Can Ubuntu Linux Consume Less Power Than Windows?

An anonymous reader writes "Now that the big Linux kernel power regression has been solved it looks like Ubuntu 11.04 can compete with Microsoft Windows 7 in terms of overall power usage. New tests revealed by Phoronix show the power consumption of Ubuntu 11.04 vs. Windows 7 operating systems. On a range of different systems, the power consumption of the Linux OS was comparable to that of Windows except for a few select workloads and systems."

Comments

Can it crash less often than Windows?

[spiffmastercow]

Ever since I upgraded my netbook to Ubuntu 11.04, it crashes randomly and often. I'm talking more that Windows 95 with no patches. Hell, more than Windows 3.0. While solving power management would be nice, it's a moot point if the computer is always off because I can never use it.

Re:Can it crash less often than Windows?

[Pausanias]

It may not be the hardware. Non-LTS Ubuntus are full of regressions. Affects some significant minority of users, but not enough to affect ship date.

The worst regressions are always fixed in the next release. They are rarely backported to non-LTS, a strategy which is designed to keep you constantly upgrading. Except that once one regression is fixed, more creep up. If you're lucky, your won't be affected. But there are ALWAYS regressions.

I basically treat non-LTS Ubuntus as betas for the LTS. I don't expect them to work. I expect many things to be broken. Many of the regressions are insidious---you don't discover them until later in the game. And, dirty secret is that once LTS is long in the tooth, only security updates get backported to LTS. Got a non-functioning file open dialog? Too bad, not going to backport the fix to LTS, you can rot in hell or upgrade. (read the final few comments, where the dev tells me I need to upgrade from LTS to non-LTS to get back a functioning file open dialog box.)

Bitter much? Yes I am, for a fan that's been with them for 7 years now.