Ubuntu 10.10 vs. Mac OS X 10.6.5: A Competitive Race | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu 10.10 vs. Mac OS X 10.6.5: A Competitive Race

phoronix.com

12 pointsbconway17 comments

7 pages of comprehensively or willfully missing the point might be a record.

I've been using OSX and Win 7 for the last several months but I was pleasantly surprised by how nice the experience in Ubuntu 10.10 has been.

On my laptop that runs it, I did not have to once manually configure anything. No command-line magic, no struggling to get random things working, zip. It all just worked.

The experience has been very fluid, with notifications floating down along the right side, update notifications from Synaptic, etc. I am not a Linux fanboy by any stretch, but for once it isn't completely off the mark to say that Linux is catching up in the consumer space.

I tested this notion out recently when a (non-tech) friend wanted to use my laptop for something and did not even realize that he was using Linux.

And yet, none of this has any direct correlation with productivity.

Or user experience, for that matter.

I was pretty surprised that OpenGL performance was so bad. If that is in fact the case then that could certainly affect both productivity and user experience in certain scenarios.

In general, there was very little written about the performance of Snow Leopard on traditional benchmarks when it was released. Most of the comparisons were to previous OSX versions based on boot times etc.

However, Leopard's poor OpenGL performance was noted at the time of its release (but generally drowned out by the choruses of "it feels faster" from the echo chamber [see http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=s...].

More likely, an anti-correlation, since we all took time to at least glance over the article...

I've been using Ubuntu sinse 8.04, and have seen it progress quite a bit over the new LTS's and updates. You can use all of the os's for different things, like....windows will probably be more music advanced than the others, mac will probably be the same flashy os (linux is not made "flashy", but you can make it do cool styff and make it "flashy"), and linux will keep on upgrading until it is the main os around and microsoft along with mac will be whipped off the face of the earth....is why Bill Gates is worried about linux, because he realizes it. Just an afterthought Ubuntu has only been aroung for oh say.....5yrs maybe 6yrs or so....and it's already competing and about to surpass all the others, and it's free. Lol....not on a "bandwagon", but am pointing out the facts that have been there, just do a little searching and you'll find out yourself. Once Linux fixes the little bugs they have completely or at least a little more, it will be on top as soon as people start realizing it more, like they have been in the past year or so.

Dont really know what this prooves. We all know Apple is not packing the ultra highest end hardware into their products. Which is actually a good thing, because what they use has proven to be good and works for the usecase, see new Macbook Air.

I hoped for some comparision of the Usability and stuff like that for the latest versions of those OSes, but i just got a bunch of meaningless benchmarks.

My reasons for choosing an OS: -Software I want is written for it -User Experience is reasonable -supports my outboard hardware

So I use either a Mac Pro or a macbook pro with snow leopard and windows 7 on it. Every requirement above is satisfied by either OS. Linux, unfortunately, does not meet the first or last requirement for me. As a hobbyist musician, I get the desire for more performance per clock cycle, but today any OS and even a netbook offers enough performance to get some work done. I guess Im a Macindows fan boy.

I see merit in performance testing the various OSes out there, and its safe to say that all of them need improvement in some area. But this does little to make me want to give up my software/hardware and make do with an open source alternative.

Were these installed on the same drive, in separate partitions? Because that makes a difference in benchmarking. The outer sections of the drive are much faster than the inner sections. So two partitions on the same drive will have different performance.

Great, but what I really want to know is how fast Photoshop runs on Ubuntu 10.10. How many frames per second can I get on WoW? Does Pro Tools run more efficiently?

Is it a "race", really, when one of the "contestants" isn't aware, or care, that the other "contestant" is even there?

While Apple fanboys have a rather condescending view of open source software, for those of us outside that little bubble, articles like this might actually be relevant.

It may be worth discussing weather or not Apple has Ubuntu or Linux on their radar.

Also, it's rude to call someone a fanboy of anything, I expect that from some sites, but I'd like to see less of that around here. That, and saying anything at all about Ubuntu does not qualify as a statement about OSS as a whole. After all, OSX is full of OSS software.

Nice strawman. I use and contribute to open source.

I don't think Apple is looking at Ubuntu though, certainly don't think they consider them an opponent in any race.

Benchmarks are so 2003.

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