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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
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.