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Ubuntu 8.10 vs. Mac OS X 10.5.5 Benchmarks
An anonymous reader writes "As a sequel to their Is Ubuntu Getting Slower? Phoronix now has out an article that compares the performance of Ubuntu 8.10 to Apple's Mac OS X 10.5.5. They tested both the x86 and x86_64 spins of Ubuntu and threw at both operating systems a number of graphics, disk, computational, and Java benchmarks, among others. With the Mac Mini used in some of the comparisons, 'Leopard' was faster, while in others it was a tight battle."
Surely we should be united against the common enemy.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
It's a lengthy read, and there isn't much in there to say that Ubuntu has any real work to do. Seems like they were comparing two Ferrari race cars and commenting on the differences in interiors... to use a car analogy.
I've just upgraded 8 systems to 8.10 and am quite happy. I was concerned over real world issues about the upgrade from early reports. The old IBM T22 with 256MB RAM was my test case. Guess what? The upgrade went as fast as my Wireless G card would allow it, after a reboot, and then an update last night, it is working a bit better than with 8.04 from a layman's point of view. Yes, it can drag now and then, but is resource limited severely. After the upgrade I did not have to tweak anything, and any problems I was having prior are now fixed. I appear to have fscked up a setting on the wireless networking, but now it's all good. As far as I am concerned, with two older laptops upgraded, and 3 older desktops upgraded, all with ZERO defects, Ubuntu continues to impress me. I will continue to give out CDs free to anyone that wants to improve their computing life.
Now, if you just have to have the 'perfect' gaming machine... go ahead and worry about little things. As for the rest of the world, 8.10 is rocking awesomeness.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Nothing new, move along. Want a sleek and fast linux ? Slackware's the answer.
OS X is WAY prettier but gets in the way too much.
Ubuntu is more efficient but the icon style sucks.
Both camps are headed towards half-assed full automation a la MS, they just have better OSes with which do it.
Drooling fanbois of both camps can bite me.
Also worth mentioning are the collection of posts from the last thread that convincingly argued various problems with the Phoronix Benchmarks.
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Speed tests are good, let's make sure we're doing them right
... for those that can't be bothered to read this lengthy yet information sparse piece.
1. MacOS X is faster in graphics intensive benchmarks.
2. The other benchmarks are fairly even with Ubuntu coming out on top more often than OS X (one notable exception is SQLite).
This is hardly anything new. OS X has a well optimised graphics system with good drivers for the intel chips (which up until now was used in both Macbooks and Mac Minis).
Also SQLite is AFAIK integral to many features of OS X, and for this reason it makes sense for Apple to have optimised for it.
Overall the benchmarks suggests that Linux (not just Ubuntu) needs some work on the graphics system and the Intel drivers. What a shock.
For things like compilations, there's a bunch of file opens, caching the compiler and loader, gobs of Mallocs, and so forth that probably intersect the OS. Then there's the driver and video layer tests that look at frames per second. Leopard had 2 to 4 times faster frames per second. then there's the supporting distro services. Tests of My SQL were 4 times faster on the mac. And then there's things like the optimzation of VMs like JAVA where again Leopard excels. THese are clearly optimization problem and can be improved. the purpose of comparing it against a mac is not simply to say "oh yeah mac is faster than unbuntu", but rather to give a bench that shows how much room for optimization ubuntu has. Conclusion is that in almost every aspect Ubuntu is severely unotimized. Since older Linux seemed to be more optimized it suggests that feature bloat is probably either screwing up the design of linux or no one is paying attention to optimizing those features.
What's up with the SQLite inserts? Is EXT3 really that bad? I would be interested in seeing PostgreSQL benchmarks.
Zoid.com
Duh , that should have read 11, not 10.3.
Ubunu isn't getting slower, Mac OSX is getting faster.
Do any of you recall Mac OSX 10.0?
The day I installed Apple's first "modern" OS, I thought X marked the spot of Apple's demise.
Apple has done an admirable job bringing MacOS into the 21st century, and their future looks promising.
Did anyone expect that Apples OS was going to be beaten on Apple hardware by a generic Linux distribution?
Which is faster on my Gateway box?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Next year, we will be seeing how much the extreme emphasis Apple is placing on performance will affect comparisons like these. Apple has figured out that since they can no longer hope to use differences in the CPU to differentiate themselves with generic Windows boxen, they will be using Microsoft's extreme backwards compatibility needs against them when it comes to fully using all the cores--whether they be in a CPU or a GPU--in a computer, and making full use of the 64-bit instruction set. GPGPU programming can give a huge performance boost to certain algorithms and the cleaner, more register rich, 64-bit instruction set is intrinsically faster in addition to allowing larger data sets.
That's why they stopped selling non 64-bit capable computers a couple years ago, and why the new MacBooks have much improved integrated graphics. That's why they are moving their developers to include 64-bit compiles as part of newly shipped universal binaries. Next year is when all this latent potential gets switched on.
Linux has the opportunity to do the same; perhaps more opportunity as it has less of a legacy binary issue, although Linux has to deal with a multitude of graphics chips, Apple only has to optimize for a handful.
