Revisiting Linux Part 1: A Look at Ubuntu 8.04
by Ryan Smith on August 26, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
CPU Benchmarks
We’ll start our short look at Ubuntu’s performance with our CPU intensive benchmarks. Up first is SuperPi, a single-threaded pi-calculating benchmark. Here we time how long it takes to calculate Pi to 1 million digits.
We ran this test several times more than usual just to make sure we weren’t seeing any kind of error. The Linux version of SuperPi really is about 30% faster than the Vista version. Keep this in mind, this will be an important point later.
Meanwhile the situation for LAME is inverted. Vista outscores the Linux version by nearly 20%.
Using the cross-platform X264-based Handbreak for our video encoding test, Vista once again pulls ahead of Linux.
Once more Vista is ahead by a large margin.
From what we can tell, there’s little-if-any innate performance advantage to Vista or Linux in these benchmarks. Our working theory is that the performance difference comes down to the compiler used. Many Linux applications are compiled with GCC, while for Windows it’s either the Visual Studio compiler, or Intel’s own compiler (which is also available for Linux). There’s also a matter of compiler settings, as we saw in our quick breakout of Firefox benchmarks.
Meanwhile SuperPi uses a lot of hand-rolled code, although we’re still not sure why it’s outperforming Vista on Linux by as much as it is.
To shed a little more light on this idea of compiler performance, we have a few benchmarks of Windows application performance under Ubuntu through Wine.
Here we see a most amazing thing: Ubuntu is outperforming Windows at running Windows applications! As we’ve removed the influence of compilers the Photoshop results are particularly interesting. From what we can tell it’s normally as fast under Linux as it is Vista, however there seems to be a short gap of low-CPU usage when running it under Vista that doesn’t occur when running it under Ubuntu. As a result Ubuntu finishes a few seconds earlier.
There are a number of conditional cases that mean that applications running under Wine don’t always match or beat Windows performance, but in our tests there’s no performance hit to using Wine to run Windows applications.
These results also lend a great deal of support to the idea that there’s a significant difference in performance between the two operating systems due to their compilers. This goes particularly for the LAME benchmark, where the performance gap melts away under Wine. This is something we’re going to have to look in to in the future.
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fepple - Friday, August 28, 2009 - link
That is exactly how the usability tests are performed. Developer asks Mom "can you change the background" then records what they dofepple - Friday, August 28, 2009 - link
So i tried to find some links about this relating to gnome, but only got some pretty old ones. There are other methods they are using as well, like the 100 paper cuts idea. honestly have a look around and you'll see how much of a focus it is, particularly with ubuntuap90033 - Friday, August 28, 2009 - link
Face it, Linux is still back in Windows 2000 days. Try getting SLI working, 1080P working right, games working. IT IS Way to much trouble and damn near impossible for regular users. In Windows or Mac its next to no work and very little issue. Wake up guys, Linux has Potential but thats it. BECAUSE those who advocate it spend so much energy defending what is "easy" to them when they ought to use that energy making it ACTUALLY easy and USER USER USER USER (DO YOU UNDERSTAND THIS WORD?) FRIENDLY... NOT PROGRAMMER FRIENDLY...newend - Wednesday, September 2, 2009 - link
All of the things you mention are probably not that easy for grandma to do either. People thrive on saying it's so hard to do things in Linux, but I think it's generally not intuitive to use most computer systems. Imagine if you had no exposure to computers how difficult any system would be. A few years ago a friend of mine wanted me to install some software on her Mac. I had no idea how to do it. I've been using computers since I was 5 years old, but had to google for information on installing software.I actually think that Yum/Apt repos actually make it significantly easier to install software. The other day I wanted an application to take a photo with my webcam. I simply did a search "yum search webcam" and looked at the descriptions of included software and found Cheese which did exactly what I wanted.
When you know exactly what you want, and it's not available in the repos you use, I agree it is more difficult to get it installed. Still with both Red Hat/Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu, you can do an install by downloading a package file. This doesn't get you the benefit of automatic updates, but it's just as easy to install as an MSI file.
fepple - Friday, August 28, 2009 - link
Well maybe they would want '1080p' but I'm not sure how that could be a problem unless you have some strange hardware that requires a specific driver... like another OS sometime needs you to go to a manufacturers website ;)Penti - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
Installing nVidia drivers and XBMC or mplayer isn't that hard.But keep in mind there is only homebrew codecs on Linux which OEMs like Dell can never ship with there computers and has limited support of proprietary formats such as BD. It's the same codecs as ffdshow, or as in XBMC or VLC on Windows. What's lacking is a PowerDVD with BD support. w32codecs is also available for gstreamer, giving alternative support for WMV and such. Installing ubuntu-restricted-extras is essentially the only thing you need for it to work in Totem if you don't need/have VDPAU support. XBMC is definitively a decent platform to playback warez. You need to rip blurays to be able to play them back at all though. But an Ion is definitively powerful enough for 1080p h264 under linux. But because all that software contains unlicensed patented codecs Canonical don't officially support any of it. So it won't work on ubuntu OOB. Codecs aren't free.
fepple - Friday, August 28, 2009 - link
Thing is, 'regular users' dont care about SLI, 1080P and Windows Games... "where is the browser/word processor/email?" :)CastleFox - Friday, April 9, 2010 - link
Great review. Thank you for reviewing 8.04 LTS Please review 10.04 when it comes out. I am interested to see if they software center has changed the authors opinions.tiffanyrose - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 - link
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