OS X 10.8 vs. Ubuntu On Apple Hardware, Benchmarked | Hacker News Reader

OS X 10.8 vs. Ubuntu On Apple Hardware, Benchmarked

phoronix.com

68 pointsquicklycode61 comments

Some of these tests are clearly testing the compiler more than the OS. Looking over the scimark tests, for example, the FFT, LU, and SOR numbers are (at least) an order of magnitude too low to be using optimized libraries that are part of the system. For these benchmarks, we're seeing the compiler quality of compiler codegen on a reference C implementation (OS tasks like malloc/free efficiency may have a small effect, but it should be essentially negligible).

No one interested in performance would actually use that code on OS X or Ubuntu; you would use a tuned library.

Like the article title, there is no clear winner but it does look like certain operations have been optimised on each platform in response to, I'd guess, expected user needs. Which isn't surprising, but it is interesting seeing what specifically each OS designer thinks is the expected use that does require time spent optimising.

Also, quite an in-depth piece of coverage, a lot of benchmarking doesn't take real world into account and just runs 3DMarks or similar.

If there are cases important to you as a user, file bug reports about the performance. OS developers can (and will) guess about what scenarios are most performance-critical, but feedback from developers and users ("doing X is important to me, and is slow on your system" / "why is Y slower on your system than on your competitors" / etc) is enormously valuable and quite welcome. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Speaking as an OS developer, poor performance absolutely is a bug, and your bug report will be taken seriously.

I don't think it's specifically poor performance, but places that have attracted more optimisation attention. An operating system is a big old chunk of work, and not every element can be honed to a fine edge. It's good that OS developers do actually respond and focus on areas users have flagged up as well, builds better systems.

No clear winner...

I'd say there is a winner : Linux. Isn't it interesting that a software developped by a team of hacker (I'd say a chaotic, huge and ever growing) can make a monster like Ubuntu and get performances that don't pale against another OS which is designed by a very organised, super funded, super focused team of carefully selected programmers...

Ok, I assume a rather romatic view of linux development, but I'd bet I'm not that far from reality :-)

Your argument is that Linux is the winner because despite all odds, it doesn't suck shit as much as you'd expect it to?

How does comparing very favourably against OSX imply that it merely "sucks shit" less?

Probably referring to the All Software Sucks camp of philosophy.

It's a pretty solid argument if the premises are correct:

The article benchmarks the performance of Ubuntu and OSX, and finds them to be in a dead heat.

Ubuntu was developed at a lower investment on Canonical's part (OR with a larger team of less skilled developers, I can't tell which is more important to frownie).

Therefore Ubuntu represents a greater achievement relative to the resources invested than OSX does.

> relative to the resources invested

While Canonical has invested limited resources in Ubuntu, the overall amount of resources used to create the Linux kernel, the Debian toolchain, and the Ubuntu OS are far greater.

One could say they match or exceed the "resources invested" in OSX, which also uses a range of Open Source software and history (to name just one extremely important part: BSD Unix).

The two are actually broadly comparable in the work and effort put in, and apparently the results as well.

You could argue that Ubuntu has the greater achievement because they spent less money on it, but given the actual value put in, it seems like a moot point.

> Therefore Ubuntu represents a greater achievement relative to the resources invested than OSX does.

Certainly. However, I think most people looking at benchmarks like these are deciding which operating system to actually use. An entire OS created by a single teenager would be a stunning achievement, even if it ran terribly. That doesn't mean you'd choose it as your primary OS.

As it stands, the Ubuntu team can stand proud that they stood toe to toe with the Apple behemoth. But these benchmarks really don't give anyone (on either side) a compelling reason to switch.

Let's not forget that GNU/Linux is intended to run on any damn machine you throw at it, while the latest version of OSX is only intended to run on Apple hardware that is no more than 3 years old. It's amazing that Ubuntu is even competitive with OSX given these circumstances.

Well... Right from the article:

    Unfortunately, switchable/hybrid graphics remain 
    a pain in the ass under Linux. With Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, 
    the 2010 MacBook Pro had problems with either 
    open-source driver.

That gcc and a lot of the open source technology used by both OSs, is a win for the Open Source movement, and also may explain why performance is similar.

A lot of the linux and GNU software is hardly just developed by "teams of hackers" at this point. As someone who got sent to a RedHat class for a week ( migrating from hpux -> linux), I can attest Linux has large corporate support at this point. My former employer wouldn't have touched it if it wasn't supported.

