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OS X Mavericks Brings Not Many Performance Changes

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  • #11
    Originally posted by johnc View Post
    A couple weeks ago I played L4D2 on OS X and I was surprised a) how awful the performance was, and b) that there was no raw mouse input, making it a real cluster-f.

    Frankly I just don't get why people think Apple is anything other than a turd.
    True, if gaming makes up most of your computing. Most stuff that is painful on Linux just works on OSX.

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    • #12
      Well I read that the battery time was increased by about 30 to 45 minutes due to synchronized program polling and therefore CPU wakeups (Timer Coalescing, App Nap).
      Maybe it's time for another comparison of power saving / energy consumption between Ubuntu/Fedora and OS X - Does the gap widen even more or does it get closed?

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      • #13
        Originally posted by jukkan View Post
        Most stuff that is painful on Linux just works on OSX.
        For example?

        I ask because I have the opposite experience. Most stuff that just works on Linux is painful on OSX. Not to mention that Finder is next to useless, although it should be a little less useless now that it has tabs. At least I won't have to open 2 windows just to move a file from one place to another. That's the only thing I'm looking forward to on "Mavericks".

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        • #14
          Originally posted by devius View Post
          For example?

          I ask because I have the opposite experience. Most stuff that just works on Linux is painful on OSX. Not to mention that Finder is next to useless, although it should be a little less useless now that it has tabs. At least I won't have to open 2 windows just to move a file from one place to another. That's the only thing I'm looking forward to on "Mavericks".
          Let me start off by saying I don't think Linux is crap, it handles many use cases for me well. Below are some of the hardships I've experienced. I understand many of these aren't directly Linux's fault or anything, this is all just observation.

          USB drives
          I need usb drives regularly and I need them to work whichever platform I happen to be on. But I've had so many problems related to usb drive handling on Linux it's not funny. Even if I format the stick to NTFS (on Linux), it won't work on Windows for some reason, so there are compatibility issues.

          Office suite
          I regularly need MS Office file formats to just work, no way around it. LibreOffice doesn't often cut it, and even if it does, the experience could be better.

          Video playing, netflix
          I regularly get full system lockups while using VLC or Netflix. Embarrassing when I try to watch an episode of BBT with my girl and shit breaks apart. Not to mention I may have work on in the background, this kind of total tilt is just not acceptable. This is with the nvidia proprietary blob (I do acknowledge the issues related to it). Open drivers still require setting the cooling policy manually in order to have the card not sound like a jet. Even though it's just one terminal command, the fact that it's not default behaviour is disturbing.

          Then the smaller, more distro and DE specific issues but which are nasty:

          - Default font rendering/configuration is still unsatisfactory in many distros. Ubuntu is the exception. My fonts look awesome but only because I've put effort and time into it. I think this shouldn't be.

          - Cursor is not always visible after logging into gnome. Need to unplug and replug the mouse. Apparently gnome sometimes falsely thinks it's being used on a touch screen. This bug is reported but yet to be fixed. Seriously??

          - Ethernet doesn't always work after reboot. Was able to fix this, turned out to be something ipv6 related after doing the research. It's very concerning when a simple thing like wired ethernet with dhcp doesn't work out of the box, while it has been perfect in Windows-world since Windows ME? Can't say about OSX because I haven't used it for very long.

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          • #15
            Originally posted by log0 View Post
            like OpenGL 4.1 and OpenCL 2 ...
            This claim of not many changes really shows a glaring handicap to these benchmarks, not to mention a true lack of Test Suites on how OpenCL 2 and OpenGL 4.1 are implemented throughout OS X.

            Then again, I don't expect much from a Linux centric site that doesn't know jack squat about OS X architecture.

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            • #16
              Maverick

              The Maverick was a cool car back in the 70's.

              Mostly what you're getting is the tool bar item that lets you see power hungry apps, iBooks, iMaps, and "Free Updates" to Apple products such as Pages. ie there is a trick where you install the demo of iWork and then you get updated to the full version for free.

              google and ye will find.

              All in all, the only other notable item of concern is the Cloud based junk.

              No way I'm putting my credit card or passwords in the icloud. n' es' a.

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              • #17
                I find this article disappointing. I hope you do better with the final version.
                If you're going to test Mavericks honestly, it would make sense to, at the very least, include tests of the features that Apple has specifically mentioned as changed and improved. These include
                - a variety of changes to VM, most notably compressed pages, so that a machine should (for most workloads) now behave like it has around 1.5x as much RAM as previously, before it starts swapping
                - improved battery life (or if you prefer, lower energy usage for most usage scenarios)
                - changed (and hopefully improved) networking, including both superior WiFi performance (for 802.11ac but hopefully also n) and use of smbX rather than AFP for default file sharing

                Are these improvements as good as Apple says? Well, that's the point of your benchmarking, isn't it? But it's flat-out dumb to run a bench of tests that are pure compiler/CPU tests (like MAFFT Alignment or SciMark), or that test things Apple probably didn't much touch (since they haven't mentioned it) like CompileBench, and conclude, or at least give the impression, that there is nothing much interesting or improved at the OS level.

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                • #18
                  Originally posted by name99 View Post
                  But it's flat-out dumb to run a bench of tests that are pure compiler/CPU tests (like MAFFT Alignment or SciMark), or that test things Apple probably didn't much touch (since they haven't mentioned it) like CompileBench, and conclude, or at least give the impression, that there is nothing much interesting or improved at the OS level.
                  That would make sense, if this wasn't a linux oriented site. From the list of things you said should be tested, the only thing that could be done, given how Phoronix works and the tests that are available, is the power usage (and consequently battery life). I would also like to know if it has indeed improved or not. As for the other suggestions, although they are all good ideas, they just don't fit with the "quick test" nature of the article. That's something more appropriate for an in-depth review, and Michael doesn't even do that for Linux distros let alone OSX.

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