Ubuntu vs. Windows In OpenOffice.org Benchmark

ahziem writes "Ubuntu's Intrepid Ibex and Redmond's Windows XP go head-to-head in an OpenOffice.org 3.0 performance smackdown measuring vanilla OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, Go-oo, and Portable OpenOffice.org 3.0. Each platform and edition does well in different tests. Go-oo is known for its proud slogan "Better, Faster, Freer," but last time with OpenOffice.org 2.4 on Fedora, Go-oo came in fourth place out of four. Slashdot has previously reported Ubuntu beating Vista and Windows 7 in benchmarks, so either XP is faster or this benchmark carries a different weight."

Comments

Big surprise

[Bobnova]

XP faster then vista/7? I'm shocked. I've been doing some general testing between XP and ubuntu 8.10 as well as dellbuntu 8.04. Ubuntu gets 25% longer battery life on my netbook, but cannot play youtube videos (on either version) without lurching video. XP on the same netbook does youtube just fine, but has a 3 hour batter life to ubuntu's 4 hour. On an old p4 i have xp scrolls smoothly and instantly in firefox, where 8.10 has a delay before anything happens. My conclusion: On a slow system, XP is faster.

Re:Big surprise

[man_of_mr_e]

Could it be that playing Youtube videos uses 25% more cpu power? And thus, because you didn't play them on your ubuntu laptop it got longer battery life?

Re:Big surprise

[0xABADC0DA]

Some tips on netbook power. Hopefully /. will correct anything wrong here:

1) Underclocking can have huge savings... as much as the backlight being on/off. I don't mean using cpufreq to change processor frequency... the power savings apparently comes from the ram and slowing down the ridiculously bad Intel GMA945. This is generally easier on XP since the OEM will have some software to do this, and nothing pre-packaged exists in Linux afaik.

2) Use a plain background and plain graphics... no gradients or pictures. GMA can use run-length encoding to compress the display memory on a line-by-line basis, and if the line hasn't changed the display uses the compressed version.

Somebody check my numbers... assuming 666 fsb, that's 666Mhz*4 bytes per second. The display might use 1024*600*3 bytes and if it refreshes the display at 60 fps, the shared memory for the display uses:

(1024*600*3*60) / (666*Mhz*4) = 15% of fsb time

That must be wrong, because at high res it would be using all the time. But I don't know what assumption is wrong... but anyway if you can compress by say 80% by using solid colors (or vertical gradients) then you can save some power and make the system somewhat faster. This might have to be turned on with the driver, idk if linux driver can do this.

3) Some USB devices use a lot more power than you'd expect. For instance a standard USB laser mouse can use a watt from various things like having USB polling it frequently.

4) As far as I can tell from reading the web, RAM power is basically how many modules you have installed not how much memory is on them. Maybe it's based on the number of chips? Anwyay it looks like upgrading memory should increase battery life by reducing disk access. So for instance if the system has low ram, like 512mb you might see disproportionately better power on linux since it generally uses less ram, so less hd activity.

5) It's almost not worth it to put the hard disk to sleep. Modern laptop drives you might save .2-.4w over just idle, but spin up might take 5w. So telling hd to spin down every 3 min for instance might actually use more power.

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Re:OpenOffice benchmarks? Seriously?

[Iyonesco]

My first thoughts were also "Is speed really the issue here?" but for different reasons. I used Open Office for eight months before having to give up due to a massive number of small niggles that when combined make it very unpleasant to use. I think a lot of issues need to be addresses in Open Office before speed but sadly none of the problems ever seem to be addressed and they instead seem to focus on adding new features. In the end I had to give up and switch to Kingsoft Office 2009.

Re:Who cares about CPU speed if it slows your work

[DesertBlade]

I use xls on both Excel and Open Office and they are mostly compatable. If you are one of those accounting types with 100000 lines in an excel file then you you should stick with excel.

Open Office is a replacement for M$ office for 95% of the use cases. Still the proprietary formats of M$ Office made it difficult to port. Since those standards are now published I think cross program support will improve.