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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."
Who cares? OOo is still slow no matter what platform it's run on.
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.
Disclaimer: I'm already a proud Ubuntu 8.10 User, i love that Os, has its issues but i think is good for me and what i do with it, but common, i'm already tired of this benchmark fever slashdot is suffering lately...
How many benchmarks do we need? Really..
Are we gonna benchmark every single app out there to see our loved Ubuntu beats the shit out of Windows?
Ubuntu Wipes Windows 7 In Benchmarks
Java Performance On Ubuntu Vs. Windows Vista
Ubuntu 8.10 Outperforms Windows Vista
Slashdot ya no es que lo era!
"Due to the efficiency of Visual Studio 9 over GCC"... I don't want to pick a compiler flamewar here, but I think it is fair to say that making blanket statements about one particular compiler producing faster code than another is pretty ignorant. There are some things VC does that GCC doesn't do, and vice versa, compiler switches can make a big difference, and you really would need to study the most commonly used code in OO under both compilers to see who is, in fact, generating better code, and, incidentally, for which processor.
This is my sig.
Is speed really the issue here? My LAPTOP was a bargain-barrel purchase 3 years ago and it has no problem running OpenOffice + FireFox + other standard software on either Ubuntu or XP.
What I care about is, "Which one is least likely to crash and make me lose my work?" That's always been my big complaint with the Windows versions of free software (GIMP comes to mind), not speed.
Who runs OO on Windows?
More people than who run it on Linux, that is for sure. We have it on all the computers here that didn't already have Office preinstalled (meaning most of them). I have both on my computer, although I use OO most of the time, as I like their spreadsheet app better than office.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I wonder if the faster warmboot times under XP are due to its prefetching functionality. Another benchmark with prefetching disabled could determine this. Maybe Ubuntu or other distributions can try adding prefetch functionality to their distributions and put Windows where it belongs, (at) last.
On my Mac desktop I used OpenOffice for a long time. I find MS Office on the Mac to be a train wreck. But OO's performance really sucks on the Mac, even with Java turned off. I switched to Apple's own iWork '09 and it's fantastic, far superior to any alternative on the same OS. I prefer open document formats, but I need to get my job done.
My point is I hope the OO teams can focus more on performance across the board. I realize the difficulty when it's built for multiple platforms, but once performance is improved it'll be a much better contender.
Developers: We can use your help.
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We have four computer labs totaling 21 computes, soon to be bumped up to 27. These are all three or four year old Dells with OEM XP licenses, but even with educational pricing, I have little interest in spending my budget on any version of Office. OpenOffice.org 3.0 opens most of the major formats, is free (as in "no licensing headaches") and is a helluva lot more like Office 97/2000/2003 than the horror story known as Office 2007.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I feel OOo is slow both on Linux as well as Windows. Most likely this is due to the bloat and mindless copying of MS Office features. I have a question: Is it possible to weed out the redundant or useless features in OOo and make it sleek and quick? Since this is completely open source, theoretically this should be possible.
In similar vein, I'm also looking for pluck-outs from Firefox which is also bloated. Rather than running extensions called NoScript, AdBlock, FlashBlock etc.; why not remove these products from the installed version itself to make it lean, mean and less resource hungry?
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Because...well, I didn't read the article, but are we benchmarking Word Processing applications now? How fast a spreadsheet can calculate the sum of a column? Whether there's a pause between fade-in transitions in a presentation?
I'm trying to think of a good car analogy here...maybe how fast your passenger side door closes?
For others (like me) who are familiar with OOo but never heard of "Go-oo", Wikipedia says,
Go-oo is a concentrated set of patches for the cross-platform OpenOffice.org office suite. Go-oo is also one of OpenOffice.org variants created from these patches. It has better support for Office Open XML file formats than the official OpenOffice.org releases produced by Sun Microsystems, and other enhancements that have either not yet been accepted into the upstream Sun version, or will not be because of business or political reasons. Some of these changes or enhancements will eventually be part of the Sun version, too; the process of assessing patches, "upstreaming", just takes time.
It's a shame that even the Go-oo website does a poor job of explaining this on the front page (doesn't mention OpenOffice.org until nearly the very end) nor on the "about" page.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Oh wait. It was a rhetorical question. Sorry.
Deleted
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.
