Is Ubuntu Getting Slower?

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix has a new article where they provide Ubuntu 7.04, 7.10, 8.04, and 8.10 benchmarks and had ran many tests. In that article, when using an Intel notebook they witness major slowdowns in different areas and ask the question, Is Ubuntu getting slower? From the article: 'A number of significant kernel changes had went on between these Ubuntu Linux releases including the Completely Fair Scheduler, the SLUB allocator, tickless kernel support, etc. We had also repeated many of these tests to confirm we were not experiencing a performance fluke or other issue (even though the Phoronix Test Suite carries out each test in a completely automated and repeatable fashion) but nothing had changed. Ubuntu 7.04 was certainly the Feisty Fawn for performance, but based upon these results perhaps it would be better to call Ubuntu 7.10 the Gooey Gibbon, 8.04 the Hungover Heron, and 8.10 the Idling Ibex.'"

Comments

Re:Security Patching?

[Atzanteol]

No, it does not matter. The point of their test was not to determine cause. There could be thousands of various causes.

What they showed is that it is getting slower. Period. Their research appears to be correct and accurate. If it's purely caused by bounds checking in the kernel then so be it. But that's for somebody else to show. But until it is proven this is only a hopeful assumption by people who can't stand hearing bad things about their pet operating system.

Re:Flexibility and freedom are its raison d'Ã

[Yfrwlf]

I can install programs from the huge apt-get application universe

Huge, but still fragmented and not huge enough, your repo should be all of Sourceforge and everything else. You shouldn't have to live in the walled garden of your distro's repository. In Windows and OS X, packages are always installable for the most part. After Alien is integrated into the existing common package managers; or the managers are made compatible with RPMs, DEBs, and others; or the formats are upgraded so they can be more easily adopted by the existing managers; or at least one new format is created that is easy for the managers to adopt, this will continue to be a problem for Linux users, the ones who don't want to spend all day looking for dependencies and compiling software just to run a program. Compatibility with the existing Linux software ecosystem, while being mandatory, doesn't mean much to normal computer users when they can't click to install software from some developer's website because the developer gave up trying to support the thousands of distros who thought they were doing everyone a favor by requiring different packages for every version they put out.

Then, users will finally be able to update their system directly from the developers who put out those security updates instead of waiting for their distro to do it for them, because the devs will finally be able to support them directly because they're on GNU/Linux, and everyone will be much more free. The distro companies may not like that freedom very much, but tough for them, it's open source software so they will have to deal instead of trying to profit off that aspect of distro lock-in.