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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.
"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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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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
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.