OOo is not a Windows application and most people are Windows users, so let's look at some logical alternatives:
So... if you're running Windows and you just need to type a paper for school for free/cheap.... why not just use Softmaker Office 2006... or Softmaker Office 2008 if you have 20 bucks. Just use Office 2007 if you're doing long reports- the bibliography handling alone will make the 60 bucks to get it through ultimate steal worthwhile when writing something long and arduous. Consider the time you save on formatting and grammar checking and such over a semester or two- it's worth it. If you're paying thousands a year for your education, the least you can do is not waste time with shitty office software.
Personally, I use OOo on my linux netbook and Softmaker Office 2006 on my Windows box and just keep my documents in ODF. It's the cheap-ass pro solution.
Re:Big surprise (Score:4, Informative)
That depends on how you define "longer":
1 - (3 / 4) -> 25% longer
4 / 3 - 1 -> 33% longer
Re:And why's it always Ubunto? (Score:3, Informative)
If the locked down root really bothers you that much do a "sudo su -" and reactivate the account. The same trick works in OSX if anyone has ever wondered. As long as your sudoers file gives your account ALL(ALL) it should work fine.
Re:First! (Score:2, Informative)
Then maybe you might try compiling it yourself or find a different binary package. I don't see that symptom at all on my Arch Linux box.
And in response to earlier posts about the slowness: OOo is marginally slower to load than MSOffice on similar hardware here. This also applies to NeoOffice for Mac, which loads slightly faster than the X11 version for the same platform.
But if you actually use it for much *work*, you're not going to re-load the program that often, so the startup time becomes irrelevant, since in operation it is at least as snappy as MSOffice.
Re:Like Windows users are gonna care (Score:3, Informative)
OO.org is a surprisingly good Office replacement for a small non-IT business. Most often all they need is a text processor to write simple 1-2 page letters, and a spreadsheet for the accountant (no fancy macros etc). OO does that - and I had OO successfully adopted in such an environment. There was no way of replacing Windows with Linux (a lot of legacy third-party apps for making orders from suppliers, one for each, most of them written for Windows, and some even for DOS), but OO - no problem with that at all.
Re:Big surprise (Score:3, Informative)
Not that there's anything I can do about it...
Who says there's nothing you can do about it? Have you tried a different video card? I was able to significantly speed up flash and UI on an old box by using the proprietary nVidia driver.
Ubuntu defaulted to the open source nv driver because the card couldn't support Compiz, but there was still a significant performance gain to be had by using the binary blob.
Re:Big surprise (Score:3, Informative)
I've seen this in Debian as well.
All of my machines have ATI video cards supported by the radeon driver. When playing Flash video with "Hardware Acceleration" turned on, they stutter and struggle and drop frames like crazy. When I turn off "Hardware Acceleration", the videos play smoothly. Given the video card in the HP Mini 1000, I doubht that this is purely an ATI video driver issue.
This is on Debian unstable, x86_64.
Re:Like Windows users are gonna care (Score:3, Informative)
Who runs OO on Windows?
Every single person in my company. Most of our people are doing the actual work that earns us money rather than reading or writing word processor documents and spreadsheets. For us, the choice was between OO.o or nothing at all. There are still a few legacy installations of Office for people who actually need a few obscure features, but all employees have OpenOffice.