Ubuntu Wipes Windows 7 In Benchmarks 781
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."
And... (Score:3, Funny)
Queue douchebag saying its only a beta.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
What about benching it against the Hardy Heron beta? Or the latest svn of every package used during testing? What about a story that matters?
Re:And... (Score:5, Informative)
"Ubuntu 9.04 we used the daily build from January 22nd."
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.
Re:And... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And... (Score:4, Insightful)
Neither runs the other's software (without proper tools, and even then it's not nearly perfect),
Close enough, though. Aside from Wine running similar tools on both platforms -- and, when Wine works, it's often faster than running the same app on Windows -- there's plenty of cross-platform development.
Let me put it this way: Suppose I'm a Java developer with Eclipse. That'll run fine on any platform I throw at it. But, even before I get to my own software, Eclipse is such a hog that I'll want every ounce of performance I can throw at it.
For that matter, if I'm developing a Java program -- or Ruby, or Python, or anything else sufficiently cross-platform -- I may well care when it gets to deployment time which OS is faster. If developing a new app, I may choose to support one platform over another for performance reasons.
It's probably not as useful as benchmarks within an OS (between Linux filesystems, say) or between POSIX-compliant OSes (but these benchmarks don't test the Windows POSIX layer, I'm sure), but it's worth mentioning.
Oh, and I like being amaturish -- a big HA HA to everyone who tried to convince me that Vista is fast, when you give it enough RAM.
Re:And... (Score:5, Insightful)
We run almost exclusively system intensive high resource usage software. (100% CPU & 5GB+ of RAM, RAID arrays pushed to the limit when rendering.) Under these loads we've seen very little performance differences between OSes. Vista x64, Windows XPx64, Windows 7 x64. Across all 3 Windows apps it's effectively a wash.
Similarly I've seen very very marginal improvements while rendering on Linux.
The tests are kind of interesting in a "I suppose that's interesting" sort of way. But on a modern system how fast most OS features act is the split between milliseconds and who really cares?
The summary is highly misleading "Ubuntu as much as twice as fast!" At extremely short unnoticeable tasks which no human would care to measure except in a benchmark.
I've very very very rarely had the OS be a bottleneck. The last time I remember encountering a system slow down on a reasonably up to date system was when I was trying to run Shake on an OSX PPC G4. An older x86 system on Windows and Linux simply smoked it in every possible way. But that was far more to do with being a PowerPC chip than OSX itself. Oh yeah... and Vista's network transfer speeds when it was first released were embarassing. But those have been straightened out as far as I can tell from my experience.
Re:And... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And... (Score:5, Insightful)
However, an informed customer (and by informed consumer, I mean someone reasonably intelligent, knows the strengths and weaknesses of Linux, etc) will almost certainly pick Linux
Since when is the majority of the market an informed consumer? Especially the netbook market?
People are going to pick words that they have heard before. Marketing is a huge part of this and what it boils down to is:
Windows XP = good, Vista = bad, Linux = difficult. (Which is sad, mostly because Vista isn't that bad, and Linux isn't that difficult, but marketing is everything to the mass average consumer)
Re:And... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a case of a buyer getting scared of a 'different' operating system. It's a case of a buyer wanting a netbook that will run every program he might ever want over the next few years, without the operating system getting in the way. It doesn't and wouldn't matter that Linux was significantly faster and more capable.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And... (Score:5, Insightful)
There may be relevant performance differences between the operating systems and versions, but this benchmark mostly does not test for them in the general use cases.
* How long does each operating system take to install?
Typical home user installs neither, real IT shops use disk images and other automated deployment tools.
* How much disk space was used in the standard install?
This is only a significant concern for SSD Netbooks. Typical home users will use ad hoc unmanaged storage and fill any available space with porn/music/photos. Power users who need lots of storage understand multiple hard disks. Real IT shops do managed non-local storage.
* How long does boot up and shutdown take?
The benchmarks shows no significant differences for boot up times. Both tests require more iterations and controls to distinguish between clean shutdowns, and ones in which software, first run, and other updates also take place during shutdown.
