OS Performance — Snow Leopard, Windows 7, and Ubuntu 9.10 688
BeckySharp writes "With the nearly simultaneous release of Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 'Snow Leopard' (available right now) and Microsoft's Windows 7 (available Oct. 22), you get the inevitable debate: Which is the better operating system, Windows 7 or Snow Leopard? To help determine that, Computerworld's Preston Gralla put both operating systems through their paces, selected categories for a head-to-head competition, and then chose a winner in each category." Relatedly, Phoronix has posted Snow Leopard vs. Ubuntu 9.10 benchmarks. They ran tests from ray tracing to 3D gaming to compilation. Their tests show Ubuntu 9.10 winning a number of the tests, but there are some slowdowns in performance and still multiple wins in favor of Snow Leopard, so the end result is mixed.
Re:Dock/Taskbar design (Score:3, Interesting)
The most thoughtful article I read that truly explains what the technical tradeoffs are with dock/taskbar design: here [arstechnica.com].
On a similar topic, if you want to work on the home page GUI for Android, there is an on-going project [fairsoftware.net] as well.
The good news for consumers is that both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard are great-looking OS. Computerworld is just wrong to give a point to Apple on price :-)
30 bucks..
a proprietary OS for 30 bucks deserves 5 points on price.
apple releasing a version of osx for 30 bucks is metaphorically equivalent to an 2010 infiniti M slapped with a 20k(US) sticker price.
Re:Dock/Taskbar design (Score:5, Interesting)
Would I recommend it to a friend? Absolutely. Would I suggest that it's actually worth the retail price? I'm not so sure. It may be if you're upgrading from Windows XP, but if you're upgrading form Vista you're getting shafted.
30? Try 130. (Score:4, Interesting)
Its only 30 if you forked out 130 for the last one, so you could really call it 160.
The place where I do give them kudos is the family pack, I can upgrade five machines for $50... only have two currently.
OK, so I have a second kudo, they don't have some weird multiple available configurations locked to a DVD like windows, I can install SL on a fresh machine using the same disc as I did for the upgrade without giving it a second thought.
But giving it points for being only $30, look if it is such a minimal upgrade; for some its a total no go as they cannot install it because they run PowerPC; makes me wonder, why didn't it just download and install like the patch it comes across as?
GCC comparison (Score:4, Interesting)
Is Apples GCC 4.3 significantly different from a vanilla GCC 4.3? I know they've been doing a bunch of work on llvm, so they can get a compiler not under the gplv3, is this part of the difference?
Performance not as important as stability (Score:2, Interesting)
Another thing I noticed with Vista, is that it keeps the hard drive light on at all times, no matter what I'm doing (or not doing). This can downgrade performance to almost unusable levels at times. With Ubuntu, it make more sense when the hard drive is accessed and the cache is clearly working well.
Having said that, it is funny to see that Ubuntu outperforms Mac in the categories that matter to me.
Cheers,
E. Conde
jBilling.com [jbilling.com] Open Source Billing
This leads me to wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
Honestly, with the exception of the gamers that want to run Half Life 7 or Quake 9, are many people really bothering to upgrade anymore? From my vantage point it will be surprising to see Windows 7 do well commercially - not because of vista - because there haven't been great reasons to upgrade from the hardware and software of 5 years ago.
Fact checking? (Score:4, Interesting)
In the Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7 article, I ran across this gem:
That's because they're in the Optional section of Windows Updates on Windows 7, bundled as "Windows Live Essentials."
It's not hard to miss, seeing as it's the only entry in the Optional section (because although Virtual PC and XP Mode are also optional, but they're still release candidates [microsoft.com]).
Also, why is Previous Versions not mentioned here? It's not new [lockergnome.com] either, Windows Vista had the Previous Versions functionality.
