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OS Performance — Snow Leopard, Windows 7, and Ubuntu 9.10
BeckySharp writes "With the nearly simultaneous release of Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 'Snow Leopard' (available right now) and Microsoft's Windows 7 (available Oct. 22), you get the inevitable debate: Which is the better operating system, Windows 7 or Snow Leopard? To help determine that, Computerworld's Preston Gralla put both operating systems through their paces, selected categories for a head-to-head competition, and then chose a winner in each category." Relatedly, Phoronix has posted Snow Leopard vs. Ubuntu 9.10 benchmarks. They ran tests from ray tracing to 3D gaming to compilation. Their tests show Ubuntu 9.10 winning a number of the tests, but there are some slowdowns in performance and still multiple wins in favor of Snow Leopard, so the end result is mixed.
The most thoughtful article I read that truly explains what the technical tradeoffs are with dock/taskbar design: here.
On a similar topic, if you want to work on the home page GUI for Android, there is an on-going project as well.
The good news for consumers is that both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard are great-looking OS. Computerworld is just wrong to give a point to Apple on price :-)
30 bucks..
a proprietary OS for 30 bucks deserves 5 points on price.
apple releasing a version of osx for 30 bucks is metaphorically equivalent to an 2010 infiniti M slapped with a 20k(US) sticker price.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I'm really enjoying Windows 7 (aside from audio troubles in L4D). Thus far I've been impressed with the stability, performance and compatibility. I do, however, wholeheartedly agree with the assessment regarding price - it's absurd. Yes, Win 7 is a big improvement. It's also the sort of polished product one would have expected when they first bought Vista. We all know Microsoft is desperately hoping to win back some respect with Win 7. You'd think they'd have the brains to fix the pricing / packaging issues at the same time. Apparently, that's not the case.
Would I recommend it to a friend? Absolutely. Would I suggest that it's actually worth the retail price? I'm not so sure. It may be if you're upgrading from Windows XP, but if you're upgrading form Vista you're getting shafted.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Its only 30 if you forked out 130 for the last one, so you could really call it 160.
The place where I do give them kudos is the family pack, I can upgrade five machines for $50... only have two currently.
OK, so I have a second kudo, they don't have some weird multiple available configurations locked to a DVD like windows, I can install SL on a fresh machine using the same disc as I did for the upgrade without giving it a second thought.
But giving it points for being only $30, look if it is such a minimal upgrade; for some its a total no go as they cannot install it because they run PowerPC; makes me wonder, why didn't it just download and install like the patch it comes across as?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Is Apples GCC 4.3 significantly different from a vanilla GCC 4.3? I know they've been doing a bunch of work on llvm, so they can get a compiler not under the gplv3, is this part of the difference?
I use Ubuntu for my daily work, mainly because we install what we develop on Linux servers. It is just much easier to have on my desktop the same environment that I'll be facing with customers. I do not care a whole lot about performance, but I am very grateful that is so stable. A windows desktop would not compare.
Another thing I noticed with Vista, is that it keeps the hard drive light on at all times, no matter what I'm doing (or not doing). This can downgrade performance to almost unusable levels at times. With Ubuntu, it make more sense when the hard drive is accessed and the cache is clearly working well.
Having said that, it is funny to see that Ubuntu outperforms Mac in the categories that matter to me.
Cheers,
E. Conde
jBilling.com Open Source Billing
How many people are still upgrading their systems often enough for this to be relevant to them anyways? I was a pathological upgrader for years, but I honestly have spent on average less than $100 on hardware per year over the past 5 years. Granted this is partially because of how my financial situation changed in that time, but also because from my vantage point it doesn't seem that there has been any great progress made in the past 5 years in terms of hardware or software that requires new hardware.
Honestly, with the exception of the gamers that want to run Half Life 7 or Quake 9, are many people really bothering to upgrade anymore? From my vantage point it will be surprising to see Windows 7 do well commercially - not because of vista - because there haven't been great reasons to upgrade from the hardware and software of 5 years ago.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
In the Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7 article, I ran across this gem:
That's because they're in the Optional section of Windows Updates on Windows 7, bundled as "Windows Live Essentials."
It's not hard to miss, seeing as it's the only entry in the Optional section (because although Virtual PC and XP Mode are also optional, but they're still release candidates).
Also, why is Previous Versions not mentioned here? It's not new either, Windows Vista had the Previous Versions functionality.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Well theoretically you are breaking a EULA if you install Snow Leopard without a Leopard license for that computer. But Apple probably won't care.
Not just that, but doesn't Apple offer a nice discount for families upgrading several machines? Windows 7 is not too expensive (especially since I always get an OEM version), but Microsoft's bulk discount is a joke. If you're a family upgrading 4 computers (or a single basement dwelling geek upgrading 4), you'll be paying 4 times the full price.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
For some reason, despite the price tag of zero and the hardcore love of a thousand morons, OpenOffice makes every single document I produce or open from any office suite to any office suite look like total and absolute ass. Maybe it's worth $65 to me for my documents not to induce eye strain. Aesthetics are extremely important in the "real world" (see: the desktop usage scenario where most F/OSS does not exist.)
Because we all just -know- how great MS Office is at keeping formatting between versions. Ever had different versions of Office and open up the same document? Take the document from Word 2003 from work and open it on Office XP at home and it looks totally different. Even documents between versions don't show up the same. If you want things to look the exact same, export it as a PDF.
