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.

Comments

Re:Dock/Taskbar design

[kc8apf]

And how does your system compare spec-wise to a fully decked out mac pro? It doesn't. A top of the line mac pro would include (2) Nehalem processors (8 cores total), 32GB of RAM, 4TB of disk.... Your system doesn't even come close.

In terms of the $4k mac pro, it still outspecs what you've listed. If you are going to do comparisons, at least use comparable parts.

Ew

[kuzb]

Operating system name:

OK, let's get this issue out of the way quickly. Which operating system would you rather run: one with the cool name Snow Leopard, or one with the unimaginative moniker Windows 7?

Enough said.

The Winner: Snow Leopard. Wild animals are inherently more exciting than panes of glass.

The first comparison made is the name, and has nothing to do with the performance of the operating systems.

Who the hell writes this kind of tripe? More importantly, who the hell wants to read this tripe?

Re:Dock/Taskbar design

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why I have a perfectly-good G4 PowerMac, but it stopped being supported only 4 years after I got it (with 10.4), while my ancient PC still gots "juice".

Good Lord, you're always whinging about that shit -- previously it was "OS X 10.2 sucks" and "the old G3 that somebody gave me for free sucks". Get over yourself already, Apple doesn't cater to the thrift store shopping crowd and no-one owes you a free state-of-the-art computer.

Re:But they should, they just don't know it.

[commodore64_love]

Linux has too many limitations. For example I use a dialup ISP called "netscape", also a program called "web accelerator" when traveling. But when I tried to run it on my Linux laptop it crashed and burned. (And no Wine did not run it either.) I did find a way to dial directly to the ISP, but without the accelerator it was slow as snails.

I didn't experiment further (the laptop is still new to me), but suspect Linux won't run lots of things, like PC-based games which expect to see Windows not linux, or Microsoft Office, or Xilinx FPGA Designer software, or Itunes, and on and on.

Re:30? Try 130.

[Uberbah]

Good thing EULA's are unenforceable notions of fancy, then. And I mean that in the legal sense, not in the you-can-get-away-with-it sense.

WTF?

[db32]

This guy gave Windows 7 the win on Control Panel vs the OS X configuration screen? Clearly he is in some drug induced hallucination. I refuse to work on people's Vista/Win7 problems because I can't just fix shit. I have to go through a maze of stupid Fisher Price interface bullshit and stupid questions just to get at the setting I want. In OS X I can pretty much get at any setting I need in a pretty intuitive fashion. The Vista/Win7 nonsense makes XP look like it has a fine tuned configuration interface with all of its hidden tabs and registry only configurable bits.