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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 :-)
the freedom involved in using ubuntu (or other distros) over mac and windows
Someday we'll hit the human carrying capacity. And the band will just play on.
These sorts of comparisons are fun from a head-to-head desktop performance perspective (with all the skewing that can bring, regardless of how impartial the tests might claim to be), but they're rarely reflective of how each OS would perform in mixed environments. I'll keep Mac OS X on the desktop, Ubuntu on the server (along with Debian), and Windows on someone else's computers, thank you.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
The first category of their "comparison" is the OS name? Really? That's enough for me to stop reading. The article doesn't even take itself seriously.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
: For testing Windows 7, I did a clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate Edition RTM on a Dell Inspiron E1505 notebook with 1GB of RAM and a 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo processor. To test Snow Leopard, I did an upgrade from Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook Air, which is loaded with a 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2GB of RAM. So the Windows machine is worse in just about every way. It doesn't even have the same type processor (Core Duo vs Core 2 Duo). He should have just installed both on the Macbook with Bootcamp.
It pretty much shows Ubuntu 9.10 beating Snow Leopard most of the time.
Yay, we've come a long way. Unfortunately Karmic also displays a few significant regressions from Jaunty, hopefully someone is trying to do some profiling for those...
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
The article linked to in the quote block is a terrible little summary of Snow Leopard and Windows 7, split unnecessarily over 5 pages, with nary a benchmark to be seen. Most of the comparisons are subjective, vague, and really not very useful to anyone.
The only benchmark I care about is porn downloading performance. My porn folder has several thousand files. In Windows, the "Save Image" dialog in Firefox always opens snappily. In Ubuntu, the same dialog somehow takes several seconds when there are many files. This makes porn downloading very painful. Until Ubuntu fixes this bug, I'm afraid I can't use it seriously.
I don't care about Ubuntu, but it's users seem happy. Anyway, Windows 7 and Snow Leopard are both performing very well for me on less then bleeding edge (3 years old) hardware and have fixed various irritations in their predecessors. Both MS and Apple seem to have created OS's that are well worth the cost and time to upgrade from earlier versions.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
99.997% of the people using these computers don't care.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
"Windows 7, on the other hand, remains the corporate standard"
That's fast, considering it was just RTM'd a few weeks ago and won't see a general release until Oct. 22nd.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
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.
Given that the license terms for OsX force (by the terms, nothing else) the user to run it on Apple hardware, the comparison is really one of hardware. Where we have two camps:
camp 1: Apple hardware; expensive and nice, and able to run all three operating systems as the user needs or desires. This provides the user with the ability to run all software on tidy but expensive hardware. Price is the barrier to entry.
camp 2: Windows vs. Ubuntu on anything other than Apple hardware. This opens up the low end of hardware as well as other form factors and styles of hardware that Apple doesn't think you need.
These articles suck because they assume that you CAN do the same task on other operating systems. For many tasks that just isn't so. I can't do serious CAD on my shiny Apple under Snow leopard or any other non-domesticated cat. There are a TON of applications that don't work or are painful under Linux. I love Linux and use it frequently, and I also love my Mac, but there are and always will be a need for the mainstream OS, and today that is Windows.
Sheldon
It's sole purpose is to spawn comments saying it's flawed and discuss totally off-topic matters. Sounds like your average slashdot poll to me!
First of all, I think that number is way too high. While it may seem that way sometimes, people do care. Maybe not even a majority of them, but enough that it does make a difference.
Second of all, those who in theory don't care, when explained why it's important, start to care. When you add up the cost of upgrading from Windows 95 to Windows XP to Windows Vista to Windows 7, along with all of its associated applications (I'm looking at you, Microsoft Office), versus the cost of upgrading through the various versions of Ubuntu or any of the other popular distributions and their associated applications, people really start to notice. One of my favorite things to do when I'm showing off Ubuntu to people is to open the package manager application. I tell them it's like the "Add or Remove Programs" applet, except that you can actually add programs. "All this stuff is available to you for no cost. Just click it, and you're good to go."
