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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.)
People who use actually have used Ubuntu have long been aware that it outperforms XP. Not sure why we have the non-story about it outperforming Vista though...
Caveat Utilitor
Wake up, 8.04 does all those out of the box just fine on my laptop.
Oh, well I guess as long as it works on your laptop, everyone should be happy. Me? I have to jump through hoops just to get to "passable", much less "working".
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
We are talking about Ubuntu.
No need for command line , scripts or anything else.
Just install , and if you need something , click on add/remove programs.
It's easier than Windows , where you have to look on different websites to get what you need.
In fact that is the accomplishment , that a very user friendly , though somewhat bulky distro like Ubuntu is outperforming Vista.
Slipping shoelaces ?
Just to chime in with the other people here, I have two systems on my desk at work. One is a two year old Dell laptop with an Intel Core Due processor with 2GB of RAM. It runs XP. The other is a four year old Dell desktop with a Pentium 4 and 1GB of RAM. It runs Ubuntu 8.10.
Guess which one is much, much faster?
The Ubuntu 8.10 desktop, of course.
Part of it is due to all the corporate crap-ware that gets installed on the machine. There's the virus scanner, the software firewall, and the automatic patch system. (And Adobe's automatic patch system, and Apple's automatic patch system, and Google's automatic patch system, and Sun's automatic patch system...)
But a greater part is that Ubuntu is just plain faster. It uses less RAM, it hits the disk less, and it just runs faster.
My general routine at the start of a day is to start the XP laptop booting, boot up the Ubuntu desktop, and then play around with the Ubuntu desktop while I wait for Windows to finally get to the point where it can slowly get Outlook up and going.
Out of curiosity, I ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark under Firefox 3.0.3 on both systems. The Ubuntu system finished with a total of 4.4 seconds to run all tests. The XP machine finished in 11.4 seconds. The 95% confidence intervals for the XP machine seem to suggest that performance changed wildly on some test runs - presumably caused by random background activity.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I'm not sure why power management functions are so hard to get right.
They touch every subsytem and driver and have to preserve the running state of hardware, applications, and have to be able to deal with situations like the network being disconnected.
I'm going to get boo'd out of the /. community for this, but here it goes.
For people like me, it doesn't matter whether which OS is the fastest (If this was true, Linux would of won the desktop a long time ago). It matters what applications it can run. I mean, I can't really play Crysis or CoD4 with wine...and I need programs like Itunes and winRAR daily that don't work on Linux even with windows program loaders.
I'm just giving my insight :)
Trolls and Linux fan-boys, you may now post.
"Mama always said life was like a box a chocolates, never know what you're gonna get" - Forest Gump
Windows is still the predominant OS, and it will remain that way until the popular games...
have you been inside a bar in the last ten years? Those MegaTouch game machines you put the dollar in that sit on the bar itself use Linux as their OS. I don't know of a single bar that doesn't have one, they're incredibly popular. People shove dollars in them right and left.
& applications that real people/businesses use are available for Ubuntu.
Open Office reads and writes Microsoft Office files. The real reason Open Source hasn't taken off is corporate FUD. The corporate media pound into everyone's heads that "free == worthless", which is utter nonsense (how much did you pay for the air you're breathing? yesterday's sunset? A walk through the woods? A smile?)
People think anything free must be crap, and the media (owned by money-worshipers) propagate this ignorant paradigm.
Free Martian Whores!
I have never had a fully usable Ubuntu install yet. Something is always broken. The standard problem is the wireless utilities suck. Even after messing around with custom drivers like Madwifi etc Ubuntu still wont connect to WPA2. Vista seems to work for me just fine.
My experience is the exactly the opposite. Never had a windows box to join my wireless network without significant fiddling. Of course, I'm careful to make sure any wireless card I get with Linus comes with an Atheros chip.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Wine
Is
Not an
Emulator!
It is *quite* possible, and it wouldn't be the first report of better performance in WINE than in Windows.
Caveat Utilitor
+1 Informative for nLite mention. You can slim vanilla Windows XP down to around 200 MB or so with it by removing unused and non-essential services, features, and bloat. Even 150 MB or so if you want to be truly compact with it. It's maybe 50 to 100 MB more if you include service packs and .NET versions. This equates to faster boot times, better responsiveness, and less memory usage.
It's great to run off USB flash drives also.
No existe.
What matters is that I go to Dixons (UK electronics store), approach a shelf with subnotebooks and see a sign "Linux notebooks will not work with mobile Internet".
Go figure.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)