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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."
Good point. Here's a funny link on the subject http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000803.html
Personal anecdotes: I have a Q6600 / 8GB 800MHz RAM / 512MB Geforce 8600GT. I used 8.10 as my primary desktop for a few months. Now I'm using Win 7 beta. Of the two, I strongly prefer Win 7, and one of the reasons for the switch was the unacceptable slowness of the X-windows GUI and all the glitches still present in Firefox 3.0.5.
p.s. I definitely plan to give 9.04 a spin when it comes out, and in the meantime I'll keep using 8.10 in a virtual machine. I can't live without it, but I can't live with it on my desktop.
This will probably get me a troll mod, but I have to say that it doesn't matter how much faster Linux is than Windows in raw speed. All that matters is what the user perceives. And I have to say it doesn't look that great for Ubuntu or Fedora or any modern linux distro right now (but that's improving!). Right now I have Fedora 10 on a brand new dual core AMD 4550e (low-wattage, but still) with 4 GB of ram.
Let's start with the GUI since that is most visible. Without compiz, Fedora's Gnome GUI is quite fast, but to the user feels slow. You can see widgets redraw and reorder themselves. When you size a window you can see the contents adjusting. You can see tearing of the edges of window decorations. When moving the windows around you often get tearing. These artifacts actually make the desktop feel slower even though it really isn't at all.
With compiz-fusion on, things get a little bit better. But still resizing a window is very painful, especially one with a lot of widgets in it. Moving a window around is usually fast enough, though. I believe compiz's rendering engine is synced to screen refresh which helps a lot here (OS X did this for years). Still thought the system often just feels slow. Windows take some time to pop up some times. Sometimes I get a window of garbage (instead of a popup menu) and then the menu appears in it. Sometimes the effects (fade in, fade out), are delayed. Fancier effects like beam-in, beam-out (kind of cool and makes windows users take notice!) work well sometimes and then sometimes stutter or are delayed.
Maybe this is related to the recently-talked about I/O kernel bug, but my Fedora 10 box stutters all the time. My cron script that renders my background Earth picture with the proper clouds and day/night lighting will cause video and audio to halt for a complete second *every* time it is run. This never happened on my older, single processor Athlon with Fedora 8. PulseAudio also seems to cause audio to stutter at the slightest hint of any i/o. In this machine, anyway, with Fedora 10 and compiz-fusion, my Gnome desktop is very disappointing from the perception of performance pov. In raw speed I'm sure it beats Windows Vista or 7. But when you're frustrated with the inability to play back video and audio without skips, and the stuttering and delays in rendering GUI elements, none of that matters.
Now use a Vista computer with decent hardware with the effects turned on. Everything is silky smooth. Window resizes, moving windows (even with translucent blurring). Popups are timely and smooth. The system just feels more responsive than my Fedora Gnome desktop. Things like audio and video have a high priority and never stutter.
How can we improve this? Several ways. First GTK with client windows goes a long ways to solving the resize problem. Rather than having asynchronous messages being passed to each and every widget's window by X11, we only deal with events to the main window. Sub windows are all managed by GTK internally, eliminating the sync problem. This should hit mainstream soon when some corner cases are taken care of. From what I've read, KDE users might already enjoy this as Qt is supposed to already do client windows on X11. Then we need to get pulseaudio fixed somehow. And the kernel bug. Development on compiz after the merger with Beryl seems to be stalled as well. Seems like 80% of the work is done, but the last 20% always struggles to get done, especially in open source software. Finally I hope that issues regarding RGBA and ARGB in GTK in particular get addressed (if they still exist). Then hopefully more apps (KDE already can do this) will use ARGB visuals appropriately.
Required mouse clicking is an element of how much user interaction is required to install. Lower is better, one wants installation to be as easy as possible by default.
Possible mouse clicking would be an element of configurable options, and for this higher may be better. One wants to be able to install properly on systems where the defaults won't work.
It also ignores the amount of text, positioning of text, and other UI design principles, so it's an incomplete metric. More analysis would be needed to make the data useful, but it's not inherently useless.
Not a sentence!
I generally agree, but frankly, OpenOffice.org Writer is still not a drop-in replacement for MS Word if you're doing anything non-trivial. And I've worked on OpenOffice.org Writer -- it has a couple of advantages and a bunch of glaring omissions even today. I haven't tried Word in Wine, but if it's made such strides, then great.
Try using them. I've searched, too. I prefer using a [fairly simple] GUI when I do music notation, not command line style things.
I haven't tried NoteEdit or Brahms. I've tried some GUI based ones though, and usually they're kinda clunky, not terribly well designed, and not easy to get used to. Similar, actually, to the response I got when I used Finale. IMO, Sibelius did a very good job with the UI and how the notation inputs worked.
leaving virtualization on the side for a moment, my XP partition is stripped down and is used for FIFA football, PES football, NHL2009, Chessmaster, Spore, David Douillet judo and some Winnie the Pooh games.