* How long does it take to copy files from USB to HD, and from HD to HD?
Methodology is flawed because the installation of each operating system has perturbed the free and occupied space layouts on the hard disk. An unbiased test would be USB to/from other installed hard disk instead of USB to/from the boot disk.
Independent of the operating system in use, data located at the outside of a CAV disk can be read and written faster than data located close to the spindle.
* How fast can it execute the Richards benchmark?
Results do not indicate any significant differences in the set. Also, does the Richards benchmark reasonably simulate any particular home or enterprise task set in general, and if so, does the (undisclosed) version of the Richards benchmark employed in this test also reasonably simulate a particular task set?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And... (Score:5, Funny)
What about a story that matters?
Do you make a point of posting in every story that doesn't matter to you? Or was it "cue the douchebag" that you couldn't resist responding to?
You lead a very fatiguing existence, don't you?
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You're modded troll because they already do run at comparative speeds. GTA IV? On a 2.66 GHz dual-core 64-bit processor, 4GB of 800MHz DDR2, and a 512MB 9800GTX+ under Windows gives framerates reminiscent of Shadows of the Colossus on PS2. Under Ubuntu, it's about the same.
Loading MS Word? Just use OpenOffice because it's compatible with those document formats. Or run word in WINE - it just fucking works and speed differences are negligible. Ditto Visual Studio, most of that time is going to be hardware, no
Re:And... (Score:5, Interesting)
I generally agree, but frankly, OpenOffice.org Writer is still not a drop-in replacement for MS Word if you're doing anything non-trivial. And I've worked on OpenOffice.org Writer -- it has a couple of advantages and a bunch of glaring omissions even today. I haven't tried Word in Wine, but if it's made such strides, then great.
Re:And... (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't disagree with you, necessarily, but I would agree more if your concern was with Open Office Calc not being a sufficient replacement for Excel. Would you care to list one or two of the most significant "glaring omissions" of OO Writer versus Word? "Glaring omissions" implies that they will be obvious to a casual user.
Re:And... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm all for Windows and Office and all the rest...
Having used Windows for years, it does not have NEAR the functionality of any given Linux distro without heavy tweaking.
I mean, come on, I have to install office programs, compilers, editors, (non-DRM) media players, (real) CD/DVD burning programs, terminals, secure communication programs, (real) file transfer programs, etc., and that's just the top categories. Let alone all the crap you have to install, just because you're using Windows, like anti-virus and anti-malware programs.
And then there's the lovely day that a program simply... stops working. Why? Who knows! Time to format and reinstall!
Seriously. I have a Windows partition because I like PC video gaming. (Lord, help me, sometimes even I don't know why. I keep all my drivers up to date, but I still get BSOD's a couple times a month.) But I can't stand to try to use it for real work.
Re:And... (Score:5, Insightful)
I always get a kick out of this argument. Has it occurred to you that when Microsoft bundles those applications they get sued to pieces and end up paying billions in fines to the European antitrust extortionists^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H regulators? If you approve of those verdicts and fines, then you cannot simultaneously criticize Microsoft for forcing you to install all those things. Approving of these fines means simply that we accept (or rather demand) the inconveniences they inflict.
Re:And... (Score:5, Informative)
I wouldn't mind if they bundled everything they make, and everything they don't make as well! Just put a price tag on it and let the market sort it out. What I can't stand is that they essentially GIVE the software away through bundling deals with the OEM's, but tell them that they can't install any other software that competes with their products, essentially causing the OEM's to eat the difference, and pass the savings on to their customers. THAT'S anti-capitalistic. Unfortunately, government's only answer is to do what they've done, which includes forcing Microsoft to GIVE MORE of their software away to schools, further entrenching their monopoly. Gah!
Microsoft's making all their money from corporate sales, who are basically beholden because of the Office monopoly. All I want is for Microsoft to sell the same piece of software for the same price to everyone. Let them have 42 editions, for all I care, but just box it and price it and let the market sort it out.