Half of writing history is hiding the truth.
the people that care are the one using open standards. If you use .xls, you better stay on ms office.
Those two things aren't mutually exclusive. I personally would love to have open formats all the time. Heaven knows that it would make my job easier. But, the fact of the matter is, most companies/people/etc use MS Office. You must have that compatibility. It's nice to hold to ideals, but you can't shoot yourself in the foot while doing so...
Who runs OO on Windows?
A lot of our home user and student clients use OO instead of Microsoft Office.
Microsoft Office isn't cheap. It's several hundred dollars depending on what kind of discounts you get and what version you need. It used to come preloaded on a lot of systems, but these days they frequently give you some kind of 30-day trial of Microsoft Office, instead of the full version.
Business folks don't generally care. Most of our business clients have some kind of volume license anyway, so they throw it on whatever new computer they get.
A lot of our home users have a hard time justifying spending $100 or more just so their kid can type up a paper at home.
So we point them at OO, and it generally does what they need it to. We've made a lot of people very happy by giving them a free alternative to Microsoft Office.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Seriously. ... Who cares if OpenOffice opens a .xls document 4 seconds faster, since it takes me a good 25 minutes to reconfigure all the graphs formating that it lost from MS Office??
Is that 25 minutes taken into factor? ... That's right, I didn't think so.
That's just silly.
If you need Excel, why would you be running OO? If you've got all kinds of graphs and formatting and whatever else that's going to take 25 minutes to fix in OO, why wouldn't you be running Excel? That time adds up pretty quickly and before long it becomes very easy to justify the cost of a license for Excel.
That's like the folks who switch to Linux or OS X and then load up their machine with some kind of VM and run everything in Windows anyway. If you need Windows, why not just run Windows?
Of course the best solution would be to get everyone working from some kind of open format, so it didn't matter what software you were using. So there was absolutely no vendor lock-in. But that won't be happening any time soon.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Have you looked at the machines in many offices recently? Many companies are on a four or five-year computer lifecycle, which would mean that they very well may have machines about as powerful as that Athlon XP 3000+. Many businesses run even older machines as they want to continue to run Office 2000/XP/2003 on Windows XP and don't want to pay to replace perfectly functional machines. Machines with a 2.0-3.0 GHz P4 and 512 MB-1 GB RAM running Windows XP are very typical; newer Core 2-based (or Athlon 64-based if you have HPs) machines are much less common, probably because a P4 will run older versions of MS Office on XP just as well as a brand-new machine will. It's really only Vista and MS Office 2007 and their big RAM demands that make those old P4s obsolete.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
I own a small web development company. The company is basically 3 members and the occassional contractor. I run Ubuntu and the other two run vista and OSX on out development machines. We use Open Office so we can be platform agnostic.
Our bugs are smarter than your test scripts.
No, it means "I'm too lazy to install Gentoo and have better things to do."
As a Gentoo user, I should know.
Ignore this signature. By order.
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My experience from the various people I have to deal with as their IT manager is that they loathe Office 2007. Maybe, all things being equal, it is superior, much as the Dvorak keyboard is probably superior to the Qwerty keyboard, but things are not equal. I deal with a staff, some of which have over a decade of experience using Word versions starting with Word 95 (and some earlier versions than that), where each new version wasn't really that big a leap, and suddenly they're plunged into the world of ribbons, and take five minutes just to figure out how to print a document.
There's this thing called a learning curve, and OpenOffice, while hardly perfect and certainly not a clone of Office 97-2003, is significantly closer in layout than Office 2007. So bravo to your Aunt Nancy for catching on, but I have to manage systems in a real live workplace, where retraining means loss of productivity until the learning curve has been matched. Taking the path of least resistance seems for many of the people I work with to be the way to go.
Microsoft should have, at every least, put in a "Looks Kinda LIke Office 2003" mode, much as they have done over the years with Windows itself.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
> It's slow, and it doesn't work for anything beyond a very trivial subset of Office functionality.
SURPRISE! That's all most people actually need.
You know.... "my requirements" versus "your requirements" beyond just the basic vendorlock thing.
The rest of us shouldn't have to buy a certain product just because you have a Microsoft fixation.
This includes the Mac users with their copies of iWork.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
OpenOffice.org is a unix application rigged into running on Windows, sort of like Pidgin or GIMP on Windows.
