Benchmarked: Ubuntu vs Vista vs Windows 7

Agreed. In the end it is just friendly (we hope) chat. Its a bitt like buying wine from expert opinion. What works for you is the one to have.
But OS's are axiomatically supposed tp progress. Perhaps we have got to the end of the line with present technology? The only way to go at present is to have more built in facilities, ie. Bloat.
I am sure, in spite of the differences in opinion, that most would agree that the progression, approx every three or four years, is not really worth the man in the street spending another £100 or so for.
But then again, I have two cars. One is 10 years old , the other one year old. The former has all the features of the newer car and performs almost as well.

Fascinated and very interested. Is there any public available download for viewing?

By the way. Anyone remember Beos? Best OS I ever tested but hey went bankrupt and hardly got off the desktop.

napilopez said:

Interesting. I'm not sure how effective those benchmarks are in representing real world usage though. I mean, I don't copy files that often. I found the boot time thing surprising. I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 x86, Vista x64, and 7 x64, and 7 clearly boots quicker than the rest on my system. Same for install. Seems to vary, but yea.

I thought the same as wel. I'm pretty sure Windows 7 boots up faster than what was benchmarked. I'll have to have a look when I get home

I'm new to this forum so I just found this thread; so back to this benchmark between Ubuntu, Vista, and Win7. Comparing Ubuntu install time, as well as Ubuntu loading time to Vista or Win7 doesn't make any sense, and is not very honest. Yes Ubuntu, as most other Linux distro installs and boot faster than Windows; the reason is so obvious: Ubuntu doesn't install as much stuff (purely OS related I mean) as Wndows does. Try booting Win95 on a machine today and see the results , then again, compare to Vista or Seven. This is ridiculous and very symptomatic in the Linux community to post stuff like that on the internet.

adding: the only relevant thing in the benchmark is the file copying. Linux is faster than Windows in that case, no doubt (better memory management); even if things were still quite acceptable with XP, and are not anymore since Vista came out, concerning the copying of files, especially small ones; same disaster in Seven. I started a new thread here this morning about that. Hope I get some input

edit: what the benchmark also doesn't say, is the amount of time you gotta spend on Linux updating (from repositories) everything after the install, and this again several times a year, concerning core components (Kernel and GUI).

just wanted to add, even if that's a bit off topic in this thread: please guys, do me a favor, forget Ubuntu a bit. Ubuntu is just a distro in Linux, Ubuntu is not Linux. There are much better options than Ubuntu if you ever give Linux a try like Mandriva, Suse, PCLinuxOS or Fedora. Ubuntu is the one I've always avoided for reasons I won't relate here (not the right thread for it).

So again, whether you ever intend to try Linux or not, stop thinking of Ubuntu as the Linux distro, 'cause it's not. Ubuntu might have a large community, but in terms of OS quality it just doesn't deserve any title, and certainly not to be mentioned everytime people outside the Linux community have a talk about Linux

I did noticed the huge difference in moving files from one HD to the other. So much faster with the newer builds of Windows 7. This makes backing up and restoring so much faster and is a very useful function for me.

Sorry ... but I just don't get the whole obsession with "benchmarking". From my experience (having done Computer Systems Engineering for over 30 years), benchmarking is a lot like statistics in that you can rig it to produce just about whatever you want.

To me (and, opinions WILL vary on this), the two things that matter are (1) how long it takes from login to a full functional desktop, and (2) the real-time responsiveness of the system once logged in.

The first matters because I reboot my systems every day, thus, I have to spend time each day waiting for the desktop to appear and the rotating widgets and other things to stop so I can actually start doing something. My personal experience in doing this (on the same machine) in order of slowest to fastest is: Vista Ultimate 32-bit, Ubuntu 32-bit, Windows 7 beta 32-bit. Windows 7 is a LOT faster, along the lines of less than a minute from login to working desktop -- and I have the same apps loaded in it as I do in Vista. Vista, in contrast, takes well over a minute to get from login to usefulness. I know that doesn't sound long, but when you're sitting their waiting, it SEEMS long.

The second matters because waiting on the machine is frustrating when you're actually trying to get something done. Not surprisingly (at least, to me), the responsiveness order is the same. Seven has the least delays, Vista has the most.

I moved over to Ubuntu from Vista because I got sick of the delays in Vista (login and real-time) -- also, I wanted to experience an "alternate" environment without having to spend the money for a Mac. And while I have been pleasantly surprised with Ubuntu, I have been even more surprised with Seven.

And yeah, Ubuntu is NOT Linux, it's just a distro -- and it does have more problems in some areas than other distros. But as said, that's not a topic for this thread.

And, yeah, it does take time to do the updates from Synaptic -- but it's five minutes or less every couple of days, and when a kernel update comes through, it might take a whole ten minutes because I have to manually reinsert my custom configs into the files that got overwritten. But, Windows Updates take at least as much time -- so, I see this updating situation as "a wash".

Only my opinions...