How many individuals do you know have paid full retail price for either Windows or Office? If I could go buy either one for what they cost the OEM, the tier-1 Select customer, or the college student -- or if THEY had to pay what -I- pay, then I would consider that competition. I'd even consider it fair to meet in the middle. If Vista Ultimate cost what a new copy of OS X cost, that would seem to be about right. Have you seen what it actually retails for? Scary.
Re:And... (Score:5, Insightful)
I have personally moved my grandmother and uncle, neither which know ANYTHING about computers. The only problem I have seen is opening horrendously formated word documents and running DX games. Please do not compare a bestbuy installed windows with a downloaded iso linux, they are not nearly the same. When bestbuy installs windows, they find the drivers, install antivirus, add tutorials, etc. When I set up an Ubuntu system, I do the same and they have NO problems!
Linux is just as easy, if not easier to use than windows. Just look at opening programs. In windows you go "start->all programs->adobe->photoshop->start photoshop". In linux you go "Applications->Graphics->Gimp Image Editor". Not to mention installing applications. In windows you have to google-hunt a program, pray it's clean, download, scan, install. In linux you open the package manager, select it and click "apply".
Please stop spreading this FUD that windows is easier simply because some joker being paid $8/hour set it up for you!
Re:And... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm all for Ubuntu and OOo and all the rest--and I use them myself almost as much as I use MS products--but let's be honest: the vast majority of users simply don't have the time or determination to learn a new OS, productivity suite, and how to deal with a host of new quirks, bugs, and features.
They will have to. XP wont last forever, not because the users don't want it to, but because Microsoft Don't want it to. Sooner or later they'll have to change to something like Windows 7 or something else.
Yeah, big deal, some people would say, Windows is Windows. To put that into perspective: I was changing a computer at an institution as part of my work today (Win2000-box out, WinXP-box in), the inane user completely stalled and was openly yelling her frantic thoughtflow out loud because the desktop-background-color was slightly off compared to the old box' configuration (Win2000 is kinda turqoise where XP was light blue). If I had given her Aero she'd have had a heart-attack.
Re:But then again... (Score:4, Insightful)
...Ubunghole is only beta-quality...
Not too shabby for an alpha.
+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)
Re:+Troll (Score:5, Funny)
Re:+Troll (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, and if it takes more that 1 GB of my 500 GB hard drive then there's something wrong.
Why don't they benchmark some more important timings like how long it takes to shutdown, how long it takes to paste text in an email and how long it takes to run a disk defrag.
Boot-up/shut-down are there. I was focused on the Windows 7/x86 & Ubuntu 9.04/x86 'cuz that's what I run. Windows 7 boots about 13 seconds faster and takes about 4 seconds longer to shut down.
Disk I/O is there too. For moving large files around, the numbers were more-or-less comparable. For moving small files (probably comparable to running a disk defrag), Windows 7 got its ass handed to it. Hopefully Microsoft is aware of this and does something about it before subjecting users to it.
Everything took more than 1 GB of hard-drive space installed, but Windows was 3-4 times as big (7.9 GB rather than 2.3 GB).
Re:+Troll (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not even remotely true. Every major flavour of Linux comes with more usable applications installed by default than any version of Windows can.
Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook don't come with Windows, real games don't come with Windows, a C compiler, Python, and Java don't come with Windows, there's only one media player installed with Windows and only one browser as well.
What pray tell, besides Microsoft's video editing tool, do you think comes with Windows that isn't on Linux?
Re:+Troll (Score:4, Informative)
Uh, direct what? Seriously, what productivity software uses Direct-X? None.
DirectX is a library interface, one that is fairly adequately implemented on Linux as well FYI.
If you want to instead state that Windows is presently a better gaming platform than Linux, then I'll let you win that one hands down. No problem. Way to go Windows, you got games. Whoopie.
Stupid question: Why do games need an Operating System as bloated as Windows? They don't. That's why Direct-X exists, ironically.
Re:+Troll (Score:4, Insightful)
>Why do games need an Operating System as bloated as Windows? They don't. That's why Direct-X exists, ironically.
