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OS X 10.8 vs. Ubuntu On Apple Hardware, Benchmarked
An anonymous reader writes "OS X 10.8 has been benchmarked against Ubuntu Linux with some interesting results. From the tests on a Apple Mac Mini and Apple MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion was clearly superior when it came to the graphics performance, but the rest of the time the operating systems performed quite closely with no clear winner. OS X also seems to have greater performance issues with solid-state drives than Linux."
Apple hardware performs better when run by Apple device drivers.
News at 11.
I made the mistake of "upgrading" two Ubuntu 12.04 desktops to solid state drives, only to find the performance increase was trivial.
If a process isn't disk-intensive, an SSD will make no difference. If it's not seek intensive, a cheap SSD may actually be worse; if I remember correctly, sustained reads from my 'Green' hard drive are 80-100MB per second, whereas one of my SSDs only gets about 40MB per second.
The big benefit is reduced seek time, and a lesser benefit from faster sustained reads on the more modern and/or expensive SSDs. It won't make games run faster unless they're streaming from disk, or improve CPU-intensive 3D rendering, or anything much else that doesn't require a lot of disk seeks.
Also I'm kinda curious: Why would spend twice as much to buy an Intel Mac PC if they're just running linux? I'd buy a regular PC for 1/2 to 2/3rd the cost.
I looked for a silent small footprint linux pc. I was unable to find one. That's why I bought a Mac Mini. It runs Linux flawlessly... and silently thanks to the fanless design and SSD.
People wanting an HD screen on a laptop might also have to buy Apple hardware even though they plan to use only Linux.
Hope you mean TRIM and not defragmenting, which occurs when a file is deleted on an SSD, not when one is written. You don't defragment an SSD, as there's no gain at all.