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."
First! (Score:4, Insightful)
One phrase invalidates the whole shebang... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Due to the efficiency of Visual Studio 9 over GCC"... I don't want to pick a compiler flamewar here, but I think it is fair to say that making blanket statements about one particular compiler producing faster code than another is pretty ignorant. There are some things VC does that GCC doesn't do, and vice versa, compiler switches can make a big difference, and you really would need to study the most commonly used code in OO under both compilers to see who is, in fact, generating better code, and, incidentally, for which processor.
OpenOffice benchmarks? Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is speed really the issue here? My LAPTOP was a bargain-barrel purchase 3 years ago and it has no problem running OpenOffice + FireFox + other standard software on either Ubuntu or XP.
What I care about is, "Which one is least likely to crash and make me lose my work?" That's always been my big complaint with the Windows versions of free software (GIMP comes to mind), not speed.
Re:Like Windows users are gonna care (Score:5, Insightful)
Who runs OO on Windows?
More people than who run it on Linux, that is for sure. We have it on all the computers here that didn't already have Office preinstalled (meaning most of them). I have both on my computer, although I use OO most of the time, as I like their spreadsheet app better than office.
Re:Like Windows users are gonna care (Score:1, Insightful)
You'd be suprised how many windows users are running Open Office. There are a lot of people, myself included who for one reason or other can't use Linux as their primary OS in some situations but still like to use Open Source Software wherever possible.
Re:Big surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps, however videocard drivers could also be the cause of all 3, especially video and graphical user interfaces.
But, even the power usage, could be from improperly handling the videocard, or maybe even bypassing it and using the CPU. (fuck if I know, just an assumption)
Re:Plug-outs or Pluck-outs in OpenOffice? (Score:3, Insightful)
How exactly are you going to remove the ad-handling code from Firefox? It's not as if there's special code in Firefox just to display ads...
As for NoScript and FlashBlock, people use them because they offer better functionality than just disabling the features in the browser itself (which is possible); the idea's to have control over what scripts run and flash is shown, rather than just blanket-disabling everything. (For instance, I block JavaScript on most sites, but not Wikipedia or Slashdot, or a few others.)
Re:Who cares about CPU speed if it slows your work (Score:1, Insightful)
the people that care are the one using open standards. If you use .xls, you better stay on ms office.
And why's it always Ubunto? (Score:2, Insightful)
Not all of us use or want to use a linux dist clearly designed for the point-and-click brigade. Not to mention the daft name (no I don't care what it means in Zulu, to an English speaker it sounds idiotic), daft release names, moronic default restrictions (to a power user) such as a locked root account. Perhaps I'm just a crusty old git but anything with release names like "gutsy gibbon" and "intrepid ibex" to me sounds like something aimed at pre teens which makes me wonder what other "user friendly" cutesy rubbish they've hacked into the system itself.
How about some benchmarks of Suse or Fedora or even Slackware?
Re:Who cares about CPU speed if it slows your work (Score:4, Insightful)
the people that care are the one using open standards. If you use .xls, you better stay on ms office.
Those two things aren't mutually exclusive. I personally would love to have open formats all the time. Heaven knows that it would make my job easier. But, the fact of the matter is, most companies/people/etc use MS Office. You must have that compatibility. It's nice to hold to ideals, but you can't shoot yourself in the foot while doing so...
Re:Big surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Only on older hardware is XP better than Vista/7.
ZDNet did a 'test' and found that with modern hardware 7/Vista (but more so with 7) easily beat XP comfortably.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3789&page=3
The better the hardware, the smaller the difference I suppose or the bigger the advantage Vista/7 has over XP.
Re:OS X (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm not aware that XP has any pre-fetching functionality, I thought that was a "new" feature in Vista and it's successors.
Re:Like Windows users are gonna care (Score:5, Insightful)
Who runs OO on Windows?
A lot of our home user and student clients use OO instead of Microsoft Office.
Microsoft Office isn't cheap. It's several hundred dollars depending on what kind of discounts you get and what version you need. It used to come preloaded on a lot of systems, but these days they frequently give you some kind of 30-day trial of Microsoft Office, instead of the full version.
Business folks don't generally care. Most of our business clients have some kind of volume license anyway, so they throw it on whatever new computer they get.
A lot of our home users have a hard time justifying spending $100 or more just so their kid can type up a paper at home.
