Ubuntu With Linux 3.16 Smashes OS X 10.9.4 On The MacBook Air

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu With Linux 3.16 Smashes OS X 10.9.4 On The MacBook Air

As it's been some months since last running any Linux vs. Mac OS X performance benchmarks, up today are benchmarks of the latest OS X 10.9.4 release on a Haswell-based Apple MacBook Air compared to running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on the same hardware with also upgrading against the Linux 3.16 development kernel.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=20687

[rob11311]

Linux vs. Mac OS X performance benchmarks, up today are benchmarks of the latest OS X 10.9.4 release on a Haswell-based Apple MacBook Air compared to running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on the same hardware with also upgrading against the Linux 3.16 development kernel

Wow! That is rare to see such a consistent and large all round thrashing.

[Luke_Wolf]

Wow! That is rare to see such a consistent and large all round thrashing.

Vs OS X? not really no, for as long as I've been reading Windows and Linux have both run much faster than OS X on it's own hardware.

[Drago]

Seems like Germany(Linux) : Brasil(os x) to me.

[Filiprino]

OS X is pretty, that's all.
And it's called GNU Linux, not Linux. Linux is the kernel, like Linux in Android.

[ssokolow]

OS X is pretty, that's all.
And it's called GNU Linux, not Linux. Linux is the kernel, like Linux in Android.

"GNU" isn't "the" Linux vendor, nor is it a Linux distro, so you need the slash. You meant "GNU/Linux" (interpreted as "GNU over Linux" in the same way that "1/2" is "1 over 2").

Even then, it's hard to justify calling it GNU/Linux in a desktop distro because Stallman's rationale is that the only parts that count as part of the OS for naming purposes are what you need to run terminal-mode Emacs. (He's lawyering the definition of "the OS" to a 1980s state to favour his viewpoint). X11 is a larger part (both in amount of code and significance to API compatibility) of "Linux" than GNU componentry (especially so if the computer doesn't have GCC installed), so it's X11/Linux by that logic. (And "X11; Linux" is what you'll find if you look into the Firefox User-Agent string.)

The only GNU component that has any relevance to the platform itself is glibc (The GNU C library) and that's the non-X11 distinction between Android and Ubuntu. (If you don't consider it to be "Android vs. X11", then, by process of elimination, Android must be a whole-distro name.) Android chose to use a glibc-incompatible libc (Bionic) and, if they hadn't, there'd be no justification for not calling it "X11/Linux".

So it's either "Linux" (vernacular), "X11/Linux" (compromise) or "X11/glibc/Linux" (accurate, but too awkward to ever take off).

(Plus, the musl C library is working toward ABI compatibility with glibc, at which point, it'll be possible to build a distro which runs X11/Linux binaries with no GNU components (BusyBox for userland utilities, musl for libc, llvm-clang if you need a compiler, etc.) ...something I welcome so that people can finally stop whining that it should be "GNU/Linux" just because Stallman doesn't want to admit that the GNU project failed as a unified whole... in large part because, like the Duke Nukem Forever project leader, their Hurd kernel guys kept chasing perfection while Linux aimed to actually be useful.)

Oh, and there's always the "no name with more than three syllables will ever catch on" argument.

[emblemparade]

OS X is pretty, that's all.
And it's called GNU Linux, not Linux. Linux is the kernel, like Linux in Android.

Well, if we're honest here, the GNU userland is almost entirely bypassed in the Phoronix test suite. This really is mostly a benchmark of "Linux" itself, which is of course a monolith that includes filesystems and graphics drivers as modules. The GNU programs are very important for everyday use of the operating system, but not very important in this case.

And it would be quite interesting to see benchmarks of Linux when it's not part of a desktop-oriented stack. Desktop distros do quite a bit of customizations of Linux in order to best support their intended workloads. It's actually possible to install Android x86 on PC architecture, where we have the same essential Linux kernel, but with very different cusomizations. ChromeOS can be used, too. However, I imagine only a very small part of the Phronoix test suite would run: gcc doesn't run on Android and none of the games Phoronix uses (as far as I know).

[rob11311]

Vs OS X? not really no, for as long as I've been reading Windows and Linux have both run much faster than OS X on it's own hardware.

But even the FOSS graphics drivers in 3.16 kept the pressure on, that's the difference I meant by consistent.

[chrisb]

Well, if we're honest here, the GNU userland is almost entirely bypassed in the Phoronix test suite. This really is mostly a benchmark of "Linux" itself, which is of course a monolith that includes filesystems and graphics drivers as modules. The GNU programs are very important for everyday use of the operating system, but not very important in this case.

In this case the compiler is important.

[Filiprino]

"GNU" isn't "the" Linux vendor, nor is it a Linux distro, so you need the slash. You meant "GNU/Linux" (interpreted as "GNU over Linux" in the same way that "1/2" is "1 over 2").

Even then, it's hard to justify calling it GNU/Linux in a desktop distro because Stallman's rationale is that the only parts that count as part of the OS for naming purposes are what you need to run terminal-mode Emacs. (He's lawyering the definition of "the OS" to a 1980s state to favour his viewpoint). X11 is a larger part (both in amount of code and significance to API compatibility) of "Linux" than GNU componentry (especially so if the computer doesn't have GCC installed), so it's X11/Linux by that logic. (And "X11; Linux" is what you'll find if you look into the Firefox User-Agent string.)

The only GNU component that has any relevance to the platform itself is glibc (The GNU C library) and that's the non-X11 distinction between Android and Ubuntu. (If you don't consider it to be "Android vs. X11", then, by process of elimination, Android must be a whole-distro name.) Android chose to use a glibc-incompatible libc (Bionic) and, if they hadn't, there'd be no justification for not calling it "X11/Linux".

So it's either "Linux" (vernacular), "X11/Linux" (compromise) or "X11/glibc/Linux" (accurate, but too awkward to ever take off).

(Plus, the musl C library is working toward ABI compatibility with glibc, at which point, it'll be possible to build a distro which runs X11/Linux binaries with no GNU components (BusyBox for userland utilities, musl for libc, llvm-clang if you need a compiler, etc.) ...something I welcome so that people can finally stop whining that it should be "GNU/Linux" just because Stallman doesn't want to admit that the GNU project failed as a unified whole... in large part because, like the Duke Nukem Forever project leader, their Hurd kernel guys kept chasing perfection while Linux aimed to actually be useful.)

Oh, and there's always the "no name with more than three syllables will ever catch on" argument.

Actually, the exact name to receive the same treatment as the rest of OS would be to call it just GNU. You don't say NT Kernel nor Darwin, and even you don't say Linux in the case of Android. You say Windows, OS X and Android. It will be possible to build a distro without GNU components as you currently can, but you'll use always GNU to speak about desktop distros and any other non-GNU derivative will be called by its own name but NEVER will be called only Linux. That's plain stupid.
You think GNU failed but you can write your post here thanks to GNU, so you can stop your madness.