[ Thanks to Michael Larabel for
this link. ]
“While Linux has long been talked about as being a
faster operating system than Microsoft Windows, in 2010 is this
still the case? It seems every time we deliver new benchmarks of
the EXT4 file-system it’s actually getting slower, recent Linux
kernel releases have not been delivering any major performance
enhancements for desktop users, the open-source Linux graphics
drivers are still no match to the proprietary drivers, and “bloated
and huge” is how Linus Torvalds described the Linux kernel last
year. This is all while Windows 7 was released last year, which
many view as Microsoft’s best operating system release to date.
Even after using it a fair amount the past few months in
preparation for this about-to-be-shared work, it is actually not
too bad and is a huge improvement over Windows Vista, but is it
really faster than Ubuntu Linux? We have used six uniquely
different systems and ran Microsoft Windows 7 Professional x64 and
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS x86_64 on each of them with a set of 55 tests
(actually, more than 165 if considering that each test is usually
run at least three times for accuracy) per installation.“To see whether Linux still is a faster desktop to that of
Windows, we have invested a great deal of time and energy in
comparing the two vastly different operating systems. In November
of last year we announced that the Phoronix Test Suite was coming
to Windows 7. The Phoronix Test Suite is our extensible, automated
testing framework that we use for conducting our software and
hardware benchmarking at Phoronix and is also used by other
publications, many software vendors, and practically every major
hardware vendor as it can streamline their internal QA, validation,
performance optimization, and regression management needs. Read the
Phoronix Test Suite web-site for more information on all of its
features from verifying statistical accuracy to automated
regression testing.”