So we point them at OO, and it generally does what they need it to. We've made a lot of people very happy by giving them a free alternative to Microsoft Office.
Re:Who cares about CPU speed if it slows your work (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously. ... Who cares if OpenOffice opens a .xls document 4 seconds faster, since it takes me a good 25 minutes to reconfigure all the graphs formating that it lost from MS Office??
Is that 25 minutes taken into factor? ... That's right, I didn't think so.
That's just silly.
If you need Excel, why would you be running OO? If you've got all kinds of graphs and formatting and whatever else that's going to take 25 minutes to fix in OO, why wouldn't you be running Excel? That time adds up pretty quickly and before long it becomes very easy to justify the cost of a license for Excel.
That's like the folks who switch to Linux or OS X and then load up their machine with some kind of VM and run everything in Windows anyway. If you need Windows, why not just run Windows?
Of course the best solution would be to get everyone working from some kind of open format, so it didn't matter what software you were using. So there was absolutely no vendor lock-in. But that won't be happening any time soon.
Re:Did I read the summary right? (Score:3, Insightful)
You're not kidding. Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS was released 20 years ago. It was snappy as all hell. What has 20 years of progress gotten us? Bloat.
Re:CPU: AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (32-bit, single core) (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you looked at the machines in many offices recently? Many companies are on a four or five-year computer lifecycle, which would mean that they very well may have machines about as powerful as that Athlon XP 3000+. Many businesses run even older machines as they want to continue to run Office 2000/XP/2003 on Windows XP and don't want to pay to replace perfectly functional machines. Machines with a 2.0-3.0 GHz P4 and 512 MB-1 GB RAM running Windows XP are very typical; newer Core 2-based (or Athlon 64-based if you have HPs) machines are much less common, probably because a P4 will run older versions of MS Office on XP just as well as a brand-new machine will. It's really only Vista and MS Office 2007 and their big RAM demands that make those old P4s obsolete.
Re:And why's it always Ubunto? (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it means "I'm too lazy to install Gentoo and have better things to do."
As a Gentoo user, I should know.
Re:Like Windows users are gonna care (Score:4, Insightful)
My experience from the various people I have to deal with as their IT manager is that they loathe Office 2007. Maybe, all things being equal, it is superior, much as the Dvorak keyboard is probably superior to the Qwerty keyboard, but things are not equal. I deal with a staff, some of which have over a decade of experience using Word versions starting with Word 95 (and some earlier versions than that), where each new version wasn't really that big a leap, and suddenly they're plunged into the world of ribbons, and take five minutes just to figure out how to print a document.
There's this thing called a learning curve, and OpenOffice, while hardly perfect and certainly not a clone of Office 97-2003, is significantly closer in layout than Office 2007. So bravo to your Aunt Nancy for catching on, but I have to manage systems in a real live workplace, where retraining means loss of productivity until the learning curve has been matched. Taking the path of least resistance seems for many of the people I work with to be the way to go.
Microsoft should have, at every least, put in a "Looks Kinda LIke Office 2003" mode, much as they have done over the years with Windows itself.
Re:Like Windows users are gonna care (Score:5, Insightful)
> It's slow, and it doesn't work for anything beyond a very trivial subset of Office functionality.
SURPRISE! That's all most people actually need.
You know.... "my requirements" versus "your requirements" beyond just the basic vendorlock thing.
The rest of us shouldn't have to buy a certain product just because you have a Microsoft fixation.
This includes the Mac users with their copies of iWork.
Re:Like Windows users are gonna care (Score:3, Insightful)
Same here. Over 50 computers in an educational research environment. Retail prices for Office Academic are outrageous ($250 to $600).
Select licensing (where a single license could be purchased for $35) has been discontinued and replaced with a 'package deal' where you pay ~$120 for Windows + Office + whatever crap they want to share but you can't just get 5 license, you need a license for every single machine in your department no matter whether they're even capable of running Windows (eg. PowerPC Mac) just because they would be covered for Office.
And then there is of course the nice Enterprise licensing. They give you a Windows and Office package for ~$100 or $60 for individual licenses per year with automatic upgrades but you have to cover every single person that might work in the offices and might use Office at some point. So we're stuck here again because we can't afford to pay for our 5 staff and the roughly 50 researchers that have a part-time appointment and only come in once in a while.
All of the above is affordable for large departments that have bunches of students and the budget to go along with it and they get a better deal out of the 'packages' but if you're running a non-Windows environment you're pretty much screwed