Revisiting Linux Part 1: A Look at Ubuntu 8.04
by Ryan Smith on August 26, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
First Thoughts
Since this is Part 1 of a 2 part series, rather than ending on a conclusion, we’ll end on some first thoughts.
In searching for an answer to our question of whether Ubuntu is good enough to convince me to switch, I ultimately have failed to find enough compelling reasons to entice me as a user to switch to Ubuntu for my day-to-day operations. I should make it clear that this is not taking price into consideration – this is only taking into account my current situation as a Windows Vista user. Ubuntu does plenty of things well and I could certainly use it for my day-to-day operations, but there are few things it does better and more things it does worse as compared to Vista, such that using Ubuntu likely hurt my productivity even after I adapted to the differences. It’s hard to fully compete with commercially developed software when you’re giving yours away for free, so I don’t consider this a surprise.
From a performance standpoint, there’s little reason to switch in either direction. As I stated early in this article performance was never a serious condition for evaluation anyhow, and the results don’t change that. Ubuntu outperforms Vista at times, but at other times it looks to be held back by compiler differences and the disadvantage of needing to play nicely with proprietary products that don’t return the favor (e.g. SMB performance). As far as I am concerned, Ubuntu performed no worse than Windows for my day-to-day needs.
Now there are some situations where performance is important enough that it can’t be ignored, and the gap wide enough to make a significant difference. In Part 2 we will be looking for these situations.
I do think there are some niches in which Ubuntu works well, where the operating system itself is the killer app. One such situation is (or rather was) the Netbook market. It’s a market that used to be dominated by Linux operating systems, including Ubuntu’s Netbook Remix. On such devices where you don’t have the resources to do anything fancy, Ubuntu’s weaknesses become less important. Meanwhile price becomes more important. However cheap copies of Windows XP specifically for the Netbook market appear to have killed this idea for now.
For what it’s worth I do have an older laptop (for guest use) that currently runs XP. For the same reason as the Netbooks, I’m considering replacing XP with Ubuntu 9.04 for the security benefits of it not being Windows. I’ve already had to wipe the machine once due to a guest getting it infected with malware.
As I haven’t gone too much in depth yet, let’s talk about user-to-user support. In spite of its user-friendly label, I have not been particularly impressed with the Ubuntu support structure. A lot of this comes down to the difficulty in finding help for existing issues, in spite of colorful names like Hardy Heron to help weed out results. Ubuntu’s Wiki, package archives, and forums all have a great deal of old information that turns up with searching. Results for 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon for example are now a historical curiosity – support ended for Gutsy back in April. Those pages and threads are largely unhelpful, and yet they clutter the search results of Google and the Ubuntu site’s search engine, pushing down more relevant information. Meanwhile the opposite is also true: results for newer versions of Ubuntu are also unhelpful.
The source of the problem comes down to 3 things. 1) Old information still exists and apparently doesn’t go away very easily. 2) Particularly for Ubuntu’s forums, they are divided up by topic but not version. 3) New versions of Ubuntu are published too often.
Now #3 is probably going to be a bit of a touchy subject, but it goes back to why we started with 8.04 in the first place. Either you’re on the upgrade treadmill or you’re not. Ubuntu moves so fast that it’s hard to jump on board. This is good from a development perspective since it allows Ubuntu to improve itself and get feedback sooner, but I don’t believe it’s good for users. A working user-to-user support system needs a lot of knowledgeable users, and the Ubuntu community is clearly full of them, but they seem to be spread out all over the place with respect to what versions they have experience with.
It’s to the advantage of less-knowledgeable users that they stick with a well-tested LTS release rather than be on the bleeding edge, but that’s not where the most knowledgeable users are. Compared to the Mac community where everyone is in sync on Leopard, or the Windows community where everyone is hating Vista and lusting over Windows 7, there’s a lack of cohesion. User-to-user support would be better served by having the community less spread out.
I have mentioned this previously, but the driver and packaging situation needs to be reiterated. While I don’t think the Linux kernel developers’ positions are unreasonable, I do think they’re hurting Ubuntu as a user-friendly operating system. The driver hell I had to go through shouldn’t have occurred, and if there was a stable API for “binary blob” drivers perhaps it wouldn’t have. The pragmatic position is that users don’t care if their drivers are open source or not, they would rather things just work. Ideals can only take you so far.
Along these lines, the packaging/repository system and the focus on it needs some kind of similar overhaul. I like how it allows updating software so easily and how easy it is to install software that is in Ubuntu’s repositories. But software that is not in a repository suffers for it. Installing software shouldn’t be so hard.
Finally, there’s the value of free as in gratis. Ubuntu may not be perfect, but I am still amazed by what it does for the price of $0.00. It’s a complete operating system, entirely for free. This is something that needs to be recognized as a credit to the developers, even if it doesn’t encourage anyone to switch.