[pedantic] gcc isn't used much in OSX anymore; the 'gcc' that ships in OSX is a pre-GPL3 version (as are any remaining GNU tools) that's on top of LLVM, and I believe the OS itself and most apps are compiled with clang now. (though LLVM and clang were both born from similar communities)

"That gcc and a lot of the open source technology used by both OSs, is a win for the Open Source movement, and also may explain why performance is similar."

I'm afraid Dr. Stallman killed that with GPLv3. Each new OS X release comes with less and less GNU software.

Linux is very well funded too und the developers are some of the most talented system programmers of our time. Just some facts from Annual Linux Development Report:

* Seventy-five percent of all kernel development is done by developers who are being paid for their work. * The top 10 organizations sponsoring Linux kernel are Red Hat, Intel, Novell, IBM, Texas Instruments, Samsung, Oracle and Google - all big boys * Linux has Linus :)

Actually I think Linux has an organizational advantage, because companies can share risks.

I believe there is an order of magnitude more people/companies involved on the entire Linux ecosystem than there's people involved on OS X. Obviously there's an overlap, some Apple engineers work on open source components, but even then the OS X stack shares more with FreeBSD than Linux.

So, yeah, you're being romantic.

What a waste of time, OS X has a usable, stable graphical interface, Ubuntu doesn't ( a lot of the lack of usability comes from the lack of quality of third-party apps ). The only use for Ubuntu is as a server, which means testing things for speed that are server related. And only on a Mini.

And yes, I've tried both Ubuntu 12.04 and OS X 10.8 for several days as my only work-based machine to road test both properly.

I will migrate my Macbook to Ubuntu soon :)The latest Ubuntu is ok with a few modifications.

If only it were stable, given the skeuomorphic crimes of recent releases and the whole full-screen/unified-expose&virtual-desktop debacle.

Not that Ubuntu/Unity fares better in that department, but right now, all the major players aren't really doing a swell job with their desktops.

You're going to get flack for that opinion, but you have a point.

The truth is, Unity sucks. A lot. Even after you get used to it. It was a poor decision by a set of developers out of touch with reality or their user-base, and it's only beginning to recover and move in the right direction slowly.

Everyone I know is migrating to Mint and Xfce/KDE4/Cinnamon (Gnome 3 fork), and with good reason.

OSX is still way ahead of the curve, but Linux (not necessarily only Ubuntu) still has a chance. The idea of Linux is still great: we're hackers, so if you feel there's a problem, help fix it. Not easy, but the fact that you can is pretty cool.

Oh yeah, the Ubuntu fanboys will be busy. But seriously, I need my main work machine to just work (TM). I need audio to work without a 4 second lag on skype (I know that's skype's fault). I need Eclipse to default to fonts that I don't notice, rather than spending 20 minutes tweaking. I need Teamviewer to work correctly when I have 2 monitors on Ubuntu.

I know that's off-topic, but I really think everyone/thing Ubuntu related should be focusing on the fact that the desktop doesn't cut it, the OA is off-topic if you like. When you write software, you write it first, properly, then worry about optimization when it's functional (with a few exceptions). If it doesn't do its job, who cares that it can unzip twice as fast.

"I really think everyone/thing Ubuntu related should be focusing on the fact that the desktop doesn't cut it"

So, the problem with this is that what you think is important might not be what other Ubuntu users think is important.

Also, I've installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my MacBook Pro, and it _just worked_ (TM) out of the box.

"If it doesn't do its job, who cares that it can unzip twice as fast."

Unless of course you're day to day work involves unzipping large amounts of data, in which case it ends up being important.

OS X does have a slick interface, but that interface is not very configurable (as opposed to say KDE4). When it works for you, it works well, when it doesn't there's not a lot you can do about it.

Also there's more and better and easier access to Unix tools on Ubuntu, just about everything is an apt-get install away. I've used third party package systems for OS X but it looks like there's no clear winner among them at least last time I looked, and some software just isn't available in recent versions without compiling or troublshooting it yourself, which I find to be a big waste of time. YMMV.

Whether you find OS X usable or not is subjective. I personally don't, preferring window managers over fully fledged desktop environments and such.

In any case at least GNU/Linux distros can easily be customized to fit one's needs. That's an important factor in the software usability metric that is often forgotten.

The ioquake3-based Urban Terror game was also much faster with Apple's graphics drivers for the Intel HD Graphics than under Ubuntu Linux with Mesa.