The worst Ubuntu performance in the tests was on the OpenGL benchmarks. There's a lot of improving coming on the Intel drivers (GEM, UXA, etc.), but it's sad to notice that it's taking so long for the performance on Linux being on pair with Windows and Mac OS X systems (in the same hardware). I have a GM965 (Intel X3100 card), which support is even less mature than the Mac Mini's integrated card. Based on my experience, I'd not recommend buying those laptops with this IGP to anyone interested in 3D, even for basic stuff like Google Earth or Celestia - unless if you don't mind waiting some more months (or years) to the drivers improve.
Ubuntu has become the defacto Linux distribution for the common computer user.
It came from nothing to something in a very short period of time.
Kind of like Obama.
I hope Obama performs as well as ubuntu.
Distros are like underwear - everyone has their favorite kind, some have none at all, but odds are you'll dislike someone else's brand because you are used to your own.
What are the meaningful differences between a Mac and a normal PC that would change performance??? Will a Core2 run faster in a differently shaped box?
I've read that when things go wrong its a pig to sort out.
See any other linux distribution. I've run linux since Redhat 4.1 in 1997 and I've slutted around with slackware(which is my fav for simplicity), debian, Suse, Caldera, and many others.
I've never run into a distro that ISN'T a pig when something goes wrong except SLACKWARE. And slackware is only simple since it offers almost no package management and no autoconfiguration.
The easier it is the use, the bigger nightmare it seems to be when it breaks. See windows registry for another great analogy.
The fact that you can't even spell the name properly tells me that you don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about, aside from the fact that you've seen this "Ubunt-thing" mentioned on Slashdot. At least do some basic research on your own before asking other people to help you out: http://www.ubuntu.com/
Either that or you're trolling. Seriously, "SuSE" is a "grown-up name" and "Ubuntu" isn't? And it "uses nice and simple inittab instead of yet another over complicated replacement called upstart"? I'm laughing, but it's not because you're funny.
They used Mac OS X's 1.5 version of Java, while OS 10.5.5 does include Java 1.6 (64-bit only). I wonder how things would have changed had they selected this version as the default for Mac OS.
- Mg
Grown up name? How is Suse (which brings to mind a certain doctoral author of children's books) any more grown up than Ubuntu (a foreign language word representing the philosophy behind the distribution and FOSS as a whole)?
Well .... you _were_ pretty fast to stop reading the article ;)
But apart from that, what's wrong with 7zip?
BULLSHIT BULLSHIT BULLSHIT
You can say "bullshit" on Slashdot. Or any other curse word you want. There's no filter here. If you don't want to use that word, then use a different one; you only make yourself look stupid when you censor yourself like that.
Also, 7-zip is a perfectly good compression algorithm.
my reasons for ubuntu (not trying to sell it to anyone...)
deb based, debian derivative
huge community with tons of use-cases that help troubleshoot almost anything
huge software repo
nice release cycle and upgrade system
different desktops available without too much hassle
and i had a terrible experience in my n00by years with rpm systems, both in fedora and suse flavours (although that was mainly an ati card being a bitch).
my only gripe is that although they offer a kde version, development is pretty much gtk-centric, and i hate gtk and gnome with its habit of treating the luser as a complete moron. i hear that opensuse is kde based, but i already put my chips on canonicals side, so i'm pretty happy with *buntu.
entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
Sadly, I have to agree with this. I'm still running XP on my work laptop and workstation at home. Why? Every damn time I install ubuntu, there is ONE vital thing that just doesn't work for whatever reason. Be it buggy nvidia drivers for my card, not having a certain package I'm using at the moment, any number of show stoppers... Sorry Ubuntu, you haven't won the desktop yet. Side note: I have more than a dozen Debian/Ubuntu/FreeBSD servers at work. And a ubuntu box that controls video playback on Channel 7 of our cable TV feed. =)
Can all fish swim?
I was thinking more of the childish release names - Intrepid Ibex , Hardy Heron etc. Who are they aimed at , 8 year olds?
Mac OS X doesn't have to accommodate variances in the hardware it is running on in the same way that Linux or Windows has to do. Therefore, it can exploit the hardware better. It's the same principle that applied to game developers targeting the XBox rather than a standard PC. Standard PCs might be more powerful, but the XBox is a non-moving target, so you don't need to write to the lowest common denominator, and can exploit the particular strengths of the hardware better. So, it's unreasonable to expect an OS that is written to work on multiple platforms to compete in this fashion.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Bullshit because ?
7-zip offers better ratios for the CPU endowed ?
"'ve never run into a distro that ISN'T a pig when something goes wrong except SLACKWARE. And slackware is only simple since it offers almost no package management and no autoconfiguration"
I'd agree with you, though of course with Slackware a lot of stuff never goes wrong because its not there to start with! Even USB stick automount isn't enabled by default in 12.1
Just a few things off the top of my head, but the OS and filesystem. Probably why the article is about comparing Ubuntu with OS X and not a whitebox machine with no OS to a Mac with no OS.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Joe Camel says childish marketing works.
Nice flame, FYI Ubuntu is debian with more up-to-date packages...