The rest of the time when I work, or someone is surfing, emailing, IM and Skyping, its on the Linux partition.
Im not gonna get rid of my XP because of games but Im not gonna use XP when Im not playing either.
The kids know that if they want to use the desktop w/ 24inch screen, they have to exit the desktop to enter XP and play games. When they are finished, they are asked to reboot so that it can load back into the default Mandriva.
The younger ones like the KDE games more but at 4 yrs old they knew which was Windows and which was Leenix and that the only thing you do on Windows is play games.
Hasnt been a problem since we've been doing this.
And I dont even bother with Photoshop on XP (love GIMP but need my CMYK) anymore since it works fine with Wine and now that I got Spore working there too, that's one thing less to boot out for.
Is it ideal? No but when the kids play, whether it is Linux or XP, I'm using either my laptop or netbook anyways and when I get back my desktop, the kids have learned to put the desktop back as it was.
You can keep the XP for games and just that.
Every time those words appear on the Front-Page of Slashdot, Bill Gates kills another kitten.
But seriously, are we expecting an objective and balanced news article from twitter on Microsoft? There's "provocative" reporting, then there's the "Fox News" of reporting. This article sinks below both.
throw new NoSignatureException();
I forgot to mention the trusty 9800 Pro (yeah, ATI's 9800, not nVidia's) they have in there.
They didn't say whether or not they turned off these two services for Vista and 7. They sacrifice some hard drive performance for safety and convenience. I'm familiar with using Ubuntu, but I don't know if it has the linux equivalent of these running by default (I'm fairly sure system restore isn't in Ubuntu)
The fact that boot up times were so close to each other would attest to Windows being at least on par with Ubuntu in hdd read performance. The sudden drop in hdd performance after boot up may be attributed to the above two features.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Excuse my bias towards gaming, but outside of business and server space theres only one reason for 'performance benchmarks'. Do it all again with Crysis, or Oblivion, or any 'mainstream' gaming title, or non-FOSS anything for that matter.
Oh, wait... you said Linux right?
Not to pick and choose, but in my book compatibility with developed salable software comes first, absolute performance comes second. Sure Ubuntu could run Doom faster, does it look like anyone would excrete a certain building material over it? Can someone explain to me how doing less is overridden by doing it faster?
Slashdot: Where opinions are just opinions until you have mod points.
(Cue people giving the argument, "but Microsoft will just change Windows". Yes, they might, but that doesn't affect the installed base of applications, nor does it affect the myriad third party applications, and if there was a viable target, third party companies would ensure compatability.)
Balogna. They already did this. Back in the days of Office 2000, Codeweavers released Crossover Office, and it was BRILLIANT. RadHat 7.2 with Ximian Desktop and Crossover was the height of Linux desktop usability to me. Something I'm only getting back to in the past couple of years with Gentoo.
(RedHat went to Fedora, and SuSE had it's share of problems. And then, admittedly, I moved to a laptop at work, and even I didn't try to run Linux on it for about 3 years.)
Microsoft saw the writing on the wall. Office XP broke Crossover. Badly. It took them YEARS to figure out how to make it work again, and it still wasn't up to the level of Office 2000. I don't know where it's at now, but I was getting the distinct impression that Microsoft was continuing to play a pretty serious cat-and-mouse game with Wine in general, and Crossover in particular.
I got the free copy they released recently. I should really give it a go again, but I'm now at a place that runs all of their internal systems on Linux, people hardly ever worry about Office documents, and I finally don't have to deal with an Exchange server!
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
I'm all for Ubuntu and OOo and all the rest--and I use them myself almost as much as I use MS products--but let's be honest: the vast majority of users simply don't have the time or determination to learn a new OS, productivity suite, and how to deal with a host of new quirks, bugs, and features.
They will have to. XP wont last forever, not because the users don't want it to, but because Microsoft Don't want it to. Sooner or later they'll have to change to something like Windows 7 or something else.
Yeah, big deal, some people would say, Windows is Windows. To put that into perspective: I was changing a computer at an institution as part of my work today (Win2000-box out, WinXP-box in), the inane user completely stalled and was openly yelling her frantic thoughtflow out loud because the desktop-background-color was slightly off compared to the old box' configuration (Win2000 is kinda turqoise where XP was light blue). If I had given her Aero she'd have had a heart-attack.
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
I don't disagree with you, necessarily, but I would agree more if your concern was with Open Office Calc not being a sufficient replacement for Excel. Would you care to list one or two of the most significant "glaring omissions" of OO Writer versus Word? "Glaring omissions" implies that they will be obvious to a casual user.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Who marked clear bullshit as interesting?
