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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."
Queue douchebag saying its only a beta.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Can I mod this story as troll?
I'm a linux user but this story is anything but serious benchmarking.
Because I can snap both installation DVDs in half, I submit that I am clearly more powerful than either OS. Not even close, really.
My unpatched Windows system can get rooted AT LEAST ten times faster than Ubuntu. Take that, Open Source!
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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.
Clearly Microsoft has been listening to us. Vista takes up a whole 8.2GB, while Windows 7 takes up a mere 7.9GB. I can't wait to get a crack at this smaller, slimmer version of Windows!
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
You get Ubuntu on CD or DVD, and one or more office packages is included on either.
With even the CD, you can get full OpenOffice and development tools, so there's at least that in Ubuntu's favour. Windows is a gigantic installation which gives you a notepad, some casual games and a file manager, more or less.
There, fixed that for you.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
The average GNU/Linux user is now getting better absolute performance from their computer as well as better value than the average Windows user.
Okay, but this is almost meaningless. Tell me instead, how much value would the average Windows user get from GNU/Linux?
It really can do the basics, is FREE and isn't prone to viral infestation.
It's suitable for a lot of people, they just need to
get over their Microsoft vendorlock fixation.
Incidentally, Macs have the same exact benefits minus the FREE part.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
People use applications, not operating systems.
It doesn't matter how fast it is if it doesn't run the software that people want. That's the biggest thing that holds up Linux on the desktop.
If Linux for the desktop is ever going to really be a viable option, someone needs to come out with a distro with the goal of, "absolutely, positively, 100% Windows Compatible" via Wine or similar technologies.
That distro would conquer the world.
(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.)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Hey I have carpel tunnel and mouse clicking is a very important benchmark you insensitive clout.
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.
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; ...).
The average GNU/Linux user is now getting better absolute performance from their computer as well as better value than the average Windows user.
Depends on what you value. I value not having to hunt down and configure obscure software to sync my phone. I value the ability to use third party software when it's released, not when they get around to making a Linux port. I value having drivers that are updated regularly, and a wide variety of quality software options, with actual support, and a user community that doesn't tell me I'm stupid because I couldn't get figure out how to connect to my WiFi network (the solution for which depends on what minor version of the windows manager I'm using, which affects which connection manager is installed by default, etc., etc.)
I also appreciate a uniform interface and application model, which Windows provides. It neither looks nor performs like a hodgepodge mix of new and ancient components, regardless of what may be present under the hood. I appreciate a clipboard which performs as expected. I've also had, by far, more success installing Windows on a wider array of hardware than Linux, including Ubuntu. Oh, the LiveCD won't work for that hardward. Oh, there's no wireless driver for that NIC, but you can wrap this other driver and then do this, and it will work most of the time, except when it doesn't.
A value to me is not saving 7 minutes on the install, or clicking 12 fewer times, (in what should be a one-shot deal anyway), or an OS footprint that saves me 0.01% of my available storage space. Value to me is reliability, choice and quality of software, and minimal fuss with configuring devices and hardware. With XP, Windows reached a level of maturity/stability that I now expect of any OS residing on my desktop (or laptop). That I have to actually pay for the OS and keep Avast resident is an acceptable tradeoff for those things.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Boot up and Shutdown times are equally irrelevant. I shut the PCs down on weekends. Am I going to notice or care that it takes a few more seconds for a machine to boot up or shut down. Also, these times are highly variable. Even on the same machine I suspect the variation is way outside the differences between the OS. 30 years ago we cared a little bit about boot up times. But then, we were reading from disk or tape, so these times were significant, and we might shut down a machine several times a day. When Apple made the Mac a super fast boot up machine, it was to solve a problem. Now it is just to win a juvenile contest. if there is not an order of magnitude difference, it does not really matter.
File copy time can be an issue, but not for everyone. I am going to make what may be a controversial statement. When I copy a multi Gigabyte set of files, and it takes a half an hour, that does not bother me. Neither do I care that for a large movie one OS might take a 30 seconds, while the next might take two minutes. What annoys me are those little daily copies of a small file that take a minute or so. Clearly there is some overhead. Sure, know how long to copy 1000 files is cool, but when does that happen.