Hell Debian proper is named after characters in Toy Story
Or do you all feel that the Federation (Windows systems) and Klingons (Nix systems) should join forces and fight the Borg (Apple systems). Then we can all take on Species 8472 (Google).
Those are code names. Like Longhorn was for Windows Vista. Officially it's just Ubuntu 8.10, Ubuntu 8.04 etc.
I tried to like Suse and opensuse post Novell, but the mono-based auto-update system kept hanging, and I had to write a cron job to force kill the processes and restart the auto-updates. Not to mention that SLED didn't ever get mozilla thunderbird packages because they thought evolution should be good enough for anyone. I switched to a more grown up distro after a year of trying to get Suse to work as Novell intended.
I have not noticed performance problems from Ubuntu. Sometimes I think these small differences are pretty much unnoticeable to the common user. I would say that while Linux always seems fast and snappy to me, its Windows which has a truly noticeable sluggish feel.
I certainly do not think it is a good trade off in an OS to sacrifice features for an increase in speed which really is not noticeable. In most cases this is not necessary as many parts of a system can be made optional. The schedular and some core kernel systems effect the speed of the whole system, but most other components are optional, like X, like drivers, like Gnome, and so on.
Which also is the nice thing about X: the designers of X decided not to try to build in a bunch of heavy user interface junk into the X server, ironically which many people criticise. Excluding memory leaks in some drivers not related to X itself, the X protocol and server system is actually very efficient by todays standards and does not use much memory. Most memory usage is in caching and in bad drivers full of crappy code. Therefore you can run our own window manager without carrying a bunch of stuff you wont use. But the eye candy is there if you want it. People should choose how many features and memory or how little they wish to use.
Since they only tested on a Mac Mini, what the results actually suggest is that an operating system distribution that's been finely tuned for a very small set of hardware beats a generic distribution that's currently running on thousands of different hardware configurations. If they actually wanted to draw some generic conclusions about Ubuntu versus Mac OS X, then they should've installed both on as many different hardware platforms as possible, and then run their benchmarks and aggregated the results.
So what might be happening is that Ubuntu Linux isn't as optimised to run on a Mac Mini as OS X - imagine the surprise.
Another problem with the Phronix methodology is that they've made no effort to identify exactly why they're seeing differences. For example, see page 8 of the results. The "Bork file encrypter" should either be limited by CPU and memory bandwidth for the actual encryption, or by the speed of the hard disk if it's reading files, encrypting, and writing them back. Given that the limiting factors here are hardware, there's no way that MacOS X should be 27% faster than Linux on this benchmark. Or on the same page, the Java Scimark v2.0 benchmark shows OSX being 370% faster than Ubuntu x86. Given that the performance of Java code is dominated by the JVM performance, this is indicating a massive regression between java 1.5 (OSX) and 1.6 (Ubuntu). Has Sun really allowed this to happen? Or is the Phronix testing methodology broken? My money's on the latter.
Except OSX doesn't do a very good job at it. Please snow leopard, FIX IT!
Ubuntu (a foreign language word representing the philosophy behind the distribution and FOSS as a whole)?
and i always tought it meant "can't install debian properly".
living and learning...
What ? Me, worry ?
Since OS X doesn't have an option to turn off compositing, shouldn't it be comparing Ubuntu with Compiz enabled?
I noticed recently that Java 1.6 for OS X is now available on Intel 64 bit.
http://developer.apple.com/java/
I'm not waiting for it to run on my PPC macs...
nice troll, im sure others have shot down most of your bull, but ill point out that upstart is backwards compatible with sysv, so you can just use a nice simple inittab if you don't want to take advantage of the added features (not that there are many yet)
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
No, Ubuntu is Debian sid with less up-to-date packages.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
My personal opinion on 7zip is that it's kind of like ace, another compression scheme that's popular with a handful of loudmouthed advocates. I have yet to encounter any *nix software that came in a .7z file, everyone is still using gzip or bzip2 (and even bzip2 is fairly "new") when distributing things in the *nix world since gunzip and bunzip2 are installed by default pretty much everywhere (and if they're not installed by default then I'd be willing to bet money on 90% of machines running an OS that doesn't include gunzip or bunzip2 having at least one of these installed in /usr/local or /opt).
Also, the small gains from using 7zip just isn't worth "converting", gzip and bzip2 are working perfectly fine. Any "normal" user (that is, someone who isn't working with petabytes of archived data and such) could probably gain a lot more by using more efficient formats for the original files (excluding things like source code and raw data, the first is generally not using enough space to justify the saved space from using 7zip and the second is, from what I've seen, rarely compressed anyway since if you're processing huge amounts of raw data chances are you'd rather not waste CPU time decompressing your data).
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I'm sure I saw a .lzma compressed package in Gentoo's portage tree a few months back.
When cars first came out, they were very slow. Today my four door econ car can do 0 to 60 in about 9 seconds and can go about 3 times as fast as my states law allows on most roads.
Computers are there too. My Mac is a core 2 duo with an 8600M GT DDR3. I can dual boot it into OS X or XP. It sits at 0% resource usage 99% of the time.
It's not about how fast you are, it's about what you get done.
