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Ubuntu 8.10 Outperforms Windows Vista
Anonymous writes "By now a lot has been reported on the new features and improvements in Ubuntu 8.10; it also looks like the OS is outperforming Vista in early benchmarking (Geekbench, boot times, etc.) At what point does this start to make a difference in the market place?" (And though there are lot of ways to benchmark computers, Ubuntu 8.10 with Compiz Fusion is certainly prettier on my Eee than the Windows XP that it came with.)
Linux remains a huge fat mess.
Until someone seriously grabs hold of cleaning up the file system, making APIs that are worth a shit, and having some unified platform stability in things like package management, and decent developer links so people can make a product for Linux, not 999 flavours with all the nasty baggage, and when Linux starts being a user oriented OS, not something where you tell the user to go fix it themselves if they dont like your half broken borked software.
Seriously, its still badly lagging other desktop OSs and new Linux releases, while making headway, don't fix the underlying issues. And hint, if you can make the netbook market a hit, it should be a serious lesso in humility, because you should be beating the living shit out of MS here and are not. MSI have a Linux return rate that holds a lesson for anyone awake.
Did they fix Pulse audio, or is it still an embarrasing pile of dung?
At what point does this start to make a difference in the market place?
Never. Never ever. Not until there is one cohesive Linux distribution to rule them all. Even its measly 1% marketshare is spread across various distros that have no standardization across the board. People who actually want to get paid for their work don't look at Linux and say, "Damn, that's a platform I want to develop for!" Not until Linux community makes it less of a nightmare to develop and support their platform.
Similes are like metaphors
How did it do in categories like connecting with Exchange? Processing large spreadsheets with VBA macros? Running company-critical active-X components? Running Photoshop, indesign or illustrator? Being updated by group policies. Who really cares how fast a machine boots? With any modern OS (OS-X, Vista, XP, or Linux) machines are maybe rebooted once a month (or less).
It's really about applications-- and for companies about fitting in with a corporate network.
Speed is rarely an issue for what most people use their computers for.
"ATI drivers don't even fucking work"
Can we please stop fucking around with this myth? I have gone through 5 ATI boards (latest greatest ftw.) never had problems. You are more than likely running some old crap, and yes they sucked at drivers back then, but this is now and they just work [tm]*
*under ubuntu.