What we don't have is how long it takes to set up a printer, something that I find I do way too often. Or how long it take to print to a printer, which has some OS dependence. Or how long it takes a save a file in MS Office versus OO.org. Or how long it takes to setup email. Or how long it takes to load a web browser. You know, the things that people do every day and tends to eat away at a persons limited time.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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,
> 2- Video editing. Super simple video editing.
Not sure what you count as super simple, but have you tried http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/ ?
Its ok, the article's first half is a bunch of benchmarks that are utterly meaningless on Windows anyway. Who cares if Window's takes twice as long to install as Linux? I mean seriously, I'm waiting. Are operating installs a frequent event? I can count on my hands and feet the number of times I've performed them.
Its all well and good that Ubuntu can install itself faster, but it doesn't matter, because it is by definition an infrequent workload. This is theoretically true for Ubuntu to. After all, wasn't the infinite in place upgradability something that has long been touted as a strength of Debian and co. Thats even more important with Ubuntu, because I sure as hell don't want to reinstall and OS every 6 months.
Same goes for startup and shutdown. Windows Vista was explicitly designed with the idea that in general, the OS is going to be suspended/hibernated, not rebooted. I'd be much more interested in seeing benchmarks of a comparison between the speed with which Windows and Ubuntu are able to hibernate/unhibernate. I've always been curious about this, as subjectively, an older Ubuntu installation hibernation seemed faster than in Windows. Alas, I guess in order to give us that benchmark, the reviewers would have to actually find hardware Linux could suspend on. How does one plot a hard lock on resume anyway, time for the system to reboot and come back up?
The other thing they failed to mention on the I/O benchmarking side is whether or not the drives were set to write cache mode or not in Windows. AFAIK the default for removable media to disable write caching in Windows, but to enable in Linux.
Oh, and why the !@#$ are they benchmarking compute intensive tasks in Python? Is it to exacerbate differences, because the chosen runtime is so absurdly slow? But, in reality, there is no reason for compute intensive tasks to vary on the same hardware. This test is highly dependent on the system services running and the python version. I would consider this more of a benchmark of python instead of Windows/Ubuntu.
...Ubunghole is only beta-quality...
Not too shabby for an alpha.
Rejoice!
May the Maths Be with you!
Can't speak for Windows 7, but I'm writing this from Firefox, running under Ubunut (sitting here building a new Ubuntu system for my kids). I have about 4 dual boot systems, and I'm to the point I'm not booting XP much anymore.
I'm obviously a fan, but here is my honest to goodness feeling on XP vs. Ubuntu: Straight out of the box, XP is just as fast as Ubuntu.
However, after you install a virus scanner, have 10 different little malware scanners you have to run to catch everything, and then every mother f'n program you installs on Windows thinks it needs to run as a service...hell yeah, Ubuntu is faster.
Man, Windows users just don't know how wonderful it is to have a hard drive that doesn't have CHURN 90% of the time. It's freaking awesome!
And games? As stated, all my systems are dual boot. I find my kids playing games in Linux about 3 out of 4 times I see them on a computer.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Install time? Clicks per install? Installed footprint? Does anybody care about those?
The file copy tests were marginally useful, but not exactly controlled. But it certainly looks like the Linux USB drivers and related I/O code is better than what exists in Windows.
Then again, on what is possibly the most useful and meaningful benchmark, Windows wins. The Richards thing is not disk I/O bound, so we're talking about memory allocation/deallocation and probably some underlying C library calls. Since we're on identical hardware, the difference is either due to the Windows memory manager, faster library routines, or a more optimized version of the python interpreter. (Which wouldn't really be a win for Windows per se.)
I'd like to see something like...oh...a standard database benchmark (e.g. TPC) run on a couple different databases (Postgres and Oracle would be fine) installed under both Ubuntu and under Windows 7 on identical hardware. This would, of course, be influenced by how well optimized these database implementations are on each operating system, but there's little we can do about that. The test would essentially be Windows+Oracle vs. Ubuntu+Oracle, or Windows+Postgres vs. Ubuntu+Postgres.