With my Mac OS X side I can get a lot more done than my Windows boot side. XP requires me to think more about C:\ http:/// and internal workings of the computer. The OS X side lets me forget about that and just do my work. On XP I know my pictures are in c:\documents and settings\username\..... I have no idea on the Mac. They are in iPhoto for all I care.
If I want to put an image from a web page into a document or into an MP3, I just click on the image (for example, on Google images) and drag it onto the document or MP3 I want it added to. Do that in XP and I get the URL, not the image. So in XP I have to right click to save the image to My Documents, then figure out which of Microsofts Insert options to use to insert a saved JPG. Insert picture? Clip art? Smart Art? If I want to move it around do I need to insert it into a table so it will go where I want it?
I struggle to make XP do what I want. OS X, it just works.
Seriously, "SuSE" is a "grown-up name" and "Ubuntu" isn't? And it "uses nice and simple inittab instead of yet another over complicated replacement called upstart"? I'm laughing, but it's not because you're funny.
/etc/inittab. Anyone whose only interaction with the system configuration is through a GUI doesn't need to know what the file is called. So why change it? This isn't a show-stopper by any stretch of the imagination, but it is an irritation for an experienced *nix user unfamiliar with Ubuntu's idiosyncrasies.
I agree that the parent poster is probably a jerk, but when I first played with Ubuntu, I did find that particular choice asinine. Anyone who knows their way around Linux in general knows to look for
Actually, the difference is that OSX doesn't enforce fsync actually finishing the write to disk. A tradeoff of reliability for performance. On top of that, SQLite is typically compiled to aggressively fsync on most distributions.
Combine that with ext3 forcing fsync to flush all pending writes before returning, and things get really ugly.
Firefox 3 has already discovered this with their use of SQLite for history handling. See complaints about firefox causing disks to constantly spin up, and 30 second system stalls...
Ubuntu loses on any disk intensive operation, especially when it is required to perform synchronisation (with sqlite, for example).
That's not surprising at all, given how the default ext3 Ubuntu partition is set up.
Everyone's running Ubuntu or Vista. They're both too slow to get first post.
Hmm...Apple isn't 'fixing' anything. Snow Leopard is supposed to add a lot of new features under the hood. Now, only time will tell if those features work as advertised.
Audio and video decoding? Is there any decent software available for Linux that does this? What about Photoshop for Ubuntu? All Ubuntu can do is run a server, a web browser, play choppy media with illegal codecs, sport some of the worst font rendering in existence, and consistently fail to recognize my USB 2.0 devices. At least with OS X, I can actually DO something.
Hmmm. Some of your other criticisms might (with some arguments to the contrary) have some foundation, but I am now convinced that font rendering in Linux is at least equal in quality to that on OS X or Windows, if not better. And I strongly suspect that if your USB devices are not being recognised, there is most probably a hardware issue. (I've had recent experience of this.)
Mac OS X doesn't have to accommodate variances in the hardware it is running on in the same way that Linux or Windows has to do.
It doesn't, huh? You mean like three generations of PowerPC CPUs, a second CPU architecture (x86), all the different flavors of HDDs, DVD drives, video cards, and other installable and peripheral devices you can add third-party, and then just about every bit of hardware Apple has come out with since the G3 processor debuted?
Therefore, it can exploit the hardware better. It's the same principle that applied to game developers targeting the XBox rather than a standard PC. Standard PCs might be more powerful, but the XBox is a non-moving target, so you don't need to write to the lowest common denominator, and can exploit the particular strengths of the hardware better.
Okay. The XBox uses a motherboard. Apple has several models using a variety of motherboard and hardware dating back to who-knows-when that it has to account for. You're comparing a console's static array of hardware to an entire production line. That's hardly the same thing.
Ok, you've expressed how much more variance there is in the Apple product line compared to the XBox. Now, just for the sake of completeness, why don't you express how much more variance in the supported hardware for Ubuntu compared to Apple.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
In Phoronix's original test, Ubuntu 7.04 (and sometimes 7.10) performed twice as fast as later releases. When later compared to Fedora, they showed that Fedora's numbers were fairly consistent over the last two years, and close to the same as recent Ubuntu releases. It seems like either something was wrong with the benchmark run on the 7.04 release or there was a huge change after 7.04. Has anyone explained that?
I use Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 daily on my laptops and OS X 10.5.5 on my iMac. In most daily tasks the actual speed is quite irrelevant, what counts is the 'snappiness' of the user interface. From this point of view I must say that OS X fails miserably and I'm seriously considering to install Ubuntu and forgetting about OS X on my iMac.
Fact is, Ubuntu on my old thinkpad T42 with 1GB RAM (already used when bought) feels much faster in daily use than OS X on my iMac 2Ghz Dual Core with 2GB RAM. Cocoa apps in general and particularly Mail.app feel slow and sluggish in comparison to the default Ubuntu apps like Evolution. Sorry Apple, but you've got to try harder if you want to keep your 'power users' in the long run!
Does Ubuntu support PPC?
Older Linuxes are built on GCC 3.x or GCC 4.1.x. Since 4.2.x, GCC has produced absolute garbage code when the Gentoo flags are not enabled.
