Made my choice

[BD2003]

I just did a bit of a test. The laptop is a Dell 600m, 1.3ghz celeron, 512mb ram. Ubuntu 7.04 and XP are both pretty much virgin, although XP is carrying a wee bit of extra weight from a bunch of wireless config apps that I dont really need and keep forgetting to remove. Everything is timed from the button press that initiates the action, and stopped when the appropriate lights shut off (HD/Power).


Ubunutu 7.04
44 sec to login screen
26 sec from login to desktop HD light off

32 sec to hibernate
32 sec to restore from hibernate

11 sec to suspend
8 sec to restore from suspend

12 sec to load openoffice writer

With desktop + gaim loaded mem usage = 120mb.
With desktop + gaim + oowriter + oocalc + ooimpress + firefox + sysmon = 168mb

26 sec to shut down


XP SP2
24 sec to login
13 sec from login till desktop HD light off

9 sec to hibernate
13 sec to restore from hibernate

5 sec to suspend
5 sec to restore from suspend

4 sec to load office 2007

With desktop + trillian pro loaded mem usage = 190mb
With desktop + gaim + oowriter + oocalc + ooimpress + firefox + taskman = 234mb

19 sec to shut down


So yes, Ubuntu itself does use a bit less ram. The programs themselves however, use slightly more memory (+4mb), although these are all open with blank documents. But its nowhere near capacity in either case, so for my purposes (light office work) resource usage is not an issue in either case.

However, just about everything else I tested is faster - not slightly quicker, but 2-3 times quicker. I wouldnt expect pages to load or CPU usage to be much different between the two once the programs are loaded, but XP is really just that much snappier.

Not to mention battery life is at least 50% longer in actual usage on XP.

Linux is great for servers and all, where its light weight can shine, but I wouldnt use it on a desktop or laptop in the name of performance.

 

[kurt454]

I just got a cheap Gateway ML3109 laptop. Came with Vista Home Basic and 512 megs of ram. Bootup times measured in geologic ages. I downgraded to XP, and my lappy feels twice as fast. I will probably buy more memory, eventually, and put Vista back on it.

 

[soonerproud]

Originally posted by: kurt454
I just got a cheap Gateway ML3109 laptop. Came with Vista Home Basic and 512 megs of ram. Bootup times measured in geologic ages. I downgraded to XP, and my lappy feels twice as fast. I will probably buy more memory, eventually, and put Vista back on it.

It is a travesty that the major OEMs are even selling computers with less than a gig on them with Vista. I have a friend who bought a $350 pc with VHB, a celeron processor and 512 of RAM. That pc was unusable with just 512 of RAM. It took almost 10 minutes for that thing to boot the first time because of all the crapplets and insufficient RAM.

I helped him out by upgrading the RAM, video card (8500 GT. He bought the pc to play WoW on and the onboard ATI graphics could barely run it.) and removing the crapplets. Now that PC is very responsive and snappy. It boots in less than 45 seconds which is a huge improvement compared to how that pc ran before.

This is the number one reason why people think Vista is slow is because these OEM's continue to sell Vista pc's with insufficient hardware to even run Vista well. RAM is cheap and I bet it doesn't even cost these OEM's any more to just include a gig instead of 512.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: soonerproud

Originally posted by: kurt454
I just got a cheap Gateway ML3109 laptop. Came with Vista Home Basic and 512 megs of ram. Bootup times measured in geologic ages. I downgraded to XP, and my lappy feels twice as fast. I will probably buy more memory, eventually, and put Vista back on it.

It is a travesty that the major OEMs are even selling computers with less than a gig on them with Vista. I have a friend who bought a $350 pc with VHB, a celeron processor and 512 of RAM. That pc was unusable with just 512 of RAM. It took almost 10 minutes for that thing to boot the first time because of all the crapplets and insufficient RAM.

I helped him out by upgrading the RAM, video card (8500 GT. He bought the pc to play WoW on and the onboard ATI graphics could barely run it.) and removing the crapplets. Now that PC is very responsive and snappy. It boots in less than 45 seconds which is a huge improvement compared to how that pc ran before.

This is the number one reason why people think Vista is slow is because these OEM's continue to sell Vista pc's with insufficient hardware to even run Vista well. RAM is cheap and I bet it doesn't even cost these OEM's any more to just include a gig instead of 512.

