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Ubuntu Wipes Windows 7 In Benchmarks
twitter writes "Recent and controversial benchmarks for Windows 7 leave an important question unanswered: 'Is it faster than GNU/Linux?' Here, at last, is a benchmark that pits Ubuntu, Vista and Windows 7 against each other on the same modern hardware. From install time to GUI efficiency, Ubuntu beats Windows and is often twice as fast. Where Windows 7 is competitive, the difference is something the average user would not notice. The average GNU/Linux user is now getting better absolute performance from their computer as well as better value than the average Windows user."
Can I mod this story as troll?
I'm a linux user but this story is anything but serious benchmarking.
From TFA:
Our test machine packed an Intel Core i7 920, which in layman's terms has four cores running at 2.67GHz with hyperthreading and 8MB of L3 cache.
(Emphasis added.)
Not sure what kind of laymen the authors hang out with, but all the laymen I know couldn't tell you the difference between a CPU and a hard drive, or the difference between GHz and GB ... much less figure out what "L3 cache" is!
I always just figured the speed was gained from not having to run virus software all the time.
With virus software installed on Windows 7 ubuntu would kill it even more.
Half of writing history is hiding the truth.
Why would anyone care about install time? The only interesting part of the install is how much of your hardware works out of the box, and how much of it can be made to work easily.
Of course installation is the easiest feature to review, but this is 2009 - there is nothing interesting about OS installation anymore.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Is the gaming benchmarks.
I've been slowly switching from XP to Ubuntu on my work laptop, but I am still stuck with XP at home. I just play too many PC games to give up XP. I really don't care if it boots slower than Ubuntu, or takes longer to shut down. What matters to me is actually using the PC.
Another note.
Linux has always been rather slow to boot, but as we understand it reducing boot time is one of the goals of the Ubuntu 9.04 release.
What kind of comment is that? Excusing a "slow boot time" with "Linux has always been rather slow to boot." Of course, then we get other benchmarks where it says that Ubuntu betas Windows in booting. IMO, this just goes to show that benchmarks on something that is so hardware dependent can be really silly. That and the user's bias is coming out in defending Linux by saying it's always been slow to boot. If Windows was the one that was so slow, it probably would have been "Windows has always been infamously slow to boot, and Windows 7 is no change." Or whatever.
Also... measuring mouse clicks on an install process? What?
And ... comparing the amount if gigabytes and saying that less space used after a fresh install is necessarily better? Becuase, as we all know, a 6 GB installation of an OS is absolutely horrendously huge, given the exorbitant cost of disk storage these days. Man, 1/166th of my 1TB drive gone because Windows! [/sarcasm]
Installation time? *Mouse clicks* to install? Seriously? Those have got to be some of the most useless benchmarks I've ever seen.
Startup and shutdown time are marginally more useful benchmarks, but still not really very important unless you're talking about embedded devices, which the desktop version of Windows 7 (obviously) isn't even designed for.
The file copy benchmarks really didn't find a clear winner either, and that was the only arguably significant benchmark. Or are there really desktop users that spend all day copying files between hard drives and USB drives?
I really didn't care all that much about the outcome. I don't have an emotional investment in Windows or Ubuntu, but this was nothing but a pissing contest from someone who wanted to make some poorly constructed graphs showing that their favorite OS beat another OS (and it didn't even do that! Windows won on a few of the tests!)
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
On my old PC laptop, Ubuntu gets very unresponsive, even with every combination of ATI drivers I use. Both Windows XP and Windows Vista boot as fast, if not faster, on it than Ubuntu did. In fact, Windows Vista was generally more responsive during normal use. There were plenty of times where Vista could easily handle stuff like Firefox with Flash and some other stuff open, but Ubuntu would slow down to a crawl.
Mod me down if you want, but I've found Windows to be faster and more responsive out of the box, especially against modern Linux distributions.
Probably even dafter . Neither is finished, so you don't know what extra logging or debug they're running (well, with Linux you could but you probably can't be bothered).
You also don't know how tuned they are - the dev teams may not have finished all the performance tweaking in the beta, so yes, you get some numbers but unless you want to run the beta in production they are meaningless when it comes to production.
To be fair to TFA though they acknowledge this and are pretty clear that you can't read much into the beta numbers.
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
the user's bias is coming out in defending Linux by saying it's always been slow to boot
That's not how I read it. The author didn't seem to be defending Linux with that statement. It was more of a "as we would have expected" statement. He was acknowledging that Linux lost on that metric.
measuring mouse clicks on an install process? What?
The authors seem to acknowledge that this metric was just for fun. The caption for that data says "A bit of a flippant one" and in the intro they say "We also, just for the heck of it, kept track of how many mouse clicks it took to install each OS."
comparing the amount if gigabytes and saying that less space used after a fresh install is necessarily better?
Yes. All other things being equal, a smaller install size is better (more space for other things). Whether or not this particular metric matters to you depends, of course. On a typical desktop machine it might not matter. On some other machines it might. The install size also affects other things people might care about (e.g. how long it takes to do a drive image or backup; how long it takes to scan or seek on the drive; ...).
Dear Slashdot editors,
We understand perfectly your needs about traffic generation and advertisements.
But please, why publish another stupidity like this... when too recently you had a highly criticized "story" about some random guy that found Ubuntu downloads faster than Vista in his home PC's. Please avoid that kind of sh... (how to name it???), that only ends turning people away for your site in the long term.
Eventually, if you can't stop from posting about so called "comparative benchmarks", please do it in the "idle" section.
regards,
I use Ubuntu, but I find comparing speeds between Linux and Windows silly, if not amateurish. Neither runs the other's software (without proper tools, and even then it's not nearly perfect), so what's the point?
I'm all for Windows and Office and all the rest...