Looking forward, coming up in the next couple of months will be the launches of Windows 7, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and Ubuntu 9.10. Compared to where Ubuntu stands with 8.04, there’s a year and a half of time for improvements, along with another LTS release due inside of a year. I think the new releases of Windows and Mac OS X are going to tip the scales away from Ubuntu in the immediate future, but given the lifetimes of those operating systems it’s going to give Ubuntu plenty of time to improve. This is something we’ll take a look at first-hand with Part 2 of this series when we look at 9.04 and more.
As a parting thought, we’d like to hear back from you, our readers, on the subject of Ubuntu and Linux in general. We’d like to know what you would like to see in future articles, both on the hardware and software side. Including some form of Linux in some of our hardware tests is something we’re certainly looking at, but we would like specifics. Would you like Linux-focused hardware roundups? What benchmarks would you like to see in Part 2 of this series (and beyond)? We can’t make any promises, but good feedback from you is going to help us determine what is going to be worth the time to try.
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ParadigmComplex - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
I concur - while most of the article is quite good, Ryan really seemed to have missed quite a bit here. His analysis of it seemed rather limited if not misleading.Not everything *has* to be a package - I have various scripts strewn around, along with Firefox 3.6a1 and a bunch of other things without having them organized properly as .deb's with APT. The packaging system is convenient if you want to use it, but it is not required.
Additionally, Ryan made it seem as though everything must be installed through Synaptic or Add/Remove and that there where no stand-alone installers along the lines of Windows' .msi files. It's quite easy on Ubuntu to download a .deb file and double-click on it. In fact, it's much simpler then Windows' .msi files - there's no questions or hitting next. You just give it your password and it takes care of everything else.
The one area I agree with Ryan is that there needs to be an standardized, easy, GUI fashion to add a repository (both the address and key) to APT. I have no problems with doing things like >>/etc/apt/sources.list, but I could see where others may. I suspect this could be done through a .deb, but I've never seen it done that way.
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
Something I've been fishing for here and have not yet seen much of are requests for benchmarks. Part 2 is going to be 9.04 (no multi-Linux comparisons at this point, maybe later) and I'd like to know what you guys would like to see with respect to performance.We'll have a new i7 rig for 9.04, so I'll be taking a look at a few system level things (e.g. startup time) along side a look at what's new between 8.04 and 9.04. I'll also be taking a quick look at some compiler stuff and GPU-related items.
Beyond that the board is open. Are there specific performance areas or applications that you guys would like to see(no laptops, please)? We're open to suggestions, so here's your chance to help us build a testing suite for future Linux articles.
cyriene - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
I'd like to see differences between PPD in World Community Grid between various Windows and Linux distros.I never really see AT talk about WCG or other distributed computing, but I figure if I'm gonna OC the crap out of my cpu, I might as well put it to good use.
Eeqmcsq - Thursday, August 27, 2009 - link
Cross platform testing is pretty difficult, considering there are a multitude of different apps to accomplish the same task, some faster, some slower. And then there's the compiler optimizations for the same cross platform app as you mentioned in the article. However, I understand that from an end user's perspective, it's all about doing a "task". So just to throw a few ideas out there involving cross platform apps so that it's a bit more comparable...- Image or video conversion using GIMP or vlc.
- Spreadsheet calculations using the Open Office Calc app.
- Performance tests through VMware.
- How about something java related? Java compiling, a java pi calculator app, or some other java single/multi threaded test app.
- Perl or python script tests.
- FTP transfer tests.
- 802.11 b/g/whatever wireless transfer tests.
- Hard drive tests, AHCI. (I read bad things about AMD's AHCI drivers, and that Windows AHCI drivers were OK. What about in Ubuntu?)
- Linux software RAID vs "motherboard RAID", which is usually only available to Windows.
- Linux fat32/NTFS format time/read/write tests vs Windows
- Wasn't there some thread scheduling issues with AMD Cool and Quiet and Windows that dropped AMD's performance? What about in Linux?
While I'm brainstorming, here's a few tests that's more about functionality and features than performance:
- bluetooth connectivity, ip over bluetooth, etc
- printing, detecting local/network printers
- connected accessories, such as ipods, flash drives, or cameras through usb or firewire
- detecting computers on the local network (Places -> Network)
- multi channel audio, multi monitor video
Just for fun:
- Find a Windows virus/trojan/whatever that deletes files, unleash it in Ubuntu through Wine, see how much damage it does.
Veerappan - Thursday, August 27, 2009 - link
I know you've said in previous comments that using Phoronix Test Suite for benchmarking different OSes (e.g. Ubuntu vs Vista) won't work because PTS doesn't install in Windows, but you could probably use a list of the available tests/suites in PTS as a place to get ideas for commonly available programs in Windows/OSX/Linux.I'm pretty sure that Unigine's Tropics/Sanctuary demos/benchmarks are available in Windows, so those could bench OpenGL/graphics.
