Why Dell Should Upgrade Past Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

The newer GCC 4.3 branch was a heck of a lot faster than Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS with GCC 4.2 on this Atom processor. It too over 22 minutes to compile ImageMagick on this lightweight Dell netbook with Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS, but just 15 minutes for Ubuntu 8.10 and 14 minutes for Ubuntu 9.04.

The 7-Zip compression performance also improved sharply with the newer Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04 releases. The 7-Zip performance had improved by 43% between Ubuntu 8.04.2 and 8.10 while there was an 8% boost between Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04.

The LZMA compression performance was also in favor of the two newer Ubuntu releases. Compressing a 256MB file using LZMA compression required nearly 20 minutes with the last Long-Term Support release, but with 8.10 and 9.04 versions that was cut down to 12 minutes.