Having used Windows for years, it does not have NEAR the functionality of any given Linux distro without heavy tweaking.
I mean, come on, I have to install office programs, compilers, editors, (non-DRM) media players, (real) CD/DVD burning programs, terminals, secure communication programs, (real) file transfer programs, etc., and that's just the top categories. Let alone all the crap you have to install, just because you're using Windows, like anti-virus and anti-malware programs.
And then there's the lovely day that a program simply... stops working. Why? Who knows! Time to format and reinstall!
Seriously. I have a Windows partition because I like PC video gaming. (Lord, help me, sometimes even I don't know why. I keep all my drivers up to date, but I still get BSOD's a couple times a month.) But I can't stand to try to use it for real work.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
I always get a kick out of this argument. Has it occurred to you that when Microsoft bundles those applications they get sued to pieces and end up paying billions in fines to the European antitrust extortionists^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H regulators? If you approve of those verdicts and fines, then you cannot simultaneously criticize Microsoft for forcing you to install all those things. Approving of these fines means simply that we accept (or rather demand) the inconveniences they inflict.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
I have personally moved my grandmother and uncle, neither which know ANYTHING about computers. The only problem I have seen is opening horrendously formated word documents and running DX games. Please do not compare a bestbuy installed windows with a downloaded iso linux, they are not nearly the same. When bestbuy installs windows, they find the drivers, install antivirus, add tutorials, etc. When I set up an Ubuntu system, I do the same and they have NO problems!
Linux is just as easy, if not easier to use than windows. Just look at opening programs. In windows you go "start->all programs->adobe->photoshop->start photoshop". In linux you go "Applications->Graphics->Gimp Image Editor". Not to mention installing applications. In windows you have to google-hunt a program, pray it's clean, download, scan, install. In linux you open the package manager, select it and click "apply".
Please stop spreading this FUD that windows is easier simply because some joker being paid $8/hour set it up for you!
But really, it does matter. If I am going to buy a netbook with a 1.6 GHz Atom CPU, 1 GB of RAM and integrated graphics, I'm going to want something that runs fast. On either platform I will have E-mail, basic games, web browsing, videos, music, etc, and whichever one runs the fastest (and the cheapest) is going to be the one someone usually picks. So when Windows 7 comes out and you can either buy the $300 netbook with Linux that runs faster, or the $350 netbook with Windows 7 that runs slower, the choice for any informed customer is obvious.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
There may be relevant performance differences between the operating systems and versions, but this benchmark mostly does not test for them in the general use cases.
* How long does each operating system take to install?
Typical home user installs neither, real IT shops use disk images and other automated deployment tools.
* How much disk space was used in the standard install?
This is only a significant concern for SSD Netbooks. Typical home users will use ad hoc unmanaged storage and fill any available space with porn/music/photos. Power users who need lots of storage understand multiple hard disks. Real IT shops do managed non-local storage.
* How long does boot up and shutdown take?
The benchmarks shows no significant differences for boot up times. Both tests require more iterations and controls to distinguish between clean shutdowns, and ones in which software, first run, and other updates also take place during shutdown.
* How long does it take to copy files from USB to HD, and from HD to HD?
Methodology is flawed because the installation of each operating system has perturbed the free and occupied space layouts on the hard disk. An unbiased test would be USB to/from other installed hard disk instead of USB to/from the boot disk.
Independent of the operating system in use, data located at the outside of a CAV disk can be read and written faster than data located close to the spindle.
* How fast can it execute the Richards benchmark?
Results do not indicate any significant differences in the set. Also, does the Richards benchmark reasonably simulate any particular home or enterprise task set in general, and if so, does the (undisclosed) version of the Richards benchmark employed in this test also reasonably simulate a particular task set?
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
However, an informed customer (and by informed consumer, I mean someone reasonably intelligent, knows the strengths and weaknesses of Linux, etc) will almost certainly pick Linux
Since when is the majority of the market an informed consumer? Especially the netbook market?
People are going to pick words that they have heard before. Marketing is a huge part of this and what it boils down to is:
Windows XP = good, Vista = bad, Linux = difficult. (Which is sad, mostly because Vista isn't that bad, and Linux isn't that difficult, but marketing is everything to the mass average consumer)
Agreed that Linux is at least as good or better on a netbook for browsing, checking email, and other simple net tasks. However, I think the (vast) majority of people have a more specialized application they wish to run, and in the (vast) majority of cases, it's a Windows app. That is as likely to be true for an informed consumer as an uninformed consumer.
It's not a case of a buyer getting scared of a 'different' operating system. It's a case of a buyer wanting a netbook that will run every program he might ever want over the next few years, without the operating system getting in the way. It doesn't and wouldn't matter that Linux was significantly faster and more capable.
We run almost exclusively system intensive high resource usage software. (100% CPU & 5GB+ of RAM, RAID arrays pushed to the limit when rendering.) Under these loads we've seen very little performance differences between OSes. Vista x64, Windows XPx64, Windows 7 x64. Across all 3 Windows apps it's effectively a wash.
Similarly I've seen very very marginal improvements while rendering on Linux.
The tests are kind of interesting in a "I suppose that's interesting" sort of way. But on a modern system how fast most OS features act is the split between milliseconds and who really cares?
The summary is highly misleading "Ubuntu as much as twice as fast!" At extremely short unnoticeable tasks which no human would care to measure except in a benchmark.
I've very very very rarely had the OS be a bottleneck. The last time I remember encountering a system slow down on a reasonably up to date system was when I was trying to run Shake on an OSX PPC G4. An older x86 system on Windows and Linux simply smoked it in every possible way. But that was far more to do with being a PowerPC chip than OSX itself. Oh yeah... and Vista's network transfer speeds when it was first released were embarassing. But those have been straightened out as far as I can tell from my experience.