Because people dont want to reboot, fuck around with ini files, etc to just play games like we used to.
>DirectX is a library interface
You cant dismiss libraries. Its part of the value of the OS.
Re:+Troll (Score:4, Informative)
Now you know. [tombuntu.com] And knowing's half the battle.
Re:+Troll (Score:4, Insightful)
<us-centric>They may think it, but they're wrong. They may believe it should be legal, but the DMCA says, pretty unequivocally that it IS ILLEGAL, even if it's your disc.</us-centric>
Now whether it's moral or ethical is a different thing, but it's not legal to circumvent copy protection measures in the US.
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.
Re:+Troll (Score:4, Insightful)
Kind of like saying religious people are atheists because of all the gods they do not believe in.
Re:+Troll (Score:5, Funny)
I read the headline and thought installing Ubuntu would wipe a Windows 7 partition.
Re:+Troll (Score:5, Funny)
Re:+Troll (Score:4, Informative)
What's wrong? I mean the summary leads you directly to the conclusion you need to be coming to here:
"The average GNU/Linux user is now getting better absolute performance from their computer as well as better value than the average Windows user."
Seriously, that's good enough for me. Don't even need to read the article now...
Re:+Troll (Score:4, Funny)
The average GNU/Linux user is still running that P4 2.8 GHz machine. Luckily, it's the 800 FSB version with hyper threading, and they upped their RAM to 1 GB last year.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I forgot to mention the trusty 9800 Pro (yeah, ATI's 9800, not nVidia's) they have in there.
Re:+Troll (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, except the article is absolute fanboyish filth that makes no effort to prove anything. It just takes a bunch of unrelated numbers, puts them into colourful charts and pretends it can draw conclusions from them.
I, for one, don't spend much time booting and shutting down, and I can vouch for the fact that Linux' lack of defragging tools has resulted in my file server slowing to a crawl over time, bad enough that every few months I pull off all the files, wipe the partition then load the files back on, to turn 4mb/sec reads into 150mb/sec :P
Here's something for the fanboys to ponder: at home I run XP, but at the office I run Linux (plus a Windows VM). As a web developer and network guru, Linux lets me work far more quickly and efficiently due to its network-centric design. It doesn't feel "faster" nor slower than Windows, it is just "better" for the kind of work I do. It most certainly is not "better" for the things I do at home, such as playing games, editing video and producing music. I don't care about your so-called "better value" if it turns my beefy media workstation/gaming rig into a useless space heater. If my sole concern was web surfing speed, I'd go back to OS/2 Warp and Netscape 3.02.
Re:+Troll (Score:4, Interesting)
Personal anecdotes: I have a Q6600 / 8GB 800MHz RAM / 512MB Geforce 8600GT. I used 8.10 as my primary desktop for a few months. Now I'm using Win 7 beta. Of the two, I strongly prefer Win 7, and one of the reasons for the switch was the unacceptable slowness of the X-windows GUI and all the glitches still present in Firefox 3.0.5.
p.s. I definitely plan to give 9.04 a spin when it comes out, and in the meantime I'll keep using 8.10 in a virtual machine. I can't live without it, but I can't live with it on my desktop.
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?
Re:+Troll (Score:4, Informative)
unacceptable slowness of the X-windows GUI
I have a E4500 2.20GHz with 4GB RAM and a 256MB GeForce 8600GT (do they make a 512 model??) and it FLIES on Ubuntu 8.10; did you install the restricted driver?
Re:+Troll (Score:4, Insightful)
Far too late for that -- the Linux kernel supports entirely too much stuff, most of it very well. And are there any good nvidia drivers, open or not, for Haiku?
If you really want to make that succeed, start trying to port the more interesting Haiku features to Linux.
I don't think you understand- the point is that Haiku is designed from the ground up for the desktop based on BeOS's example. The point is that it's not linux- it's designed for the desktop. This is the reason we lost the ck patchset for the linux kernel. The companies supporting linux are doing it for the server and HPC-- and that's fine.
