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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.
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!
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]
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.
Hey I have carpel tunnel and mouse clicking is a very important benchmark you insensitive clout.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.