Since most distros don't ship with --funroll-loops -O19 --ZOMG-MAKE-CODE-FAST, almost everyone has experienced a huge code speed drop. Meanwhile, Apple, knowing that all of their x86 machines support SSE2 or better has no qualms doing said incantations and benefiting from the speedups in autovectorization and other areas where the GCC hackers and Apple have been spending time.
This leads us to the conclusion that a) Older Linuxes were better optimized (by the compiler, not the coder), b) Newer Linuxes are able to benefit but... c) Newer Linuxes are not benefiting because of their one-size-fits-all nature.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Unless you can prove that OS X is taking advantage of hardware features that other operating systems are unable to, your point is baseless. OS X even runs on generic PCs with a few hacks.
It used to, but doesn't any more. Lack of demand.
And incase you're saying that PPC support is more important than the tens of thousands of devices linux supports, think again. I've never had a hardware setup ubuntu hasn't worked with. It can be tricky at times, but my digital camera works straight away, my phone does, my MP3 player, web camera, usb headset, usb/wireless mouse, etc etc etc. The hardware support in linux absolutely vast, and support for non-peripheral hardware is going to be pretty tight.
So yeah, linux supporting everything does mean lowest-common-denominator development, as the grandparent said.
Those aren't release names, they're code names. The release names are "Ubuntu 8.04", "Ubuntu 8.10", etc., which are perfectly professional. Proprietary software often has code names which are just as "childish" (your word, not mine); you just don't see them because the development is done behind closed doors.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
You know how you find out?
You type "Ubuntu PPC" into Google and it's the second hit.
Also, 7-zip is a perfectly good compression algorithm.
Bullshit.
7-Zip is a container format, not a codec.
lol, you have to beg apple to fix shit. Glad I have Ubuntu so I can fix problems myself, luckily I don't have problems like you iTard.
Fine - call us when your fixed Ubuntu beats OS X in all benchmarks.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
It used to, but doesn't any more. Lack of demand. And incase you're saying that PPC support is more important than the tens of thousands of devices linux supports, think again. I've never had a hardware setup ubuntu hasn't worked with. It can be tricky at times, but my digital camera works straight away, my phone does, my MP3 player, web camera, usb headset, usb/wireless mouse, etc etc etc. The hardware support in linux absolutely vast, and support for non-peripheral hardware is going to be pretty tight. So yeah, linux supporting everything does mean lowest-common-denominator development, as the grandparent said.
It's worth mentioning that G3 support was dropped in Leopard, and that PowerPC support was dropped entirely from the developer version of Snow Leopard.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
1) negligible compression gain
2) processor intensive
3) not ubiquitous
4) just another format to support with no great purpose
The Admin and the Engineer
The only benchmark that matters when it comes to speed and optimisation is the top 500..
Linux - 378 - 75.60 %
MacOS X - 2 - 0.40 %
Used to, but they dropped official support for it a while back. Not sure if they are bringing back support with the PS3 version though.
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
IIRC, there isn't a normal BIOS on a Mac, and for Boot Camp one is emulated. Theoretically, this emulation could cause additional latency to the hardware access. How much of an effect this actually has is unknown. I am also unsure if Ubuntu on a Mac requires the Boot Camp BIOS.
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
Unless you can prove that OS X is taking advantage of hardware features that other operating systems are unable to, your point is baseless. OS X even runs on generic PCs with a few hacks.
If you have to hack it to even get it to run, how is this relevant in the slightest?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I have yet to encounter any *nix software that came in a .7z file,
Imagemagick has .7z and .lzma tarballs: ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/
Also, the small gains from using 7zip just isn't worth "converting",
I would consider 30% smaller files (almost 50% compared to gzip) pretty impressive.
7z is actually pretty impressive. I recently converted a bunch of ROMs from 7z to gz for use with mednafen. I don't remember exactly, but the gzipped roms were close to 50% bigger than the 7z. FWIW, 7z uses both LZMA and bzip2 compression as appropriate. The only real reason not to use it, is that you can't expect people to have 7z installed just yet. But bzip2 overcame that obstacle, and 7z should too. This comparison should interest you.
It's also worth noting that the gui windows 7-zip program is the best archive manager I've ever used on that platform. Easy to use, powerful (great context menu entries), supports most existing formats, and is entirely free. There's no reason 7z shouldn't take over the world. But I guess that makes me a loudmouth advocate, huh.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
If you have to hack it to even get it to run, how is this relevant in the slightest?
Because the hack doesn't slow anything down nor would the "hack" placed in the main OS slow anything down. OSX pays the performance penalty of supporting extreme variation in hardware by having drivers and APIs that abstract functionality. The fact that there are only drivers written for hardware that Apple sells is a moot point in terms of performance penalties.
The Xbox was always sold with the same chipset. There was no need to have interchangable drivers.