What's with this Katamari Damacy attitude in open source? I thought F/OSS was supposed to be more flexible.
Re: (Score:3)
No, not troll, but flamebait. Because if someone asks "What has Gates done PERSONALLY to make slashdotters so hateful of him?" and you list several very good, well though out reasons [slashdot.org], it's flamebait.
So no, this story isn't a troll, it's flamebait. Like my comment was (I liked Captain Splendid's take on it, "Mods on crack").
Re:+Troll (Score:5, Funny)
Mouse Clicking (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Possible mouse clicking would be an element of configurable options, and for this higher may be better. One wants to be able to install properly on systems where the defaults won't work.
It also ignores the amount of text, positioning of text, and other UI design principles, so it's an incomplete metric. More analysis would be needed to make
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Quote
However, Linux isn't sitting still: with ext4 now stable we expect it to be adopted into distros fairly quickly.
end Quote
Sigh, they have obviously not been keeping up with what is going on in leading edge distros. Fedora 11 (Alpha available today) uses ext4 as its default filesystem.
But (another big sigh) too many people seem to think that Ubuntu is the ONLY Linux Distro or even worse LINUX == Ubuntu == Linux.
Which mightily pisses me off.
Right, I'm off to start banging my head agaist the brick wall as
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Thank you for that.
True, there was one interesting metric where Windows got its ass kicked (copying small files around). But for the most part, I saw no major ownage. In fact, it showed that Windows did a better job with large files and had a faster turn-around time to boot & shut-down.
Windows takes longer to install and takes up more hard drive room... Meh. I don't re-install my OS very often and my hard drive is big enough that the extra 5 GB is just a nit-picky annoyance and a point I can use to
Dear /. editors (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear Slashdot editors,
We understand perfectly your needs about traffic generation and advertisements.
But please, why publish another stupidity like this... when too recently you had a highly criticized "story" about some random guy that found Ubuntu downloads faster than Vista in his home PC's. Please avoid that kind of sh... (how to name it???), that only ends turning people away for your site in the long term.
Eventually, if you can't stop from posting about so called "comparative benchmarks", please do it in the "idle" section.
regards,
I can best them both. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I can best them both. (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, imagine a beowolf cluster of Essequemodeias!
Re:I can best them both. (Score:5, Funny)
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! ;-)
Ubuntu vs. XP speed test (Score:4, Informative)
Can't speak for Windows 7, but I'm writing this from Firefox, running under Ubunut (sitting here building a new Ubuntu system for my kids). I have about 4 dual boot systems, and I'm to the point I'm not booting XP much anymore.
I'm obviously a fan, but here is my honest to goodness feeling on XP vs. Ubuntu: Straight out of the box, XP is just as fast as Ubuntu.
However, after you install a virus scanner, have 10 different little malware scanners you have to run to catch everything, and then every mother f'n program you installs on Windows thinks it needs to run as a service...hell yeah, Ubuntu is faster.
Man, Windows users just don't know how wonderful it is to have a hard drive that doesn't have CHURN 90% of the time. It's freaking awesome!
And games? As stated, all my systems are dual boot. I find my kids playing games in Linux about 3 out of 4 times I see them on a computer.
Re:Wrong (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Layman? (Score:4, Funny)
I'd be interested to know what that is in non-layman's terms!
Is that with Virus Software installed? (Score:5, Insightful)
With virus software installed on Windows 7 ubuntu would kill it even more.
Re:Is that with Virus Software installed? (Score:4, Interesting)
Good point. Here's a funny link on the subject http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000803.html [codinghorror.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
With virus software installed on Windows 7 ubuntu would kill it even more.
I'm not sure this counts as killing. I mean, 73 seconds for booting?
Hands up everyone who got it down to less than 30, any distro.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
> Hands up everyone who got it down to less than 30, any distro.
Here is cold boot to desktop under 10 seconds with Asus Eeepc (not by me, but just to show that it is not that impossible):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzkQhHaFE0I [youtube.com]
Re:Is that with Virus Software installed? (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, a fellow gentooer. Are you done compiling yet?