Re:30? Try 130. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Dock/Taskbar design (Score:3, Interesting)
Not just that, but doesn't Apple offer a nice discount for families upgrading several machines? Windows 7 is not too expensive (especially since I always get an OEM version), but Microsoft's bulk discount is a joke. If you're a family upgrading 4 computers (or a single basement dwelling geek upgrading 4), you'll be paying 4 times the full price.
Re:GCC comparison (Score:3, Interesting)
Read that section again, 10.6 beat 9.10 on the Apache compile, but lost by as much as it had won on the PHP compile. As with most of the tests they used, its a toss up between OS's.
In reality, both of these "benchmark" articles blow goats. The Computerworld one is extremely subjective and takes a whole lot of artistic license in determining the winners in a few categories. The Phoronix one gets points for being more objective, but in reality it really doesn't tell you anything. Unless you use your computer only for something extremely specific like doing long scientific calculations and simulations or intense movie rendering etc., the performance difference between OS's could be as much as 15-25% and still not matter. The difference between me saving a document and it taking a quarter second or it taking a half second is negligible, as is loading a webpage in a half second compared to a whole second. That's not to say more performance and better tuning isn't nice, it's actually a great thing. It's why I prefer Chrome to Firefox. The miniscule differences in page loading, startup times, and url searches all add up to a more positive experience that I prefer. BUT (and thats a big but, like something sir mix a lot would enjoy), when it comes to a choice such as what operating system you should use, there are so much more important reasons than how quickly your system compiles apache to base your pick on. Application capability is a big one. Like to game? Windows it is. Are you a big traveler? Then the 8 hour battery life of the new Macbook Pro's + OS X might be just what you need. Working in academia? Depending on where and what you are involved in, Linux could be the dominant OS of choice.
Each system has it's own advantages and disadvantages. Comparing things like installation experiences (something your users should only have to go through once) or benchmarking their performance in a multi-threaded ray tracing is journalistic wankery and serves no real purpose but to inflate page clicks and rouse up the fanboys. If you want to really figure out what OS is best for you, then look first to yourself and what your computer needs are, then find the one that meets those needs through its available applications and support. If all of them meet your needs, then look at the price of each and what sort of hardware needs you have, and if the OS can meet those. Still stumped? Pick which OS you're most familiar with. Point is, random performance metrics and criticisms of taskbar vs. dock or expose/spaces vs. compiz is the grime at bottom of the barrel in terms of reasons to pick an OS.
Re:But they should, they just don't know it. (Score:3, Interesting)
For some reason, despite the price tag of zero and the hardcore love of a thousand morons, OpenOffice makes every single document I produce or open from any office suite to any office suite look like total and absolute ass. Maybe it's worth $65 to me for my documents not to induce eye strain. Aesthetics are extremely important in the "real world" (see: the desktop usage scenario where most F/OSS does not exist.)
Because we all just -know- how great MS Office is at keeping formatting between versions. Ever had different versions of Office and open up the same document? Take the document from Word 2003 from work and open it on Office XP at home and it looks totally different. Even documents between versions don't show up the same. If you want things to look the exact same, export it as a PDF.
That's absolutely wrong. It's in our best interest to ignore these products until they become worth showing people. Some open source projects have graduated and are worth showing users (ie 7-zip) while others are utterly terrible and only have popularity due to an arbitrary freetard bias (openoffice, koffice, compiz, etc..) so they need to be ignored so the developers don't get the idea into their heads that they've accomplished something worthwhile and (heaven-forbid) stop going back to the drawing board, where they should be firmly planted.
While KOffice isn't really that great, Open Office is perhaps the best office suite save for iLife and MS Office. And yes, there are a -lot- of others, (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_suite [wikipedia.org]). Compiz is pretty good for eye candy, it works much nicer than Vista's "3-D effects" and more impressive than OS X's.
Re:30? Try 130. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:30? Try 130. (Score:2, Interesting)
This i think is also a political move, because gcc 4.3 and up are GPL3 (please correcte me if i'm wrong). FreeBSD is also doing this.
Re:Dock/Taskbar design (Score:4, Interesting)
>>>Win7 may be if you're upgrading from Windows XP
I don't think so. I have XP. It costs about $200 to do the upgrade, but why bother? For just a little more I could walk into Walmart during a sales event, and get a whole new PC with the Win7 OS included "free". Yes that PC would be bottom-line, but it's still better hardware than the single-core P4 I have now.
Re:Dock/Taskbar design (Score:3, Interesting)
Like... refurbished G5s that Apple sold in 2007?
I mean, we are talking about an OS sold in 2009 that won't run in hardware that was still being produced in 2006.
Re:Dock/Taskbar design (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Dock/Taskbar design (Score:5, Interesting)
I just deleted my Win7 partition and went back to my trusty XP Pro Sp3 x86. - mainly because, IMO, Windows 7 _isn't_ a decent upgrade for XP users who (by now should) know what they're doing. However, I would recommend it to Vista users looking for a speed boost, or people new to Windows.
What's nice about 7 is that there's a lot less mucking about in driver control panels when using bog-standard hardware, which makes it a lot easier for beginners to slide in and start working without much fuss. The "find drivers online" function actually works now (at least for popular hardware - obviously stuff like the fingerprint reader and HSDPA adapter on my Thinkpad weren't found off the bat), and things like display drivers are automatically installed with no fuss at all (and actually work right away).
Other advantages over XP include:
-Hooking up an HDMI monitor now automatically enables it too (in XP you'd need to plug in and then activate the secondary display manually in the Display Properties or a program like Ultramon. Little tweaks like this are obviously nice.
-Per-Application volume mixing, just like Vista... I'm still wondering if there's a way to add this to XP - that would pretty much take care of my needs for the next few years or so :)
-Aero Snap - very useful, and the XP addon (AeroSnap) that does this is sadly pretty unstable.
-Mobile Device Center - didn't try it out, but it's GOT to be better than the steaming pile of crap called ActiveSync
Other than that, it was pretty much just filled with annoyances... the interface has become far too user-friendly :)
Disadvantages over Windows XP:
-Audio engine is still laggier with ASIO, at least with my E-Mu interface and with on-board. Latencies are roughly twice as high as in XP, and very unstable (In-Out 7ms in XP, ~10-20ms in Win7).
-Aero drains battery life like crazy, and Aero basic without translucency is the ugliest crap I've ever seen on an OS. Windows 3.11 looked better than that... Sure, you can just switch to a standard XP visual style, but having installed the required DLLs for that on a Vista installation before, I didn't feel like going to the trouble of that...
-Aero causes my graphics chip to run very hot - with power management enabled, or the performance locked to Standard 2D mode, I get about 45 degrees C at idle. Since the CPU and GPU are all cooled by the same big heatsink/fan assembly, the CPU runs nice and cool (30 degrees) when the GPU is under 50 degrees - but when running Vista, the CPU idle temperature climbs to 45+ degrees, because the GPU is idling at almost 60C...
-Once again, driver availability. My laptop is less than half a year old... You'd think that manufacturers would have released working drivers for at least Vista 64-bit by now - at least for hardware that's still on the market today... but it's still the same old problem. I'm assuming 32-bit support is better.
All in all, upgrading from XP isn't worth it, IMO... Causes more problems than it's worth.
New users, on the other hand, or people sick of Vista's crawling speed (although it seemed to me that Win7 just makes certain processes, which used to lock up the system, low priority), should definitely be encouraged to use Windows 7. The benefits (speed, ease of use) are pretty much no-brainers, and the learning curve (as far as I can tell) is far less steep than that of 2K/XP.
Re:Dock/Taskbar design (Score:4, Interesting)
So... its a graphical versioning system. Sure, there was nothing quite as good as it before (though I still mostly use iBackup), but it isn't a new or innovative idea. Its a backup... I've been doing that for around 20 years before Time Machine came around, I'll continue doing it years after OS X dies.
It's like SVN, but for all your files. Revision history!
That alone makes it better than "just a backup".