OS X Intel has been sold (so far, and at least) on systems with Intel 945GM, 945PM, GM965, GMS965, PM965, 5000X, 5400 and nVidia 9400M system chipsets. That's two (plus one low-power variation) Intel mobile chipsets with Intel integrated graphics, two Intel mobile chipsets with PCI Express x16 graphics, two Intel server/workstation chipsets, and one nVidia integrated mobile chipset. It supports two generations of Intel GPUs (GMA 950 and X3100), at least three generations of GeForce GPUs (7, 8, and 9-series), and at least four generations of Radeon GPUs (X1k, HD2k, HD3k, and HD4k).
There aren't a whole lot of hardware-specific assumptions or optimizations that can be made without making things only work on on that hardware... which is why hardware-specific code is in interchangeable drivers.
Apple can't even assume that every Intel Mac has a 64-bit dual core CPU; the first Intel Macs had Core Solo or Core Duo CPUs. Apple can assume that every Intel CPU will have SSE2 and SSE3, though, so many floating-point operations are performed using SSE instructions instead of the x87 FPU. But software can be compiled to use SSE on any other operating system as well. (SSE3 is featured on nearly all Intel and CPUs.)
They could write code/compiler optimizations that result in faster execution on some CPUs, but they're already supporting the P6 microarchitecture (the original Core Duo was close in design to the Pentium M) and the Core microarchitecture, and Nehalem will be here soon.
No one's said it yet...
So it seems like we have the following:
Ubuntu obviously supports more hardware but that was not the point. The point was that Mac OS X is not designed to target only specific hardware - it was designed just like all the other operating systems out there. Support for additional hardware can easily be added with a driver should someone decide to write one. It can even run on AMD hardware if you download the patched version.
So the grandparent was correct - the optimizations developers can make for static hardware like the XBox do not apply to Mac OS X. There are simply way to many different Mac hardware configurations out there.
Having said that, Snow Leopard is said to offer many optimizations - but they are not device specific.
Mac OS X doesn't have to accommodate variances in the hardware it is running on in the same way that Linux or Windows has to do.
Truth is that OsX DOES have to accomodate variances.
There are several types of CPUs used in macbooks at least 2 different architectures (PCC and CORE 2 - The latter with different steps). Differences in hardware extend also to chipsets, graphic cards, network adapters and other hardware.
Proof that OSX runs flexibly on various platforms is the fact that with proper hacks it can run on AMD cpus that have never been included in apple's hardware.
Jokes aside, at least with OS X performance is the only issue that has to be fixed...
.sig: No such file or directory
You have to hack it 'cause Apple puts in checks to prevent running it on non-Apple hardware.
.sig: No such file or directory
It's relevant because you claimed OS X relies on the capabilities of a subset of hardware dictated by Apple, and I pointed out that OS X happily runs on generic PC hardware through copy-protection hacks.
Really, it's bleedingly obvious that it's relevant, and you know that--you just don't have a counterargument for it
Mmmm, wait... does Linux use the BIOS for hardware access?? (excluding the boot process) This is something new to me.
.sig: No such file or directory
Sorry, my brain fell 10 years behind when I wrote that. So the only point of latency would be boot times, which shouldn't affect the benchmarks. Plus, it looks like elilo is capable of booting linux directly from EFI, negating the need for Boot Camp. Although TFA says they used Boot Camp.
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
First: Linux has had EFI support since early 2000 via elilo.
Second: The "emulation" as you call it is not emulation in the same sense that Rosetta is emulation. They implemented a BIOS interface in EFI itself. It does not slow anything down.
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
Well I guess (really just a guess) stock Ubuntu doesn't include elilo/doesn't support booting from EFI, that's why they used BootCamp.
.sig: No such file or directory
It's relevant because you claimed OS X relies on the capabilities of a subset of hardware dictated by Apple, and I pointed out that OS X happily runs on generic PC hardware through copy-protection hacks.
No, I didn't. I claimed that OSX does not have any need to deal with the vast number of use cases that Linux or Windows does, and that they can tweak the way their software runs to be more efficient on the small selection of hardware they do support.
The fact that you can run it if you hack it is irrelevant. I could probably run the XBox OS on a mainframe with the right virtual machine, but that doesn't change the fact that the XBox OS was tailored to perform optimally on the XBox hardware, and it doesn't change the fact that OSX was tailored to perform optimally on Apple hardware.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
So, you fixed all the crap linux audio layers yourself? You fix compiz crashes and feature instability too? How about Flash? How is that flash working for you on large videos?
Ubuntu zealots are far worse that Apple zealots. At least the Apple ones admit to the problems without backpedaling to "OMG TEH CODEZ" when there have been persistent problems in Ubuntu for years. You haven't really fixed shit. You just trot out the line like a good little group-think conformist.
You want to talk about a moving target... A six month release cycle that breaks as many things as it fixes? Every release comes rife with new issues that could have been avoided with some decent QA.
Be realistic. Ubuntu is a crap distribution, and I will never understand the fanboy elitism around here that surrounds it. At least with Gentoo it made sense back in the day, since there was actual coding, patching, and real optimization in place. Ubuntu is worse than OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, Fedora, Slackware, or even the Debian it sprang forth from. It is the distribution that a generation of mascara-wearing angst-monkeys lives and swears by in the false sense of "sticking it to the man".