Re:Well its software that counts, and this proved (Score:4, Informative)
Rejoice! [winehq.org]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Bravo! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
But it is still beta and untill it is released they still have a lot of time to fill in at least 0.3GB of useless stuff, most likely even more than that... ;-)
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.
Value (Score:3, Insightful)
Value is an entirely subjective concept and it will vary wildly from person to person. For many people, a computer with a free OS that can't run their favorite program has much less value than a computer with a paid OS that can. The same could be said for people who don't want to learn a new interface or people who don't actually want to take the time to instal their own OS.
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.
Seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
Installation time? *Mouse clicks* to install? Seriously? Those have got to be some of the most useless benchmarks I've ever seen.
Startup and shutdown time are marginally more useful benchmarks, but still not really very important unless you're talking about embedded devices, which the desktop version of Windows 7 (obviously) isn't even designed for.
The file copy benchmarks really didn't find a clear winner either, and that was the only arguably significant benchmark. Or are there really desktop users that spend all day copying files between hard drives and USB drives?
I really didn't care all that much about the outcome. I don't have an emotional investment in Windows or Ubuntu, but this was nothing but a pissing contest from someone who wanted to make some poorly constructed graphs showing that their favorite OS beat another OS (and it didn't even do that! Windows won on a few of the tests!)
--Jeremy
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The more complex the install, the more likely something is to not work correctly.
I disagree. I have been doing a bunch of RedHat and SuSE (SLES) installs. A lot of mouse clicks (or keyboard entries, in my case). They don't tend to work incorrectly though.
Complexity doesn't necessarily mean likely to fail. Simplicity often means no customizing, complexity often means more user interaction/customizing. Yeah, more user interaction may make it more apt to working incorrectly, since users make mistakes. But hey, if you want, I'll give you an OS that doesn't let you do anything and neve
Dubious indeed (Score:3, Informative)
Boot up time was also measured from the moment the machine was turned on, and the timer was stopped as soon as the desktop was reached.
Anyone who has ever used WinXP knows that you can't really do anything until all the services and task bar things have loaded. You still have several seconds (20-30 on my machine) once the desktop appears before you can actually do anything.
I recently spent 6+ hours just installing Ubuntu (Score:3, Informative)
Then it would be a repeat of all the old steps as I restarted the install sequences, taking about 30-40 minutes each time. Several times there was a new bizarre problem at the partition stage, which caused me to restart several times. After installing I had no large resolutions even though I have a major brand graphics card. A Google search and a download later, that problem was solved but no dual monitor support yet. A google search revealed it was a pain in the ass and I don't have the heart for it yet.
I've installed various distros bunches of times but never had anything as slow as Ubuntu. Obviously the install program is buggy or I have some hardware conflict, but I've installed windows (A LOT) and never had that problem
Now that I've got Ubuntu up and running I should say that I'm very impressed and its running nicely, though it is still slower than windows at graphics intensive operations.
Re:I recently spent 6+ hours just installing Ubunt (Score:3, Insightful)
And about a month ago, I setup a dual-boot Ubuntu/Windows machine. Ubuntu was done in about 30-40 minutes. Windows on the other hand, I spent most of a day to install the OS, track down the necessary drivers, install office suites, anti-virus, etc..
This is why anecdotes are useless, for every anecdote that shows one thing you can find one that shows the opposi
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Has to be said... (Score:4, Insightful)
People use applications, not operating systems.
It doesn't matter how fast it is if it doesn't run the software that people want. That's the biggest thing that holds up Linux on the desktop.
If Linux for the desktop is ever going to really be a viable option, someone needs to come out with a distro with the goal of, "absolutely, positively, 100% Windows Compatible" via Wine or similar technologies.
That distro would conquer the world.
(Cue people giving the argument, "but Microsoft will just change Windows". Yes, they might, but that doesn't affect the installed base of applications, nor does it affect the myriad third party applications, and if there was a viable target, third party companies would ensure compatability.)
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.