They're comparing apples to oranges. Mesa are like default graphic drivers, with very little or no hardware acceleration.

that's incorrect. mesa is the 3d graphic library on top of the native intel hd graphic drivers.

the comparison actually make sense. you're not going to intel's osx drivers running in linux and you're not going to get mesa and intel's linux drivers running in osx, you realize that right? right? Oh right it's just trendy to hit on Phoronix for no reason.

Well, they're testing the same games in the different environments to decide which environment is the fastest. That's very much apple to apple.

I'd like to hear your test that's so much more accurate between Linux and Apple gaming with the same hardware. PLEASE ENLIGHTEN US.

You seem to be really angry about this. I mean, shockingly so.

Your comment just really jumped out at me and caught me by surprise. So much so that I felt like it might be good for someone to point it out to you.

I'd like to prescribe an afternoon of UrT. Take about 45 minutes to frag the hell out of a Steve Jobs avatar and post back in the morning. :)

Anger aside, he's right. mesa is used even if the intel driver is used too. mesa includes a software implementation, but it's also the gateway to the hardware drivers.

Better stated: the Intel graphics driver is part of the Mesa/DRI2 framework. Mesa's core provides the OpenGL front end (API implementation, shader compilers, high level optimizers). Intel provides a low level component that takes that shader stream and turns it into programs and commands for the hardware, which is managed by a DRI driver in the kernel.

Intel's official Linux graphics drivers are a part of Mesa. You're probably confusing it with the Mesa software renderer, which is a fallback if you have no accelerated drivers.

I haven't yet benchmarked any flavour of Linux running natively on my current-gen Ivy Bridge 13" MacBook Pro, but I have compared Windows 7 to both System 10.7 and 10.8. Consistently Win7 out performs OS-X on "raw" math-heavy benchmarks.

I've only uploaded my results form Geekbench-2, but the other benchmarking utils show similar numbers:

Geekbench-2 Scores and [Results]:

  OS-X 10.8: 8743 [1]
  Windows 7: 10092 [2]

Getting a Linux install to run via Bootcamp on this MBP is one of my next projects (most likely Gentoo), and I'm curious to see how well its performance stacks up against the other two. That is taking some time as... well, some things just don't work yet. (Thankfully I don't have to deal with the hybrid GPU setup that's in the Retina MBP.)

  1: http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/902437
  2: http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/810264

15 pages for this article seems quite excessive

Mildly OT, but...

Agreed. Unfortunately, nearly every hardware review like this does that. I almost invariably skip to the last page to read the conclusion first, and only poke through the middle pages if I'm curious why the reviewer drew the conclusion they did.

This one is particularly bad, though, because the pages aren't labeled, and there's no table of contents. Which makes "poke through the middle pages" for the purpose of finding a specific test related to the conclusion hard.

We all know it's to bump up the number of page views and therefore ad revenue, but I wonder: For a review like this, how many ad impressions do you need to break even on the reviewer's time, hardware cost (if any), and other overhead? Is ridiculous pagination a necessary evil for these sorts of reviews to exist? Or is it solely to pad margins?

The text loads quickly enough, but the pictures really kill it. I clicked page 2 and got one line of text and a bunch of white, and decided to make that the extent of my user experience.

Lots of data, but preciously little information. For example:

- Why is python so much slower on Mac OS X? if I had to guess, I would say it is more due to a version difference than due to a compiler change. It might also be some particularly slow library code on Mac OS X, though.

- What is causing the sometimes huge differences in CPU-only tasks such as the matrix computations? Compiler, system overhead due to inefficient code, system overhead because the system also performs other work (for example, did the OS index files during some of the runs?), or maybe architectural choices that lead to system overhead (for example, a scheduler might switch tasks more often in order to keep UI response low)?

With such info, this would have been a great article. As it stands now, all I conclude from it is that OpenGL is slower under Ubuntu, and that Linux filesystems are faster (but there, it would help to know why. HFS probably is a large part of the explanation, but it also might be that Mac OS ports of various tools do slightly different things, e.g. By flushing to disk more aggressively.

Things like TLB might also affect your performance, at the cost of memory fragmentation. For example bigger page size (1, 2 or 4MB) would need only two 2 page directory/table lookups, while 4096 pages would need 3.

It's just one of the examples. For example 4096bytes vs 4MB page size:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:X86_Paging_4K.svg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:X86_Paging_4M.svg

I was just about to try Xubuntu on my MBP, but after seeing those power consumption stats I don't think I can justify it. Sad but true: Linux worked better in the old school Desktop era when batteries, power consumption, sleep/hibernation and wireless networks weren't there to mess things up.