HINT: You are not sticking it to the man. No one gives a shit what OS you run on your home computer. Neither Microsoft nor Apple are pining away for that 0.92% of the market share you and your ilk occupy.
Yes, you did. Look, you're about to do it again:
You believe OS X exploits the capabilities of a subset of hardware, and the implication is that such exploitation is the reason for OS X's speed over Ubuntu. You even used the word "exploits" in your previous post about it.
You're purposely being obtuse, so I'll spell it out for you. Your argument was about performance on a reduced set of hardware, and I pointed out that OS X runs outside that set of hardware. It runs fast on it, too. Apple isn't taking advantage of some mysterious set of hardware features only they are privy to--an Intel Mac is made of standard PC parts.
You're obsessing over the "hacks" part and ignoring that the hacks are for the copy protection.
How many times do people have to point out that OS X runs well on generic non-Apple hardware? Are you just going to keep ignoring it in every post you make?
How many times do people have to point out that OS X runs well on generic non-Apple hardware? Are you just going to keep ignoring it in every post you make?
Being that the subject of the discussion is the validity of the conclusions that are based on these benchmarks, and being that there is an absence of benchmarks that substantiate your anecdotal evidence, I'm likely going to keep ignoring it until you put up benchmarks to prove what you say. Because nothing I've seen here is even slightly conclusive.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I don't recall any Republicans talking about reconciling with the 50% of the population who didn't vote for Bush in 2000 or 2004.
Wharrgarbl!!!
I hate my flatmate
Jokes aside, at least with OS X performance is the only issue that has to be fixed...
You haven't used Finder much, have you?
First: That is true, but I've since read the article and they are using Boot Camp and not elilo.
Second: See my correction following Atti K.'s response. I'm not sure what I was thinking, since the BIOS has only been used for boot and not OS Hardware operation since DOS. Even if the "emulation" of the BIOS introduces any latency, it would only be present until the BIOS hands off the boot process to the OS. So, my bad, I'll stop shooting my mouth off now.
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
I see, now you're going to jump to a different topic and pretend that the burden of proof is on me when you were the one claiming OS X "exploits" a subset of hardware and only runs well on that subset.
You are the one who needs to provide benchmarks for your claim. Next.
Can you elaborate on that?
Yes.
Can you elaborate on that?
Yeah, I wish he would just tell us how he really feels.
(Snicker.... :)
Kubuntu 8.04 is working just fine here (though I'm withholding judgement on 8.10 until I've had some hands-on experience), I've heard a lot of bitching about the six month release cycle myself but never had any real problems due to it. Six months to stabilize the revision of Debian Sid they've forked from seems enough from where I'm sitting. Besides, all distros have people who hate them. I was once thinking of switching to Fedora because someone I respect talked about it like it was the best thing since sliced bread, them someone I have equal respect for switches away from Fedora, citing numerous major problems. Who the hell do I listen to? Eventually, I listened to myself, and stuck with Kubuntu. As I said at the start, it's working just fine here, why change things?
BTW, ALSA and Compiz are one thing, but Flash? How the hell are we supposed to fix that when Adobe still insists we can't have the full source code? We're trying our best (re: Gnash, Swfdec) but Flash itself can only be fixed by Adobe. Frankly, if Gnash or Swfdec works for the sites I want, I'm switching in a heartbeat. I'm sick and fucking tired of the Flash plugin crashing and leaving me with nothing but grey rectangles all the damn time.
Even if everything there is true, it's not as if it's a terminal situation. OSX is improving and so will Ubuntu. If you want to be realistic, everything started out as crap.
Be realistic. Ubuntu is a crap distribution, and I will never understand the fanboy elitism around here that surrounds it.
My parents can still use their ~5 year old laptop/PC with 512mb RAM. No resource swallowing antivirus software. No pain (which is the word to describe my parent's former attitude towards their laptop).
One friend of mine even joined a facebook Ubuntu group after his switch. He installed it on his own and he was hardly able to install a Windows hardware driver before (and still now). He didn't phone me about one single problem.
I'm convinced that all the other distros/OS'es wouldn't have the same amount of success.
Only experience? Mayvbe. For me, this is not crap. This is great. This distribution is improving lifes.
And I'm not using it, because just like you I don't need it. But there are people that do.
What are you talking about?
I've been using Finder since System 6. It is now, and has been since at least then, the best file management interface on ANY platform.
So, as GP said, at least with Mac OS X, performance is the ONLY issue that has to be fixed. And for Finder, that's one of the big things in Snow Leopard - fixing performance issues.
The UI is, hands down, the best already.
Your original post made a very broad assumption, namely that since there is less Apple hardware out there than PC hardware, Apple developers can exploit hardware tricks or in general work closer to the metal. I don't know if you think they're making extensive use of assembly languages or non-portable C code, but I can tell you that that's just not the case.
Part of the reason that the hardware switch went relatively smoothly for Apple is because their kernel is portable and is not full of CPU-specific hacks (PPC and x86 are different enough that they wouldn't have gotten away with that, plus, it's not 1980 anymore). And as far as console OSes go...they haven't had to include things like multitasking, memory allocation, or paging until very recently. Again, simply not comparable to OS X.
