September 30, 2011 -- For some months I've been meaning to try out WattOS, an Ubuntu derivative that claims to do more than providing simple desktop theme changes and other high-level customizations. It seeks to provide a simple and fast desktop that's also said to conserve more power and run better on older hardware, but is this actually the case? Here are benchmarks of WattOS R4 compared to the upstream Ubuntu 11.04 release from which it's derived, and the numbers are quite revealing.

September 28, 2011 -- When Ubuntu 11.04 was released, Phoronix provided Bootchart results for five different systems showing the boot performance from Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS through Ubuntu 11.04. Since Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, the boot time has unfortunately increased.

September 26, 2011 -- At the request of many Phoronix readers, here are some benchmarks comparing the 64-bit performance of Ubuntu 11.04 versus a recent development build of Ubuntu 11.10. Six different systems were benchmarked for this comparison.

September 07, 2011 -- FreeBSD provides a Linux binary compatibility layer that allows 32-bit Linux binaries to be natively executed on this BSD operating system. Linux binary compatibility on FreeBSD allows Linux-only applications to be executed in a near seamless manner on this alternative platform, even for games. New tests have revealed that the modern FreeBSD operating system (via PC-BSD 8.2) can actually outperform Linux when it comes to running OpenGL Linux game binaries.

July 25, 2011 -- When Apple released Mac OS X 10.7 Lion last week Wednesday, they not only put out their new operating system, but they also released new Mac Mini and MacBook Air hardware. The primary changes for both the Mac Mini and MacBook Air refresh is that both form factors are now shipping with Intel's latest "Sandy Bridge" processors, there is the new Thunderbolt I/O, and of course, they are shipping with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. This hardware update led me to immediately order the new Mac Mini as the latest piece of Apple hardware at Phoronix. Not because Phoronix is part of the Apple cult (since, after all, Phoronix is the leading Linux hardware site), but an immense curiosity about the Intel Sandy Bridge Mac OS X graphics driver. In particular, to see how Apple's Sandy Bridge driver compares to the Linux and Windows driver. Well, that was the plan at least, prior to the untimely demise of the new Apple hardware.

July 18, 2011 -- Last week there was a GNU Hurd status update, which generated a fair amount of attention as it stated there are plans for a Debian GNU/Hurd release in conjunction with Debian "Wheezy" when it's out in late 2012 or early 2013. After being in development for more than 20 years, the Hurd is finally taking some shape. The Debian GNU/Hurd installer for Wheezy is even now working, which I tried out and ended up porting the Phoronix Test Suite to GNU Hurd. In this article is a brief look at Debian GNU/Hurd along with the first-ever benchmarks of Debian GNU/Hurd against Debian GNU/Linux.

July 04, 2011 -- Last week we delivered results looking at the power consumption of Ubuntu 11.04 versus Windows 7, which was interesting in its own right, but in this article is a brief look at where Apple's Mac OS X operating system fits in between the power consumption of Ubuntu Linux and Microsoft Windows.

June 29, 2011 -- After recently tracking down the major Linux kernel power regression that's present for a vast number of mobile users in Fedora 15, Ubuntu 11.04, and other recent Linux distributions shipping the 2.6.38+ kernel, the sights were turned to see how the power management of Ubuntu 11.04 compares to that of Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1. In this article are the power consumption results of Ubuntu 11.04 compared directly to Windows 7 Professional 1 on several different systems with distinct notebook and desktop / workstation configurations.

June 02, 2011 -- With the extensive Linux power consumption tests that I've been carrying out to solve some nasty Linux kernel power regressions and find other areas for optimization, one of the requests that has come in frequently is to compare the power consumption of the KDE, GNOME, Unity, Xfce, and LXDE desktops. After the article earlier this week to look at how the desktop environments / compositing window managers affect OpenGL performance, I carried out a quick desktop power test. In this article are battery power consumption results for Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Lubuntu.

May 31, 2011 -- Ending out May, we have an interesting set of tests comparing the performance of Fedora 15 and Ubuntu 11.04. This is looking at the "out of the box" performance of both operating systems on three different systems. Not only is the actual test result looked at, but we also compared the power consumption of the two operating systems.