Chrome OS Benchmarked Against Moblin, Ubuntu Netbook, More

An anonymous reader writes "Using the latest build of Google's Chromium OS source code, Phoronix built it out to run on a Samsung netbook and ran sixteen benchmarks, putting it up against Moblin 2.1, Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10, openSUSE 11.2, and Fedora 12. They ran some of their usual desktop benchmarks (encoding, video, etc..), but more interestingly they ran a number of battery, CPU usage, and memory consumption tests under different settings that show some of the advantages and disadvantages for each of the Linux distributions, and spotted a few bugs along the way."

Comments

If you really care about Linux performance...

[Silverlancer]

There's been an enormous improvement in the Linux scheduler in recent months--in some cases the performance improvements are as high as 60-80% with simple multithreaded apps like video encoders. The instant 2.6.32 comes out officially, expect to start seeing some completely absurd results in stupid "comparisons between Linux distros" like these, where the distros that happened to update to .32 trash the ones that haven't yet.

Re:Shocking.

[Enderandrew]

Does the Phonorix test suite even run on Windows yet? I don't think that's released yet.

Phonoroix does benchmark against the Mac all the time.

Re:Shocking.

[RanCossack]

Notice they didn't bother comparing any of them to either Windows 7 or Mac OS X. They wouldn't want open source to look bad, would they? LOL.

I know, right? Moblin's boot time can't hold a candle to Windows 7's, but the real powerhouse is Vista -- a boot time score higher than Moblin, Ubuntu, Suse, and Fedora's all *combined*... and then *squared*.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to dominate a game of golf.

Re:Let's stop calling it "Chrome OS".

[DragonWriter]

Repeat after me. I want my applications locally, where I can use them regardless of having a network or not.

The intent is for that facility to be provided by web apps with offline functionality, something that has been important to Google since before Chrome OS was conceived (or, at least, announced as something they were working on.)

The whole world could burn down and I could still do my work with my PC (as long as I survived).

The only initial barrier to do that with Chrome seems to be that the first time a user logs on, network connectivity and a Google Account is required, although Google has stated that that initial limitation is just that: they want to work with other authentication sources, specifically they've cited having an OpenID alternative as a goal. While this still requires network connectivity, something as simple as a home LAN with an lightweight server doing authentication would work. And, since Chrome OS is targetted for netbooks, a certain degree of network dependency is not as critical as it would be if it was intended to be a general-purpose desktop OS.

Now, you may have an issue with the entire idea of a netbook-specific OS and prefer just a general purpose desktop OS with slight visual adaptation to the limit screen real estate -- and that's certainly a reasonable preference. But I don't think that all netbook users are going to share that preference.

I don't think a great deal of thought actually went into it.

I think that its pretty clear from reading the pages on the design and plans that a great deal of thought has gone into it.

I think its equally clear that what has been released has not realized all of the things that are planned for it, and that it is not intended to be a production release, a release candidate, a beta, or even an alpha release, but more an opening up of the development code base and the work-in-progress plans to public view and comment.