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Ubuntu Wipes Windows 7 In Benchmarks
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Feb 05, 2009 04:10 PM
from the such-things-need-more-context-than-substance dept.
from the such-things-need-more-context-than-substance dept.
twitter writes "Recent and controversial benchmarks for Windows 7 leave an important question unanswered: 'Is it faster than GNU/Linux?' Here, at last, is a benchmark that pits Ubuntu, Vista and Windows 7 against each other on the same modern hardware. From install time to GUI efficiency, Ubuntu beats Windows and is often twice as fast. Where Windows 7 is competitive, the difference is something the average user would not notice. The average GNU/Linux user is now getting better absolute performance from their computer as well as better value than the average Windows user."
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+Troll (Score:5, Insightful)
Can I mod this story as troll?
I'm a linux user but this story is anything but serious benchmarking.
Re:+Troll (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:+Troll (Score:5, Funny)
I'm a linux user but this story is anything but serious benchmarking.
Yeah, they left out almost all distros.
Parent
Re:+Troll (Score:5, Funny)
I read the headline and thought installing Ubuntu would wipe a Windows 7 partition.
Parent
Mouse Clicking (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:+Troll (Score:5, Insightful)
The title, at least, is troll-ish. Ubuntu WIPES windows 7 in benchmarks? Even the article concluded differently:
Obviously we're Linux users ourselves, but our tests have shown that there are some places where Windows 7 really is making some improvement and that's good for competition in the long term. However, Linux isn't sitting still: with ext4 now stable we expect it to be adopted into distros fairly quickly.
Parent
Re:+Troll (Score:5, Informative)
I'm guessing the real root of both of your problems is old graphics drivers, unless you really seariously prefer IE over Firefox?
Parent
Re:+Troll (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Wrong (Score:5, Funny)
My unpatched Windows system can get rooted AT LEAST ten times faster than Ubuntu. Take that, Open Source!
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Funny)
... and this is not a bug, it is a feature! ;-)
Parent
Layman? (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA:
Our test machine packed an Intel Core i7 920, which in layman's terms has four cores running at 2.67GHz with hyperthreading and 8MB of L3 cache.
(Emphasis added.)
Not sure what kind of laymen the authors hang out with, but all the laymen I know couldn't tell you the difference between a CPU and a hard drive, or the difference between GHz and GB ... much less figure out what "L3 cache" is!
Re:Layman? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because model numbers tell you nothing about the specifications without a reference sheet handy. People understand "21 Ghz", but not the model number 12675100.
Parent
Is that with Virus Software installed? (Score:5, Insightful)
With virus software installed on Windows 7 ubuntu would kill it even more.
Bravo! (Score:5, Funny)
Install time? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would anyone care about install time? The only interesting part of the install is how much of your hardware works out of the box, and how much of it can be made to work easily.
Of course installation is the easiest feature to review, but this is 2009 - there is nothing interesting about OS installation anymore.
What sold me.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been slowly switching from XP to Ubuntu on my work laptop, but I am still stuck with XP at home. I just play too many PC games to give up XP. I really don't care if it boots slower than Ubuntu, or takes longer to shut down. What matters to me is actually using the PC.
But can they measure responsiveness? (Score:5, Insightful)
On my old PC laptop, Ubuntu gets very unresponsive, even with every combination of ATI drivers I use. Both Windows XP and Windows Vista boot as fast, if not faster, on it than Ubuntu did. In fact, Windows Vista was generally more responsive during normal use. There were plenty of times where Vista could easily handle stuff like Firefox with Flash and some other stuff open, but Ubuntu would slow down to a crawl.
Mod me down if you want, but I've found Windows to be faster and more responsive out of the box, especially against modern Linux distributions.
The perception of speed is all that counts (Score:5, Interesting)
This will probably get me a troll mod, but I have to say that it doesn't matter how much faster Linux is than Windows in raw speed. All that matters is what the user perceives. And I have to say it doesn't look that great for Ubuntu or Fedora or any modern linux distro right now (but that's improving!). Right now I have Fedora 10 on a brand new dual core AMD 4550e (low-wattage, but still) with 4 GB of ram.
Let's start with the GUI since that is most visible. Without compiz, Fedora's Gnome GUI is quite fast, but to the user feels slow. You can see widgets redraw and reorder themselves. When you size a window you can see the contents adjusting. You can see tearing of the edges of window decorations. When moving the windows around you often get tearing. These artifacts actually make the desktop feel slower even though it really isn't at all.
With compiz-fusion on, things get a little bit better. But still resizing a window is very painful, especially one with a lot of widgets in it. Moving a window around is usually fast enough, though. I believe compiz's rendering engine is synced to screen refresh which helps a lot here (OS X did this for years). Still thought the system often just feels slow. Windows take some time to pop up some times. Sometimes I get a window of garbage (instead of a popup menu) and then the menu appears in it. Sometimes the effects (fade in, fade out), are delayed. Fancier effects like beam-in, beam-out (kind of cool and makes windows users take notice!) work well sometimes and then sometimes stutter or are delayed.