Maybe either UT2004 or some version of Quake or Doom 3 would work as gaming benchmarks. It's all going to be OpenGL stuff, but it's better than nothing. You could also do WoW in Wine, or Eve under Wine to test some game compatibility/performance.
Once you get VDPAU working, I'd love to see CPU usage comparisons between windows/linux for media playback of H.264 videos. And also, I guess, a test without VDPAU/VAAPI working. Too bad for ATI that XvBA isn't supported yet... might be worth mentioning that in the article.
You also might want to search around for any available OpenCL demos which exist. Nvidia's newest Linux driver supports OpenCL, so that might give you a common platform/API for programs to test.
I've often felt that DVD Shrink runs faster in Wine than in Windows, so the time to run a DVD rip would be nice, but might have legal implications.
Some sort of multitasking benchmark would be nice, but I'm not sure how you'd do it. Yeah, I can see a way of writing a shell script to automatically launch multiple benchmarks simultaneously (and time them all), but the windows side is a little tougher to me (some sort of batch script might work). Web Browsing + File Copy + Transcoding a video (or similar).
Ooh... Encryption performance benchmarks might be nice. Either a test of how many PGP/GPG signs per second, or copying data between a normal disk partition, and a TrueCrypt partition. The TrueCrypt file copy test would be interesting to me, and would cover both encryption performance and some disk I/O.
One last suggestion: Folding@Home benchmarks. F@H is available at least in CPU-driven form in Windows/Linux, and there's F@H benchmark methodologies already developed by other sites (e.g. techreport.com's CPU articles).
Well, that's enough for now. Take or leave the suggestions as you see fit.
haplo602 - Thursday, August 27, 2009 - link
you are out of luck here ... linux does not compare to windows because they are both different architectures. you already did what you could in the article.especialy in a binary distribution like Ubuntu, compilation speed tests are meaningless (but Gentoo folks would kiss your feet for that).
boot up times are also not usefull. the init scripts and even init mechanisms are different from distro to distro.
compression/filesystem benchmarks are half way usable. on windows you only have NTFS these days. on linux there are like 20 different filesystems that you can use (ext3/4, reiser, jfs and xfs are the most used. also quite many distros offer lvm/evms backends or software raid.
I do not think there is much benchmarking you can do that will help in linux vs windows, even ubuntu vs windows because the same benchmars will differ between ubuntu versions.
the only usable types are wine+game vs windows+game, native linux game vs same windows game (mostly limited to unreal and quake angines), some povray/blender tests and application comparisons (like you did with the firefox javascript speed).
GeorgeH - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
Not really a benchmark per se, but I'd be curious to know how the stereotypes of Windows being bloated and Ubuntu being slim and efficient translate to power consumption. Load and idle would be nice, but if at all possible I’d be much more curious to see a comparison of task energy draw, i.e. not so much how long it takes them to finish various tasks, but how much energy they need to finish them.In know that’d be a very difficult test to perform for what will probably be a boring and indeterminate result, but you asked. :)
ioannis - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
is there some kind of cross platform test that can be done to test memory usage? Maybe Firefox on both platforms? not sure.By "no laptops", I presume you mean, no battery tests (therefore power and as a consequence, heat). That would have been nice though. Maybe for those looking for a 'quiet' setup.
but yes, definitely GPU (including video acceleration) and the GCC vs Visual Studio vs Intel compiler arena (along with some technical explanation why there are such huge differences)
ParadigmComplex - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
If you can, find games that are reported to work well under WINE and benchmark those against those running natively in Windows. It'd be interesting to see how the various differences between the two systems, and WINE itself, could effect benchmarks.Fox5 - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
Number 1 use of Ubuntu is probably going to be for netbooks/low end desktops for people who just wanna browse the net.In that case, the browsing experience (including flash) should be investigated.
Boot up time is important.
Performance with differing memory amounts would be nice to see (say 256MB, 512MB, 1GB, and 2GB or higher). Scaling across cpus would be nice.
Ubuntu as a programming environment versus windows would be good to see, including available IDEs and compiler and runtime performance.
Ubuntu as a media server/HTPC would be good to see. Personally, I have my windows box using DAAP shares since Ubuntu interfaces with it much better than Samba. And as an HTPC, XBMC and Boxee are nice, cross-platform apps.
Finally, how Ubuntu compares for more specific applications. For instance, scientific computing, audio editing, video editing, and image manipulation. Can it (with the addition of apps found through it's add/remove programs app) function well-enough in a variety of areas to be an all-around replacement for OSX or Windows?
Speedwise, how do GIMP and Photoshop compare doing similar tasks? Is there anything even on par with Windows Movie Maker?
What's Linux like game wise? Do flash games take a noticeable performance hit? Are the smattering of id software games and quake/super mario bros/tetris/etc clones any good? How does it handle some of the more popular WINE games?