Yep. Its as if people seem to think that a 1gb system is twice as fast as a 512mb system. When in reality, the 1gb can be immeasurably faster because all that matters is that the system is kept below the physical memory limit. Vista can eat up 512mb on its own in many cases.

If you're going to be a prebuilt Vista system, absolutely do not buy one that does not have the Vista premium logo on it. Theres a whole list of stringent requirements that need to be met to get the premium logo, one of which happens to be 1gb of ram.

 

[toadeater]

Originally posted by: soonerproud
It is a travesty that the major OEMs are even selling computers with less than a gig on them with Vista. I have a friend who bought a $350 pc with VHB, a celeron processor and 512 of RAM. That pc was unusable with just 512 of RAM. It took almost 10 minutes for that thing to boot the first time because of all the crapplets and insufficient RAM.

There is a class-action suit against OEMs (and/or Microsoft?) about mislabeling PCs as "Vista capable" when they clearly were not.

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

Originally posted by: BD2003
I just did a bit of a test. The laptop is a Dell 600m, 1.3ghz celeron, 512mb ram. Ubuntu 7.04 and XP are both pretty much virgin, although XP is carrying a wee bit of extra weight from a bunch of wireless config apps that I dont really need and keep forgetting to remove. Everything is timed from the button press that initiates the action, and stopped when the appropriate lights shut off (HD/Power).


Ubunutu 7.04
44 sec to login screen
26 sec from login to desktop HD light off

32 sec to hibernate
32 sec to restore from hibernate

11 sec to suspend
8 sec to restore from suspend

12 sec to load openoffice writer

With desktop + gaim loaded mem usage = 120mb.
With desktop + gaim + oowriter + oocalc + ooimpress + firefox + sysmon = 168mb

26 sec to shut down


XP SP2
24 sec to login
13 sec from login till desktop HD light off

9 sec to hibernate
13 sec to restore from hibernate

5 sec to suspend
5 sec to restore from suspend

4 sec to load office 2007

With desktop + trillian pro loaded mem usage = 190mb
With desktop + gaim + oowriter + oocalc + ooimpress + firefox + taskman = 234mb

19 sec to shut down


So yes, Ubuntu itself does use a bit less ram. The programs themselves however, use slightly more memory (+4mb), although these are all open with blank documents. But its nowhere near capacity in either case, so for my purposes (light office work) resource usage is not an issue in either case.

However, just about everything else I tested is faster - not slightly quicker, but 2-3 times quicker. I wouldnt expect pages to load or CPU usage to be much different between the two once the programs are loaded, but XP is really just that much snappier.

Not to mention battery life is at least 50% longer in actual usage on XP.

Linux is great for servers and all, where its light weight can shine, but I wouldnt use it on a desktop or laptop in the name of performance.

Thanks for running those tests. Like I said, I was really curious about how Ubuntu would compare to XP. Maybe if I wind up with an extra XP license sometime I'll swap out Ubuntu for XP on this laptop. As it is, however, I'm still not willing to drop $100 on a new XP license, and my version of Vista doesn't qualify for the downgrade program.

It's pretty hard to beat FREE!

 

[Nothinman]

I can't say I'm surprised by the bootup and shutdown speeds, AFAIK Ubuntu's still using synchronous init scripts while MS tends to start a lot of services asynchronously, which can be a PITA since we used to have machines make it to the NT login screen before the network had started up.

But the hibernation/resume speeds are kind of sad so I wonder if they're defaulting to the basic in-kernel swsusp instead of uswsusp, the latter is usually be much faster and allows things like compressing and encrypting of the image. On my home machine I'm using TuxOnIce instead of uswsusp but the speeds should be similar these days, reading and writing the image using lzf compression happens at ~60M/s and that includes the entire filesystem cache so everything's still in memory and there's no paging to be done. So mine is probably still longer than 9s but I'll bet that it's a lot more responsive if you had a lot open when you hibernated.

No one denies that O is a hog, AbiWord and Gnumeric both start in about a second here. And for those of us not using Gnome or KDE login time is virtually instantaneous, I use E16 and it takes ~3 seconds to get to the desktop and another 3 or so to autostart the applications I have setup. Although the former can take longer when new images are added to it's background directory since it indexes and generates thumbnails on login.

