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Ubuntu 8.10 Outperforms Windows Vista

Posted by timothy on from the windows-probably-runs-more-windows-apps dept.

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.)

21 of 689 comments (clear)

  1. Faster than Vista! by baffled · · Score: 5, Funny

    What an accomplishment!

    1. Re:Faster than Vista! by dintech · · Score: 5, Funny

      In other news, bi-pedal world championship winning Thai kick-boxer out-performs one legged man in ass-kicking benchmarks.

    2. Re:Faster than Vista! by electrictroy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      HAHAHAHAHAHA! Well, I would be far more-impressed if I saw the headline "Ubuntu outperforms XP". Now that would be truly something.

      --
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    3. Re:Faster than Vista! by clang_jangle · · Score: 5, Informative

      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...

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    4. Re:Faster than Vista! by dsginter · · Score: 5, Interesting

      This is just more sensationalism.

      I run Ubuntu 8.10 and yet I am somehow able to assess the situation pragmatically. As it sits, if I were to install Windows on my Ubuntu box, then I would probably make up the cost (aka "Micro$oft tax) with the annual power savings - Ubuntu *still* doesn't suspend-to-ram on my system (Biostar nforce 6150 motherboard with an Athlon X2 processor).

      And while I try to shut the system down, when possible, I always find myself walking away for "just a moment" only to find myself not returning until the next day (or more). When Ubuntu can put up the functionality of Windows (including power management), then it becomes a proper comparison. Until then, it pains me to defend Microsoft...

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    5. Re:Faster than Vista! by Lumpy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Ubuntu after 6 months of use beats XP used for 6 months.

      That's easy. Windows get's clogged up with so much crap that in 6 months it's dead in the water. Hell simply installing webroot or another low grade Virus/spy service on XP and it's dog slow city. Most users also install every single crapware they can get their hands on, weatherbug, etc....

      Thankfully there is none of that crap for Ubuntu/Linux..... yet.

      --
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    6. Re:Faster than Vista! by BrokenHalo · · Score: 5, Funny

      Not sure why we have the non-story about it outperforming Vista though...

      My thought exactly. Well, almost. My first thought was that a snail towing a 65-ton truck might outperform Vista, but I'm very polite. ;-)

    7. Re:Faster than Vista! by msuarezalvarez · · Score: 5, Insightful

      When you shopped for the computer did you take as a parameter the fact that the manufactured was openenough to provide details on how to do suspend to ram to anyone apart from MS?

    8. Re:Faster than Vista! by _xeno_ · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

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    9. Re:Faster than Vista! by Bert64 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      People often compare a clean windows install to a clean linux install, forgetting that a clean linux install is a fully usable system that's ready to go, while a clean windows install is largely useless until you install a significant number of third party apps.

      The hidden costs of windows...

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    10. Re:Faster than Vista! by thepotoo · · Score: 5, Interesting
      OK, it really depends on what you're doing. Also, a lot of the stuff I do (games) is not dependent on OS at all, but on the drivers.

      Vista is so slow as to be utterly useless - it came with my laptop, and after waiting 10 minutes for it to boot up, I reformatted and put Ubuntu on it.

      If you're doing processor-heavy work (for example, recoding a DVD), I've yet to find anything faster than an N-lited copy of XP. You can slim down Ubuntu, but I'm not Linux savvy enough to do this yet.

      And if you're playing games, the drivers in Ubuntu are so piss-poor that you'll see a 10-20% drop in framerates (this is an Nvidia 7900 GS, benchmarked in Unreal 2004 max settings, same hardware). ATI drivers don't even fucking work, so I can't even compare them to the XP ones on my laptop (if anyone knows how to get an X1250 working in Kubuntu with ATI's proprietary drivers, respond. Machine crashes on resume, games crash on screen resolution change or exit).

      So it breaks down like this, in my experience:

      Out of the box XP gets it ass handed to it by Ubuntu.

      Ubuntu gets beat (slightly) by an N-Lited XP.

      Everything beats Vista.

      Startup times vary based largely on RAID array type (hard drive speed if you're in a laptop) and processor speed, but always go (slowest to fastest): Vista, Ubuntu, XP, 2000, N-Lited XP. Installing more programs slows this down in XP, but not enough for Ubuntu to beat it.

      Also, (this is settings related) torrents seem to run about 25-50 kb/s faster on Ubuntu than they do on Windows. I suspect this is related to half-open TCP/IP connections, but I don't know.

      Feel free to correct me if your mileage varies.

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    11. Re:Faster than Vista! by binarylarry · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Which is nigh impossible to do on Windows because the entire software distribution system is centered around installing random unknown software off CD/DVD's or off the Internet.

      On most linux distros, all the software you'd need is checksummed, signed and can verified.

      On Microsoft Windows, you get a sweet hologram sticker... sometimes!

      --
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  2. YES! by Gerafix · · Score: 5, Funny

    2009 is the Year of Linux on the Desktop!

  3. XP is what to beat - not Vista by SpuriousLogic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Vista has already lost in the marketplace. More and more companies are skipping Vista to go from XP to Windows 7 because of all the performance and compatability issues with Vista. So comparing Ubuntu (or any OS actually) to Vista is fairly useless. If you want to make a case for business, do it against the OS's that business really uses - in this case Windows XP, or in the future, Windows 7.

    1. Re:XP is what to beat - not Vista by _Sprocket_ · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sure, if your only exposure to Vista is from slashdot. In the real world, most new computers are sold with Vista and people are perfectly happy with it.

      Yup - that's why they did The Mojave Experiment; to show people that they're happy. Because if you don't tell happy people that they are, in fact, happy they wouldn't know. And that means your happy people are unhappy. You don't want unhappy happy customers.

  4. It Doesn't Make a Difference in The Marketplace by mpapet · · Score: 5, Insightful

    First and most importantly, I genuinely despise "speeds and feeds" metrics. It does nothing but harm the distro world when it's reduced to dumb metrics like this.

    Second, money talks and specs walk. Right now, Microsoft is the failsafe meme for most PHB's. There are a million reasons for this. Over time this will change as Microsoft tightens the noose. Microsoft's customer is not the admin, but the buyer. The buyer is indifferent to almost all specs and usually overrules engineering with their "business case".
     

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  5. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Funny

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  6. Re:Laptops by domatic · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  7. Re:Laptops by PitaBred · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If it doesn't work by default on your laptop, someone did some specific development work on Windows to make it work. The machine almost certainly doesn't conform to ACPI specs. When a computer does, Linux works quite well. Thinkpads are usually very good about it.

    Really, the issue is that you have hardware that was designed for Windows. Just like you wouldn't expect Windows to work completely flawlessly on a Mac, why would you expect Linux to work completely flawlessly on a machine that was only ever designed to run Windows? Get a laptop that's designed to run according to open specs, and your problems will go away.

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  8. Re:I thought the proper metric was suckage.... by _ivy_ivy_ · · Score: 5, Funny

    As in Windows 7 will suck less than Vista...

    I'm sure that feature will be removed prior to the release date.

  9. Re:So what? Not news, though the reverse would be by MrNaz · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's also far more apt at connecting to the internet, what with the internet being a series of tubes and all.

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