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Windows
And if you go over each of the official build services, you will find that one of the big differences between go-oo.org, StarOffice, and OpenOffice.org vanilla is simply build engineering. Specifically, if they're building with cygwin, it provides some major performance issues. Although Windows has some native POSIX support, you don't use it quite the same way as you do in Linux or Solaris- rather than accounting for these differences, OOo uses a POSIX emulation layer in order to avoid extra work. Despite the fact that Windows is the primary platform for distribution, it's simply too much trouble for Sun or Novell to screw with it. I know Novell is trying to move their build service (go-oo) into a straight GCC cross-compile solution, so the speed issue will not get any better on Windows.
My point is that this is built with Visual Studio 2005 as more or less a standard Windows application, not a Vista/7 application- it's not using the NT 6+ API's, so it's invalid as a true performance test. This would be similar to us testing Microsoft Office 2003 (I don't think OOo is quite feature comparable to 2007) on Windows vs. Wine and then declaring that Windows is the hands down superior platform.
So let's talk about Platform inequities. The Microsoft optimizing C compiler is a better compiler than GCC-- but GCC is really not half bad anymore. Visual Studio's really superior because of its debugging, refactoring, and profiling tools, not so much JUST its compiler. I think this is part of why Firefox runs faster in Wine than in native Linux. In fact, by writing your application in like vim and debugging with gdb then just using Visual Studio as a build slave, you're really getting the short end of the stick in both directions. But I digress, a native unix application like OOo is a native unix application, and I wouldn't expect you to get tremendously better success in Windows unless you're running it on Interix or something. Of course, that's not to say Windows doesn't do unix tasks like NFS better than UNIX, just that it doesn't necessarily run direct unix code better.
But this is all fluff, the fact of the matter is that OOo is not a Windows application and most people are Windows users, so let's look at some logical alternatives:
So... if you're running Windows and you just need to type a paper for school for free/cheap.... why not just use Softmaker Office 2006... or Softmaker Office 2008 if you have 20 bucks. Just use Office 2007 if you're doing long reports- the bibliography handling alone will make the 60 bucks to get it through ultimate steal worthwhile when writing something long and arduous. Consider the time you save on formatting and grammar checking and such over a semester or two- it's worth it. If you're paying thousands a year for your education, the least you can do is not waste time with shitty office software.
Personally, I use OOo on my linux netbook and Softmaker Office 2006 on my Windows box and just keep my documents in ODF. It's the cheap-ass pro solution.
If the locked down root really bothers you that much do a "sudo su -" and reactivate the account. The same trick works in OSX if anyone has ever wondered. As long as your sudoers file gives your account ALL(ALL) it should work fine.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
OO.org is a surprisingly good Office replacement for a small non-IT business. Most often all they need is a text processor to write simple 1-2 page letters, and a spreadsheet for the accountant (no fancy macros etc). OO does that - and I had OO successfully adopted in such an environment. There was no way of replacing Windows with Linux (a lot of legacy third-party apps for making orders from suppliers, one for each, most of them written for Windows, and some even for DOS), but OO - no problem with that at all.
Who runs OO on Windows?
Every single person in my company. Most of our people are doing the actual work that earns us money rather than reading or writing word processor documents and spreadsheets. For us, the choice was between OO.o or nothing at all. There are still a few legacy installations of Office for people who actually need a few obscure features, but all employees have OpenOffice.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Same here. Over 50 computers in an educational research environment. Retail prices for Office Academic are outrageous ($250 to $600).
Select licensing (where a single license could be purchased for $35) has been discontinued and replaced with a 'package deal' where you pay ~$120 for Windows + Office + whatever crap they want to share but you can't just get 5 license, you need a license for every single machine in your department no matter whether they're even capable of running Windows (eg. PowerPC Mac) just because they would be covered for Office.
And then there is of course the nice Enterprise licensing. They give you a Windows and Office package for ~$100 or $60 for individual licenses per year with automatic upgrades but you have to cover every single person that might work in the offices and might use Office at some point. So we're stuck here again because we can't afford to pay for our 5 staff and the roughly 50 researchers that have a part-time appointment and only come in once in a while.
All of the above is affordable for large departments that have bunches of students and the budget to go along with it and they get a better deal out of the 'packages' but if you're running a non-Windows environment you're pretty much screwed
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