FreeBSD (Score:3, Informative)
Should have been fair and included FreeBSD in the comparison.
( in my personal experience, its noticeably faster then any Linux distro on the same hardware, )
Value (Score:4, Insightful)
The average GNU/Linux user is now getting better absolute performance from their computer as well as better value than the average Windows user.
Depends on what you value. I value not having to hunt down and configure obscure software to sync my phone. I value the ability to use third party software when it's released, not when they get around to making a Linux port. I value having drivers that are updated regularly, and a wide variety of quality software options, with actual support, and a user community that doesn't tell me I'm stupid because I couldn't get figure out how to connect to my WiFi network (the solution for which depends on what minor version of the windows manager I'm using, which affects which connection manager is installed by default, etc., etc.)
I also appreciate a uniform interface and application model, which Windows provides. It neither looks nor performs like a hodgepodge mix of new and ancient components, regardless of what may be present under the hood. I appreciate a clipboard which performs as expected. I've also had, by far, more success installing Windows on a wider array of hardware than Linux, including Ubuntu. Oh, the LiveCD won't work for that hardward. Oh, there's no wireless driver for that NIC, but you can wrap this other driver and then do this, and it will work most of the time, except when it doesn't.
A value to me is not saving 7 minutes on the install, or clicking 12 fewer times, (in what should be a one-shot deal anyway), or an OS footprint that saves me 0.01% of my available storage space. Value to me is reliability, choice and quality of software, and minimal fuss with configuring devices and hardware. With XP, Windows reached a level of maturity/stability that I now expect of any OS residing on my desktop (or laptop). That I have to actually pay for the OS and keep Avast resident is an acceptable tradeoff for those things.
So what (Score:4, Insightful)
Boot up and Shutdown times are equally irrelevant. I shut the PCs down on weekends. Am I going to notice or care that it takes a few more seconds for a machine to boot up or shut down. Also, these times are highly variable. Even on the same machine I suspect the variation is way outside the differences between the OS. 30 years ago we cared a little bit about boot up times. But then, we were reading from disk or tape, so these times were significant, and we might shut down a machine several times a day. When Apple made the Mac a super fast boot up machine, it was to solve a problem. Now it is just to win a juvenile contest. if there is not an order of magnitude difference, it does not really matter.
File copy time can be an issue, but not for everyone. I am going to make what may be a controversial statement. When I copy a multi Gigabyte set of files, and it takes a half an hour, that does not bother me. Neither do I care that for a large movie one OS might take a 30 seconds, while the next might take two minutes. What annoys me are those little daily copies of a small file that take a minute or so. Clearly there is some overhead. Sure, know how long to copy 1000 files is cool, but when does that happen.
What we don't have is how long it takes to set up a printer, something that I find I do way too often. Or how long it take to print to a printer, which has some OS dependence. Or how long it takes a save a file in MS Office versus OO.org. Or how long it takes to setup email. Or how long it takes to load a web browser. You know, the things that people do every day and tends to eat away at a persons limited time.
"twitter writes..." (Score:3, Interesting)
Every time those words appear on the Front-Page of Slashdot, Bill Gates kills another kitten.
But seriously, are we expecting an objective and balanced news article from twitter on Microsoft? There's "provocative" reporting, then there's the "Fox News" of reporting. This article sinks below both.
this is a pretty inane set of benchmarks (Score:4, Insightful)
Install time? Clicks per install? Installed footprint? Does anybody care about those?
The file copy tests were marginally useful, but not exactly controlled. But it certainly looks like the Linux USB drivers and related I/O code is better than what exists in Windows.
Then again, on what is possibly the most useful and meaningful benchmark, Windows wins. The Richards thing is not disk I/O bound, so we're talking about memory allocation/deallocation and probably some underlying C library calls. Since we're on identical hardware, the difference is either due to the Windows memory manager, faster library routines, or a more optimized version of the python interpreter. (Which wouldn't really be a win for Windows per se.)