When you explain to these people how there is absolutely zero technical reason why they can't have a movie or song play on the DVD player in their living room, their iPod, their computer, and anywhere else (and anyway else) they want to play it, but that thanks to DRM systems incorporated into Windows 7 and Mac OS X, they are artificially restricted from doing so because some third party has decided to "manage their digital rights" for them, it definitely gets their attention.
When you explain to these people how honest competition from really smart people doing really smart things just because they can and because they feel that others should benefit from their collective knowledge is one of the reasons why a lot of commercial closed-source software these days that might otherwise cost hundreds or thousands of dollars is sold for really low cost or given away for free because of how hard it is to compete with volunteer work, it also gets their attention.
When I show people my web browser (Firefox with AdBlock) and how I don't see particularly onerous ads on web sites because the person who wrote my browser isn't beholden to financial interest or corporate mandates, it has raised a lot of eyebrows.
I could go on, but hopefully you see my point. Free and open source software benefits everyone, even people who don't otherwise care, even people who shun it in favor of commercial and/or closed-source options. And sitting back and saying that people don't care isn't very productive. It's in our best interest to actually educate people so that they will care.
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
Apple has confirmed that you can install the $30 upgrade version on top of Tiger.
At an Apple store I asked if the $30 dollar was an upgrade or a full install disk. I was told it was a full install disk and no copy of leopard or even tiger was required. I installed it successfully on my sisters computer AFTER wiping it clean (Read: no previously purchased OS installed.) It is a full blown OS for only $30 (not an upgrade disk.) They do sell a more expensive copy that comes bundled with iLife and iWork.
"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 heard it here first - August 28th is the new October 22nd. Update your calendars appropriately!
That green slime had it coming.
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.
Apple doesn't have an in between system. You have their all-in-one, but if you want to go past that, the next thing is a high end workstation. So suppose you want a quad core with a reasonable graphics card. Bare minimum price from Apple is $2700 for a quad with 3GB RAM, a 4870, and a 640MB HD. So if you want a similar thing from Dell you get a Core 2 Quad, 4GB RAM, a 4870 and a 750MB HD for $1150, less than half the price. Now you'd be correct in pointing out that the Mac Pro has hardware the Dell doesn't, like a second CPU slot. Ok, but what if you don't need that? Well too bad, you have to pay for it anyhow.
That is a big problem you get in to with Mac prices. In a very large segment of the market, they have no good offerings. You have to buy much higher end hardware which drives the price way up. You can argue all you like that it isn't "equal" it doesn't matter. If those extra features aren't needed or wanted, then all you are doing is driving the price up.
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.
Under section C.
The whole point of this test was to show how well Windows, SN, and Linux perform on similar hardware. Talking about old or cheap stuff is kind of...pointless.
>>>the response time for 10.5 leopard was the same on all the machines from the mac pro towers in the media labs to the 1998 imac net nodes tucked away in obscure corners
>>>
I don't believe this story. I don't think you intentionally misled us, but you probably didn't realize you can Not run 10.5 on 1998 iMacs. They don't meet the 866 megahertz minimum requirement. Perhaps they were running 10.4 just like my PowerMac runs, the latest version available for its speed.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Really, this is just silly.
How much time do you spend working with a computer during its lifetime? What does that work out to, in dollars?
Now how does that compare to the price of the hardware?
How much of your time will you expend in terms of the price difference in the hardware?
If you think that a better system will save you that much time in the life of the computer, it's a no-brainer.
People who work with their tools every day do NOT go scraping the bottom of the barrel when they shop for their tools. They go for the good stuff.
You are aware that the oldest Mac that will run Snow Leopard (the version discussed in this article) was made in 2006...?
No? Well, consider yourself informed.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
That's Leo, pard.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader