MeeGo Netbook Performance: It's Beating Ubuntu & Co

Finally, we have our Bootchart numbers for the four distributions. With Fedora 13, prior to collecting the boot metrics, we set the GDM to automatically login to the GNOME desktop, since the three other desktops all use auto-logins as well.

Fedora 13 had a boot time of 23 seconds, Moblin 2.1 had a boot time of 18.45 seconds, Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.04 came in at 17.31 seconds, and MeeGo had a boot time of just 8.151 seconds. However, the Bootchart program between the four distributions are slightly different and in MeeGo is a custom Intel version, but regardless, MeeGo is a very fast booting distribution that's inherited from all of the optimizations that went into Moblin and its boot process.

MeeGo had won a majority of the performance tests from within its desktop; however, it lost when it came to the OpenGL performance and the disk benchmarks. MeeGo's OpenGL performance was actually the worst, which as aforementioned is likely attributed to its window manager. This, however, is bad news for anyone that is looking to use MeeGo on devices to play any accelerated games. With the PostMark and Unpack-Linux disk tests, the performance of MeeGo 1.0 was quite competitive with its Btrfs file-system, however, not quite fast enough to beat out Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.04 LTS in each instance. The Btrfs file-system performance is already quite good and should continue to evolve in forthcoming kernel releases now that it is mostly stabilized.

In terms of the battery power consumption, as our results show it was rather close between MeeGo, Fedora, and Ubuntu Netbook Remix, but overall Fedora 13 did the best by about 0.4 Watts over MeeGo. An extremely fast boot process tops all this off.

MeeGo is certainly an interesting distribution for not only its speed advantages in different applications, very fast boot times, and an interesting user-interface, but also it is interesting from a technical perspective with its use of Btrfs by default, among other innovations. The MeeGo 1.0 netbook edition can be downloaded at MeeGo.com. We will certainly be around with more MeeGo tests in due time.

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