Wow, a child can click the next button. Weee! So, since he can't read the code Windows requires I wonder how he handled making the right decision when it came time to partition disks. Or, had he been installing it on a machine with data still on the drive or what did he do when his video card refused to display the proper resolution from his LCD? (Damn thing just wouldn't go about 1024x768!) What would he do in either OS if the printer didn't magically detect and "just work." And how did he create initial user accounts without being able to read?
Yes, any drooling monkey can put a CD in a machine and hit next until the magic happens. However, most adults that know very little about computers would have the advantage of considering factors like data loss and, when reading something they didn't understand refusing to proceed.
Simply put, this post is a non-issue.
But IMHO by using the PC they chose they ruined any info that may have been useful. A Core i7 920? Yeah, because so many folks have those quad core monsters lying around their house. A much more useful test would have been on a combination of two "average" machines, which can still be found in most offices, that is something in the P4 2.6GHz-3.6GHz range with 1-2GB of RAM, along with a Quad and whatever machine is the lowest price at Walmart or Best Buy(last I checked these were single core AMD Sempron or Intel Celeron in the 2GHz range with 1GB of RAM).
This would IMHO give us more of a "real world" benchmark and see how the machines that are the vast majority of the market would handle it. Despite being out for a couple of years now Dual Core machines are not what you find in most folks homes and offices, and quad cores certainly have even less of a penetration in these places. With WinXP getting long in the tooth and the economy bone dry when it comes to credit a lot of SMBs are going to be hanging onto those 2.2-3.6 GHz P4s, and the home consumers are going to be hanging on even tighter.
If MSFT "pulls a Win2K" and lets WinXP die out for lack of attention when Win7 comes out these folks are going to need a migration path that hopefully won't involve buying several $$$$ dollars worth of hardware in the case of the SMBs. With real world benchmarks on real world hardware I could hand this data to customers sitting on the fence and let them decide for themselves which upgrade path would be right for them. But putting it on a Quad Core superbeast doesn't really tell me anything. It certainly doesn't tell me how the 3 OSes would operate in the real world in an office full of 3GHz machines. So if the ones who ran these benchmarks read this: Please rerun these tests on machines one would find in your average office or home. Because with the economy as bad as it is an money tight I have a feeling folks are going to be hanging onto machines both at work and at home for a lot longer than AMD or Intel would like.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Because when MS even tries to include a web browser and a media player, they get their asses chewed out by the EU for anticompetitive behavior.
And why is this? Because the web rowser and media player that MS include are un-removeable. Not only that, but the un-removeable web browser is highly non-compliant with web standards, and the web browser includes proprietary-to-Microsoft non-standard extensions such as ActiveX and Silverlight, and the media player explicitly excludes support for open media formats such as ogg vorbis audio and Dirac video.
If the programs that Microsoft included used open standards, and hence did not promote lcok-in, then there would be no issue with Microsoft for anticompetitive behavior. Heck, Microsoft could even include Office if it wanted to, and it would not be anti-competitive as long as the default files save format was OpenDocument.
That's true, until they try to plug in the crap they get at Walmart into the USB ports like those damned Lexmark all in one printers and they find they will never work. I tried selling low cost Linux machines in the shop and finally had to wipe them and put back on Win9X/Win2K. Why? Because I ended up having to stick a sign on the front of them that said "Will NOT run Lexmark printers!" Because trying to get one of those bastards to work in Linux will cause you to blow a blood vessel. And needless to say after 6 months they never sold, whereas even the Win9X sold after a few weeks. After all what good is a PC that you can't print from? And sadly with most consumers(at least around here) Lexmark is king, which means good luck getting it to run in Linux.
What I don't get is why someone can't come up with a WINE or Ndiswrapper for those damned printers. I have taken them apart and there really isn't any chips in them, and surely it can't be more complicated that getting the strip of wire and micro firmware that passes for a wireless "card" these days to work in Linux. All the print/scan/fax work is being done by Windows. From what I can tell calling the printer simply hands off everything to the Windows GDI which does all the work. But until I can place machines on the table and know that they will work with those damned Lexmark printers I just can't sell Linux machines. And I wonder how many of those Netbook returns could be traced back to crap like those damned Lexmarks?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You said it better than I was about to... three of the five benchmarks are useless to me. I don't care how much space the install takes up, I don't care how long it takes to install because I only do that once and I don't care how long it takes to boot-up because I leave my computers on. Of the remaining two, I rarely if ever copy files from USB to HD and I have no idea how well this benchmark represents common task I perform such as browsing, movie watching and game playing.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
* How long does each operating system take to install?
;-)
Perhaps more relevant would be a "swearing quotient". I have found that most installations of Windows have involved a lot of swearing, e.g. where Windows arbitrarily decides there is something wrong with hardware that was perfectly OK five minutes ago...
Whereas most Linux installs tend to be fairly cruisy. Ubuntu is not my distro of choice, but installation is very quiet.