OS X 10.8 vs. Ubuntu Linux: A Battle With No Clear Winner

First up are the test results when running OS X 10.7.4 vs. OS X 10.8.0 vs. Ubuntu 12.04 vs. Ubuntu 12.10 on the mid-2011 Apple Mac Mini with an Intel Sandy Bridge processor and integrated graphics.

The same Mac Mini hardware was used throughout testing and each OS was running in its stock configuration.

The Compile Bench results keep the disk busy and the CPU to some extent. These results show the OS X vs. Ubuntu Linux disk performance with the Journaled HFS+ and EXT4 file-systems, respectively, running close to the same speed from the 500GB Hitachi SATA HDD. For some of the Compile Bench test cases, Ubuntu Linux was running slightly faster, especially when it came to reading back the compiled tree.

Unpacking the Linux kernel source tree from the .tar.bz2 package was slightly faster under Ubuntu Linux than OS X.

As the final disk test of this cross-OS comparison, the PostMark mail server benchmark was significantly faster on Ubuntu than Apple OS X.