I'd like to see something like...oh...a standard database benchmark (e.g. TPC) run on a couple different databases (Postgres and Oracle would be fine) installed under both Ubuntu and under Windows 7 on identical hardware. This would, of course, be influenced by how well optimized these database implementations are on each operating system, but there's little we can do about that. The test would essentially be Windows+Oracle vs. Ubuntu+Oracle, or Windows+Postgres vs. Ubuntu+Postgres.
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]
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; ...).
Re:Heh. (Score:4, Insightful)
You get Ubuntu on CD or DVD, and one or more office packages is included on either.
With even the CD, you can get full OpenOffice and development tools, so there's at least that in Ubuntu's favour. Windows is a gigantic installation which gives you a notepad, some casual games and a file manager, more or less.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
A lot of stuff is included in Windows. I don't know how much of it is OS and how much of it is extra software.
That's what the anti-trust tribunal said.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Try using them. I've searched, too. I prefer using a [fairly simple] GUI when I do music notation, not command line style things. [lilypond.org]
I haven't tried NoteEdit or Brahms. I've tried some GUI based ones though, and usually they're kinda clunky, not terribly well designed, and not easy to get used to. Similar, actually, to the response I got when I used Finale. IMO, Sibelius did a very good job with the UI and how the notation inputs worked.
Re:Time for me to upgrade (Score:5, Funny)
There, fixed that for you.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I think the Jamaican version is called "Mondriva", mon.
Re:And? (Score:4, Informative)
The average GNU/Linux user is now getting better absolute performance from their computer as well as better value than the average Windows user.
Okay, but this is almost meaningless. Tell me instead, how much value would the average Windows user get from GNU/Linux?
It really can do the basics, is FREE and isn't prone to viral infestation.
It's suitable for a lot of people, they just need to
get over their Microsoft vendorlock fixation.
Incidentally, Macs have the same exact benefits minus the FREE part.
Re:Great (Score:4, Informative)
> 2- Video editing. Super simple video editing.
Not sure what you count as super simple, but have you tried http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/ [fixounet.free.fr] ?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I do. I haven't bought a whole computer since 1987 and paid for and installed several versions of DOS and Windows. Quite frankly, Windows is a complete and utter pain in the ass to install. It takes hours (XP was the last one I bought so YMMV with later releases) and you have to babysit the whole process; you never know when something will pop up and ask for something.
Mandriva takes maybe half an hour, asks everything up front at the start of the process and you only have to come back to change CDs. For sni
Re:GUI Efficiency? (Score:5, Informative)
Its all well and good that Ubuntu can install itself faster, but it doesn't matter, because it is by definition an infrequent workload. This is theoretically true for Ubuntu to. After all, wasn't the infinite in place upgradability something that has long been touted as a strength of Debian and co. Thats even more important with Ubuntu, because I sure as hell don't want to reinstall and OS every 6 months.
Same goes for startup and shutdown. Windows Vista was explicitly designed with the idea that in general, the OS is going to be suspended/hibernated, not rebooted. I'd be much more interested in seeing benchmarks of a comparison between the speed with which Windows and Ubuntu are able to hibernate/unhibernate. I've always been curious about this, as subjectively, an older Ubuntu installation hibernation seemed faster than in Windows. Alas, I guess in order to give us that benchmark, the reviewers would have to actually find hardware Linux could suspend on. How does one plot a hard lock on resume anyway, time for the system to reboot and come back up?
The other thing they failed to mention on the I/O benchmarking side is whether or not the drives were set to write cache mode or not in Windows. AFAIK the default for removable media to disable write caching in Windows, but to enable in Linux.
Oh, and why the !@#$ are they benchmarking compute intensive tasks in Python? Is it to exacerbate differences, because the chosen runtime is so absurdly slow? But, in reality, there is no reason for compute intensive tasks to vary on the same hardware. This test is highly dependent on the system services running and the python version. I would consider this more of a benchmark of python instead of Windows/Ubuntu.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Ah... someone else who couldn't understand Linux. Please, sir, there's no need to bitter about it. *nix-based operating systems ARE user friendly, they're just picky about who their friends are.