May 04, 2012 -- For the past few days I have been trying out the Microsoft Windows 8 Consumer Preview. For the most part, I would call Windows 8 a crap wreck, but it is not without a few advantages over Linux.

May 02, 2012 -- Here's a comparison of the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS versus Microsoft Windows 7 performance when it comes to using Intel Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors with integrated graphics. While the Sandy Bridge graphics performance was once faster when it came to OpenGL with the open-source Linux driver, that's no longer the case. The Linux OpenGL performance for both Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge hardware is now slower in most GL workloads than Intel's Windows 7 x64 driver.

April 11, 2012 -- How does the choice of desktop environments you make for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS impact your system's performance and power consumption? Here's the latest round of benchmarking from the various Ubuntu 12.04 desktop environment choices -- Unity, Unity 2D, GNOME Shell, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, and Openbox -- when running them on three different laptops.

April 09, 2012 -- While recent testing has shown how Ubuntu 12.04 LTS KVM/Xen/VirtualBox virtualization compares between Intel's Sandy Bridge and AMD's Bulldozer platforms, in this article is a different look at the KVM virtualization performance of the forthcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating system. In this review is a look at the KVM virtualization performance of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS compared to the earlier Ubuntu 10.04.4 and Ubuntu 8.04.4 Long-Term Support releases.

April 04, 2012 -- Similar to the mixed boot performance results for Ubuntu 12.04, the power consumption results are also mixed. For some hardware, Ubuntu 12.04 is the most power efficient Ubuntu Linux release in recent history while for some other hardware the Precise Pangolin is continuing in a power binge.

March 29, 2012 -- Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" can boot faster... sometimes. If you are not lucky, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS can boot more than twice as slow as Ubuntu 10.04, the previous LTS release. Here are boot performance results of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS running on six distinct notebooks and comparing the Bootchart results upon clean installations of Ubuntu Linux going back as far as six years from the days of the Ubuntu 6.06 LTS "Dapper Drake" release.

March 08, 2012 -- Curious to know how the performance of enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS, Scientific, etc) evolves over time? Here's a look at the performance of Scientific Linux 5.7, the recently released Scientific Linux 6.2, and then Fedora 16 as representative of what will eventually work its way into Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

March 05, 2012 -- The Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project has been quite interesting as one of the official Debian operating system ports. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD pairs the FreeBSD kernel with the Debian GNU user-land so that users can enjoy their traditional Debian applications while taking advantage of the FreeBSD kernel. With the recently released FreeBSD 9.0 kernel having worked its way into Debian Wheezy, how is the FreeBSD 9.0 kernel performance compared to the Linux 3.2 kernel? This article provides those benchmarks.

February 29, 2012 -- For some results that are more interesting than the recent RHEL / Oracle / CentOS / Scientific Linux comparison, here are some benchmarks pitting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 against a development snapshot of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on three different systems.

February 28, 2012 -- While most x86 hardware shipping in the past few years has been x86_64-capable, Canonical has continued recommending the 32-bit version of Ubuntu Linux over the 64-bit version. With Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" this will hopefully change where the 64-bit version becomes recommended as the default spin. In this article are some updated benchmarks showing the performance of the 32-bit versus 64-bit versions of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.