Maybe this is related to the recently-talked about I/O kernel bug, but my Fedora 10 box stutters all the time. My cron script that renders my background Earth picture with the proper clouds and day/night lighting will cause video and audio to halt for a complete second *every* time it is run. This never happened on my older, single processor Athlon with Fedora 8. PulseAudio also seems to cause audio to stutter at the slightest hint of any i/o. In this machine, anyway, with Fedora 10 and compiz-fusion, my Gnome desktop is very disappointing from the perception of performance pov. In raw speed I'm sure it beats Windows Vista or 7. But when you're frustrated with the inability to play back video and audio without skips, and the stuttering and delays in rendering GUI elements, none of that matters.
Now use a Vista computer with decent hardware with the effects turned on. Everything is silky smooth. Window resizes, moving windows (even with translucent blurring). Popups are timely and smooth. The system just feels more responsive than my Fedora Gnome desktop. Things like audio and video have a high priority and never stutter.
How can we improve this? Several ways. First GTK with client windows goes a long ways to solving the resize problem. Rather than having asynchronous messages being passed to each and every widget's window by X11, we only deal with events to the main window. Sub windows are all managed by GTK internally, eliminating the sync problem. This should hit mainstream soon when some corner cases are taken care of. From what I've read, KDE users might already enjoy this as Qt is supposed to already do client windows on X11. Then we need to get pulseaudio fixed somehow. And the kernel bug. Development on compiz after the merger with Beryl seems to be stalled as well. Seems like 80% of the work is done, but the last 20% always struggles to get done, especially in open source software. Finally I hope that issues regarding RGBA and ARGB in GTK in particular get addressed (if they still exist). Then hopefully more apps (KDE already can do this) will use ARGB visuals appropriately.
Re:And... (Score:5, Informative)
"Ubuntu 9.04 we used the daily build from January 22nd."
Parent
Re:And... (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably even dafter . Neither is finished, so you don't know what extra logging or debug they're running (well, with Linux you could but you probably can't be bothered).
You also don't know how tuned they are - the dev teams may not have finished all the performance tweaking in the beta, so yes, you get some numbers but unless you want to run the beta in production they are meaningless when it comes to production.
To be fair to TFA though they acknowledge this and are pretty clear that you can't read much into the beta numbers.
Parent
Re:And... (Score:5, Funny)
Naw - there's more than one. So you have to line them up single file and deal with them one at a time.
Parent
Re:Heh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Another note.
Linux has always been rather slow to boot, but as we understand it reducing boot time is one of the goals of the Ubuntu 9.04 release.
What kind of comment is that? Excusing a "slow boot time" with "Linux has always been rather slow to boot." Of course, then we get other benchmarks where it says that Ubuntu betas Windows in booting. IMO, this just goes to show that benchmarks on something that is so hardware dependent can be really silly. That and the user's bias is coming out in defending Linux by saying it's always been slow to boot. If Windows was the one that was so slow, it probably would have been "Windows has always been infamously slow to boot, and Windows 7 is no change." Or whatever.
Also... measuring mouse clicks on an install process? What?
And ... comparing the amount if gigabytes and saying that less space used after a fresh install is necessarily better? Becuase, as we all know, a 6 GB installation of an OS is absolutely horrendously huge, given the exorbitant cost of disk storage these days. Man, 1/166th of my 1TB drive gone because Windows! [/sarcasm]
Parent
Re:Heh. (Score:5, Insightful)
the user's bias is coming out in defending Linux by saying it's always been slow to boot
That's not how I read it. The author didn't seem to be defending Linux with that statement. It was more of a "as we would have expected" statement. He was acknowledging that Linux lost on that metric.
measuring mouse clicks on an install process? What?
The authors seem to acknowledge that this metric was just for fun. The caption for that data says "A bit of a flippant one" and in the intro they say "We also, just for the heck of it, kept track of how many mouse clicks it took to install each OS."
comparing the amount if gigabytes and saying that less space used after a fresh install is necessarily better?
Yes. All other things being equal, a smaller install size is better (more space for other things). Whether or not this particular metric matters to you depends, of course. On a typical desktop machine it might not matter. On some other machines it might. The install size also affects other things people might care about (e.g. how long it takes to do a drive image or backup; how long it takes to scan or seek on the drive; ...).
Parent
Re:Time for me to upgrade (Score:5, Funny)
There, fixed that for you.
Parent
Re:I can best them both. (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, imagine a beowolf cluster of Essequemodeias!
Parent