Forget that there's less Apple hardware out there. It's hardware that's changed greatly over the years, and OS X is a modern OS with a lot of features that game consoles can do with out. It's simply not a good analogy. The idea can be true on a very broad level (more portable code can't run as lean) but it's certainly not always true and in this case it doesn't apply for many reasons.
Just let it go at this point, rather than challenge people for benchmarks when you haven't offered anything in the way of proof for your own argument (there really isn't any, since game consoles are as different from Macs as they are from PCs, OS-wise. Or at least they were until very recently).
I think this was the first comment that really accounted for some of the differences rather than rely on conjecture. Wish I had modpoints.
It's happened in the past -- in certain benchmarks, OS X was pitifully slow on a G4 vs Linux on the same machine.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It's not just advandages in knowing the hardware, it can sometimes just be the pure work of optimising the code to speed up the slowest parts of the code.
Mac OS X doesn't have to accommodate variances in the hardware it is running on in the same way that Linux or Windows has to do. Therefore, it can exploit the hardware better.
The problem with your theory is twofold. First, today an Apple is a bog-standard PC except for the inclusion of EFI - which is gradually coming to the PC world, or so I hear. Second, the same MacOS runs on numerous different systems and can even be made to run on a PC clone, with a little work.
Also, many games on the Xbox were cross-platform, and the same game engine has to work on PC, Xbox, and Playstation 2; for example, the Grand Theft Auto engine, or the Star Wars: Battlefront engine. While these games may be the exception rather than the rule, rather the converse was the idea; the "Xbox" name grew from the concept-based name of the DirectX-Box. In a way, the Xbox is a hardware manifestation of an API.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There is no reason whatsoever that OSX should run faster on Apple hardware than non-Apple hardware. This is easy to see and to argue otherwise is to completely fail to understand the nature of the hardware in question. I've harped on this before, but anyway; Apple is using Intel processors and Intel chipsets that are in every way identical to the chips used in non-Apple computers. Why should OSX run any slower on a non-Apple machine? There could be only one reason: if it were deliberately crippled. It is easy to see that this is true, because modern operating systems do not need to go to the BIOS (or equivalent.) Apple computers do not contain any special, custom hardware. The only special thing about Apple computers is the case. They also have a superior boot loader, but I'd rather have coreboot with grub than either one, thanks. Your demand for benchmarks is an abandonment of reason.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The fact that Apple seemingly painlessly supported multiple generations of ATI, Intel, and NVidia gpus is an interesting testament to the use of well implemented OpenGL.
From what I've heard from those developing Linux GPU drivers and window managers (especially one or two compiz-fusion devs), X's DRI and DRM aren't enough to make full use of OpenGL capability (which is why the NVidia X drivers override a lot of X functionality).
It's not an impossible problem to solve, but it's a category in which we can grow, for sure.
Actually it looks like Ubuntu beat Oh-Sex! in several categories and lost at 3D games, which is a known problem with the Intel GMA945 and has nothing to do with Ubuntu but Intel.
No, Ubuntu is Debian sid with less up-to-date packages.
A stopped clock is still correct twice a day.
Give it time. StaleOS is growing even more stale as I write this.
I would hope that once [Apple has an OS monopoly], people would watch them just as closely as they do MS.
That leaves an interesting question: what happens if everybody runs Linux?
I can imagine hearing the whiners "Linux has a monopoly, antitrust, rabble-rabble blah blah!"
But would there be something to it? How far does the argument "but you have all the source" take you?
On the other hand, as long as there's Debian GNU/NetBSD and Debian GNU/HURD, there isn't a *Linux* monopoly. And as long as there's epiphany, firefox, konqueror and edbrowse, there's no browser monopoly; there's two implementations of X floating around, ....
Ever heard the people bitch that there are too many choices with Linux? One cynically wonders how many of them would bitch about too few choices if they had fewer choices... ;)
What do you guys think? If Linux takes over not only the Desktop but the world, what would happen?
Just let it go at this point, rather than challenge people for benchmarks when you haven't offered anything in the way of proof for your own argument (there really isn't any, since game consoles are as different from Macs as they are from PCs, OS-wise. Or at least they were until very recently).
My original argument was that these benchmarks, which are what the article is about, which is what the discussion is about, do not say anything about how OSX runs on non-Mac hardware, and do not provide a fair comparison of the software, because they are inconclusive, and because there is every reason to believe that OSX is designed to work particularly well on Mac hardware. You don't do half an experiment, jump to conclusions on that basis, then when people point out that you only did half the experiment, demand that they do the other half before they contest your conclusions. It doesn't work that way, and no amount of fanboyism is going to change that reality.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
pong games.
And the ad is not from Apple, but from a store selling Apple IIs.
I'd guess, from the content of the ad, it was a store in California. (And I don't mean from the address.)
not admitting an issue is the first step in never addressing it.
Dude, you are SO totally right on this. I agree with you completely man... if she weighs the same as a duck, it means she's made of wood. And therefore.... a witch!
Burn her!!!!
It's been a long time since I compiled a Linux kernel, but I recall performance options for architecture. Have these been removed?