Gauging memory usage is pretty pointless though since there's no way to get an accurate count, even if you add up the resident size of every process you'll be counting every shared library multiple times.

 

[covert24]

i installed opensuse 10.2 through my network but im having trouble finishing it. it opened up a firefox window and is asking me for a registration/activation code but i dont know where to find that? can someone help me out?

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
I can't say I'm surprised by the bootup and shutdown speeds, AFAIK Ubuntu's still using synchronous init scripts while MS tends to start a lot of services asynchronously, which can be a PITA since we used to have machines make it to the NT login screen before the network had started up.

But the hibernation/resume speeds are kind of sad so I wonder if they're defaulting to the basic in-kernel swsusp instead of uswsusp, the latter is usually be much faster and allows things like compressing and encrypting of the image. On my home machine I'm using TuxOnIce instead of uswsusp but the speeds should be similar these days, reading and writing the image using lzf compression happens at ~60M/s and that includes the entire filesystem cache so everything's still in memory and there's no paging to be done. So mine is probably still longer than 9s but I'll bet that it's a lot more responsive if you had a lot open when you hibernated.

No one denies that O is a hog, AbiWord and Gnumeric both start in about a second here. And for those of us not using Gnome or KDE login time is virtually instantaneous, I use E16 and it takes ~3 seconds to get to the desktop and another 3 or so to autostart the applications I have setup. Although the former can take longer when new images are added to it's background directory since it indexes and generates thumbnails on login.

Gauging memory usage is pretty pointless though since there's no way to get an accurate count, even if you add up the resident size of every process you'll be counting every shared library multiple times.

Yeah, I just went by what either taskman or sysmon said was being used, and since memory is not as simple as "this program is using x MB of memory", it wouldnt surprise me if they were slightly different measures. Either way, neither OS is really taxing a low end system.

While I'm sure there are various distros and window managers that are faster, theyre not really all too easy to get to and set up through ubuntu.

Ubuntu really is a step in the right direction, but it still has a long way to go. As I used it, I began to notice its limitations more and more. Multimedia support is very weak, for instance. And something as simple as configuring display properties required editing a text config file, and IMO in 2007, thats just not acceptable.

Linux is always a work in progress, but it's always seemed like its playing catch-up as far as desktop usability goes. So many programs that I see are really just half baked copies of windows software - evolution is copying outlook, rhythmbox is copying itunes, - and theyre just not as good as the programs theyre trying to copy.

Still, you can't beat free, and it pwns as a server. But on the desktop its nothing but a toy to me.

 

[Nothinman]

While I'm sure there are various distros and window managers that are faster, theyre not really all too easy to get to and set up through ubuntu.

Sure they are, install any one of them via Synaptic and they'll be available as a choice in GDM. Configuring them how you want once you get in will obviously vary though.

Ubuntu really is a step in the right direction, but it still has a long way to go. As I used it, I began to notice its limitations more and more. Multimedia support is very weak, for instance. And something as simple as configuring display properties required editing a text config file, and IMO in 2007, thats just not acceptable.

I can say the same thing about Windows, I just installed Vista last night and it won't even play xvid/mp3 AVIs out of the box and then after I installed ffdshow WMP/MPC crashed on startup. And IMO editing text files is vastly superior to any GUI config tool in almost all instances. Sure it requires a little more knowledge about what you're doing but that's usually a good thing as well.

Linux is always a work in progress, but it's always seemed like its playing catch-up as far as desktop usability goes. So many programs that I see are really just half baked copies of windows software - evolution is copying outlook, rhythmbox is copying itunes, - and theyre just not as good as the programs theyre trying to copy.

That's probably why I don't like Evolution or Rhythmbox. But it's funny because it's a lose-lose situation. If the apps look too different then people complain because it's too much work to learn but if they look like other platform apps then they say they're just a copy of something else.

Still, you can't beat free, and it pwns as a server. But on the desktop its nothing but a toy to me.

After fighting with XP and Vista for the past few days all I can say is that I'm damned glad that I don't have to use them. But no I wouldn't consider Windows a toy, I expect toys to be fun to play with. =)