All these benchmarks are great and all... but in terms of using Linux on a Macbook Pro, the shitty support for the multitouch trackpad/touchpad alone makes linux barely usable. Unless this has changed recently, in which case someone please correct me

Power consumption has been such a big problem on Linux. Their was PCIe-ASPM bug before and now new power bugs. Their is no end to it.

I'm kind of wondering why you would use a Mac without using OSX. The only reason to have that computer is to run the OS that ONLY runs on that computer. Otherwise you can get a better computer for less money that is more flexible.

Apple laptops are (IMHO the best, but let's say among) the best in the market. So it is no surprise that Linux users may want one but without osx.

Yep. Apple notebook notebook hardware cannot be beat. Zero contest from anyone else.

Apple [now] uses the same components as everyone else, so I'd be surprised if Apple had significantly different performance. Their construction/build-quality is clearly exceptional, though I'll be curious to see if my [incoming] Thinkpad X1 Carbon comes close.

I was primarily pointing out the construction and build quality. An Apple chassis cannot be beat =)

Do you run Linux on a macbook? If yes how is it performing?

In case you're not being rhetorical/sarcastic:

Linux (or any other OS) runs terribly on Apple hardware, because the hardware is intentionally designed to run OS X and only OS X. If you try to run, say, Ubuntu on a Macbook, you'll notice that you won't be able to do basic things like adjust the fan speed (it'll be turned up to the max the entire time) and the battery life will thus be horrible, not to mention that the computer will also be insanely hot.

This is because of the way an alternate OS is installed on Apple hardware - it's actually running on top of a low-level layer that prevents the OS from having proper access to the hardware.

The only time I've ever heard of people running into driver issues these days on Linux for basic work is on Apple hardware, and that's the reason. So even if you like Apple hardware, you still wouldn't be getting your money's worth running any other OS on it.

If you want to run Linux, go for almost any other laptop on the market - you'll get better priced hardware, and the performance will be better.

"This is because of the way an alternate OS is installed on Apple hardware - it's actually running on top of a low-level layer that prevents the OS from having proper access to the hardware."

This is entirely inaccurate. Even using the BIOS CSM ("Boot Camp") gives you full access to the hardware, and people are moving away from that to native UEFI booting.

Most of this is not true. At all.

No rhetorical at all. I've tried to switch to Linux on my macbook a couple of times with disappointing results (jumbojet fan noise, magma hot, etc).

I am looking for success stories to motivate me for the next switch.

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 on my MacBook Pro (7.1, I think), and everything worked out of the box (including suspend, which historically I haven't had much luck with). Also, the fan works fine, and I get between 5 and 8 hours of battery life, depending on what I'm doing.

Although, as far as gaming performance goes, I haven't actually run any games.

I'm not really sure what you mean by "running on top of a low-level layer that prevents the OS from having proper access to the hardware."

I find that hard to believe given that Linus Torvalds develops Linux on a MacBook Air: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/19/an-interview-with-millenium...

I'm not GP, but I run Debian on an old MacBook (06 or 07 model I believe) and it's doing fine. It's also more than fast enough for my use, even the 3d effects in kde4 run fine. The battery-life is (a little? a lot?) better in OS X, but I find Linux/BSD much better for development. I used to boot OS X to run some things like Spotify and Skype, but lately more and more programs refuse to run in that old version of OS X.

Great hardware is worth a good amount of money.

I love my linux for developing, but no other laptops come close to touching my air when it comes to aesthetics. Which, as a hobbyist painter/photographer, does matter to me.

aesthetics is very subjective. personally I find mac laptops pretty dull and boring. they're okay. but that's that. so yeah, subjective.

It is subjective, you're right. The parent asked why ANYONE would want to run linux on a mac. My reason is because I like the look and feel of the machine. I suspect many others (but not everybody...;) are in the same camp as me.

I agree with the rest of the responses you are bound to receive—Apple laptops are pretty solid machines, they easily run multiple operating systems (including but not limited to the respectable OSX), I'm a nerd so "why not play with even more toys?", and I really like the feel of the keyboard.

As someone with a macpro version 1 tower, I can be heartened that I can install the latest Linux, even though apple no longer supports my machine with its OS upgrades. Its only a matter of time (and lack of security updates...) before it would be a very large well designed paperweight

Of course I'm still running snow leopard a 2 versions back OS.

Just because OSX only runs on Mac hardware doesn't mean that's the only reason to use it as you assume. The non-Apple competition is pretty much crap if you are looking for a high end laptop.

I'm pretty sure Linux support for a MacBook Air is pretty good, seeing how that's Linus's primary machine: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/19/an-interview-with-millenium...

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