That's absolutely wrong. It's in our best interest to ignore these products until they become worth showing people. Some open source projects have graduated and are worth showing users (ie 7-zip) while others are utterly terrible and only have popularity due to an arbitrary freetard bias (openoffice, koffice, compiz, etc..) so they need to be ignored so the developers don't get the idea into their heads that they've accomplished something worthwhile and (heaven-forbid) stop going back to the drawing board, where they should be firmly planted.
While KOffice isn't really that great, Open Office is perhaps the best office suite save for iLife and MS Office. And yes, there are a -lot- of others, (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_suite). Compiz is pretty good for eye candy, it works much nicer than Vista's "3-D effects" and more impressive than OS X's.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
please link EULA stating this.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Nope, it wasn't exactly trimming with a script. They're using LLVM and clang now instead of bread and butter gcc4.2. which i believe isn't stable/tuned to powerpc.
This i think is also a political move, because gcc 4.3 and up are GPL3 (please correcte me if i'm wrong). FreeBSD is also doing this.
>>>Win7 may be if you're upgrading from Windows XP
I don't think so. I have XP. It costs about $200 to do the upgrade, but why bother? For just a little more I could walk into Walmart during a sales event, and get a whole new PC with the Win7 OS included "free". Yes that PC would be bottom-line, but it's still better hardware than the single-core P4 I have now.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Like... refurbished G5s that Apple sold in 2007?
I mean, we are talking about an OS sold in 2009 that won't run in hardware that was still being produced in 2006.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
You are correct, the main difference is the QuickPath Interconnect speed which is faster in the Xeon chip.Which for the end user, I imagine would be hard to see a difference. But for the price difference, he could have picked up the i7 975 Extreme Edition, which has the same QPI (for a single chip) and is clocked at 3.33ghz with an unlocked multiplier and STILL be several hundred dollars shy of Apple. Also given decent air cooling most people assume they will reach about 4ghz overclocked. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Nehalem_(microarchitecture)
I just deleted my Win7 partition and went back to my trusty XP Pro Sp3 x86. - mainly because, IMO, Windows 7 _isn't_ a decent upgrade for XP users who (by now should) know what they're doing. However, I would recommend it to Vista users looking for a speed boost, or people new to Windows.
What's nice about 7 is that there's a lot less mucking about in driver control panels when using bog-standard hardware, which makes it a lot easier for beginners to slide in and start working without much fuss. The "find drivers online" function actually works now (at least for popular hardware - obviously stuff like the fingerprint reader and HSDPA adapter on my Thinkpad weren't found off the bat), and things like display drivers are automatically installed with no fuss at all (and actually work right away).
Other advantages over XP include:
-Hooking up an HDMI monitor now automatically enables it too (in XP you'd need to plug in and then activate the secondary display manually in the Display Properties or a program like Ultramon. Little tweaks like this are obviously nice.
-Per-Application volume mixing, just like Vista... I'm still wondering if there's a way to add this to XP - that would pretty much take care of my needs for the next few years or so :)
-Aero Snap - very useful, and the XP addon (AeroSnap) that does this is sadly pretty unstable.
-Mobile Device Center - didn't try it out, but it's GOT to be better than the steaming pile of crap called ActiveSync
Other than that, it was pretty much just filled with annoyances... the interface has become far too user-friendly :)
Disadvantages over Windows XP:
-Audio engine is still laggier with ASIO, at least with my E-Mu interface and with on-board. Latencies are roughly twice as high as in XP, and very unstable (In-Out 7ms in XP, ~10-20ms in Win7).
-Aero drains battery life like crazy, and Aero basic without translucency is the ugliest crap I've ever seen on an OS. Windows 3.11 looked better than that... Sure, you can just switch to a standard XP visual style, but having installed the required DLLs for that on a Vista installation before, I didn't feel like going to the trouble of that...
-Aero causes my graphics chip to run very hot - with power management enabled, or the performance locked to Standard 2D mode, I get about 45 degrees C at idle. Since the CPU and GPU are all cooled by the same big heatsink/fan assembly, the CPU runs nice and cool (30 degrees) when the GPU is under 50 degrees - but when running Vista, the CPU idle temperature climbs to 45+ degrees, because the GPU is idling at almost 60C...
-Once again, driver availability. My laptop is less than half a year old... You'd think that manufacturers would have released working drivers for at least Vista 64-bit by now - at least for hardware that's still on the market today... but it's still the same old problem. I'm assuming 32-bit support is better.
All in all, upgrading from XP isn't worth it, IMO... Causes more problems than it's worth.
New users, on the other hand, or people sick of Vista's crawling speed (although it seemed to me that Win7 just makes certain processes, which used to lock up the system, low priority), should definitely be encouraged to use Windows 7. The benefits (speed, ease of use) are pretty much no-brainers, and the learning curve (as far as I can tell) is far less steep than that of 2K/XP.
So... its a graphical versioning system. Sure, there was nothing quite as good as it before (though I still mostly use iBackup), but it isn't a new or innovative idea. Its a backup... I've been doing that for around 20 years before Time Machine came around, I'll continue doing it years after OS X dies.
It's like SVN, but for all your files. Revision history!
That alone makes it better than "just a backup".