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

[Luke_Wolf]

To be fair, Linux (Android) is neck and neck with Apple in the mobile department

You haven't been paying attention to the IDC reports have you?
Android has about 70-80% of the smartphone marketshare, Apple is second with ~ 10% of the market share, and it gets much smaller from there
Android has surpassed Apple on the number of tablets sold starting in mid-2013 and consistently continuing to the current quarter.

So no, not neck and neck, it's linux dominated. That said I would expect Android to run slower on an iPhone than iOS due to Dalvik being slow. Android L will be getting around the Dalvik problem by AoT compiling applications on the device.

[rober]

Must be why the only thing Apple developers are good at is copying UI elements from GNOME 3.x. Seriously, check out how closely the latest Mac OSX update looks to GNOME 3.x -- check out all the features it's getting that GNOME 3.x developed -- speaks volumes in itself.

GNOME can still take a lot of things from OSX, for example:

- Dock: I think the only way to do efficient multitasking in GNOME is using Alt+Tab and sometimes is not enough, the GNOME overview is ridiculous, as is implemented now, you just cannot find a window on it (just compare this with this, in which one is easier to find a window? one more thing to learn), a dock is a pretty good alternative to do efficient multitasking and not get lost in your own workspace, I really prefer GNOME Shell + Plank (or another competitive dock) than just GNOME Shell.

- Fullscreen application management: one thing that I love in OSX is that an app gain it own workspace, believe me, that is really comfortable.

- Gestures: touchpad gestures are not present in GNOME (right now, I feel that they are coming), lots of gestures are available in OSX to change workspace, trigger the overview and switch between apps, before starting using OSX, I thought that gestures was totally usefulness, now, I cannot live without it (I just need it to give a it a good try to a good gestures implementation).

- Smoother animations: oh God, one cannot give enough thanks to have pretty and smooth animations. I am waiting for you Wayland, do something for us !!!

- More configurability, GNOME is working on that to. Believe it or not, this one is quite important, brings the user the feeling of have everything under control.


Changing the subject, performance is not everything... in OSX my laptop works at lowest temperatures than in Linux, touchpad driver works better (waiting for you too, libinput ), suspend-resume is faster, 4 hours more (or even more) of battery life, and that surely has an impact on performance, but as a laptop user, I prefer quiet coolers, low temperatures and high battery life, I don't care if OSX takes a couple of milliseconds more to do something.

I don't want to criticize GNOME or Linux, I love these, I am expecting the moment when I can format my OSX partition without miss anything, nowadays I miss things that are only present in GNOME when I use OSX, and that's awesome! But it bothers me a lot that people thinks that because Linux can compile a software 500ms faster than OSX they automatically thinks that the UX in Linux better than in OSX, that's not wise nor objective, that's being a fanboy.

And talking about appearance, for me, GNOME is visually prettier than OSX, even so Phanteon.

PS: Stop talking about how we call Linux GNU BSD Debian Fedora bla bla... Phoronix forum is an off-topic factory.

[emblemparade]

You guys, if Torvalds and Stallman can't agree on what the scope of an "operating system" is, we probably won't either.

The fact is that the term is not very well defined, and there are enough variations to the answer of "how to operate a computer" to make it hard to encompass all of them. I'm old enough to remember that the "operating system" used to be mostly people before we had mini-computers. An "operator" was a full-time job, far more interesting than that of a "programmer."

The GNU userland is an important part of many free operating systems. But just how important? Historically, it was *crucial*: Linux simply could not have existed without the ability to instantly have the broad range of libraries and tools that GNU had already completed, tools that allowed Linux to compile and load and support many standard UNIX programs. Without GNU, Linux would have been an interesting embedded operating system looking for someone to build something on top of it.

And of course, very crucial is that Linus used the GNU General Public License. Torvalds could have chosen a BSD-type license, and simply forked the old BSD userland, like NetBSD, etc. But the decision to go with the incomplete GNU operating system project was all about its ingenius license. Argue all you like about the ideology, the fact is that the license has proved extremely effective in this case in doing exactly what it was supposed to do: forcing the hand of many big companies to release their operating system modules as free software, part of the Linux source code tree. Now that Linux is such an incredible success, such a strict license may not seem so necessary anymore, but I'm convinced that were it not for the GPL, Linux would remain a rather isolated project, like the BSDs.

So, it's clear that Linux owes a huge deal to the GNU project early on. But what about later?

Linux succeeded in taking over the server world, first for the early Internet, and now slowly encroaching on enterprise domains. But much of that success is due to the "LAMP" stack which also includes Apache, MySQL and PHP. So, should we call the operating system LAMP?

Its mobile success is due to Android (which really uses very little of GNU). Indeed, that's what we call it.

Linux has not really succeeded on the desktop, but even there, what success it has is also due to other important software packages. X11 (and its forerunners), Firefox, OpenOffice, KDE and GNOME were all necessary to turn Linux into a fully usable everyday desktop operating system. Is GNU important there? Sure. But is GNU what makes the desktop operating distinct? Not at all. Windows XP was an entirely different operating system (NT-based) than Windows 98, but it was still Windows: it ran the same software (the Win32 API) and behaved similarly. So, is the kernel important? Is it worth even emphasizing that it's "Linux"? For example, running Debian GNU/kFreeBSD will give you pretty much the same user experience as Debian GNU/Linux. Linux is, however, important to emphasize when you want to talk about the hardware/driver support of your operating system. FreeBSD and Linux support different hardware differenty, use a different set of filesystems, etc.

So, it's really a matter of your own emphasis. I'm surprised that two guys as experienced as Torvalds and Stallman don't understand this, and continue to argue about the name.

Me, I prefer not to use either "Linux" or "GNU"! Instead, I talk about "free Unix-like operating systems." They're are all very similar in terms of what you can do with them, and they all run a very similar set of software, despite using one of a few different kernels, one of a few different userlands, one of a few different desktop environments. The experience between them is very similar, down to the choices available. And let's not forget that there are all also "free BeOS-like operating systems" (Haiku) and "free Windows-like operating systems" (ReactOS). The point is that free operating systems, together and separately in their specific uses, offer a crucial alternative to the proprietary ones.

[profoundWHALE]

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

It's great when someone tries so hard to be anything but ignorant, and then ends up being totally ignorant.

Unfortunately, this is not a point at all.

You mean like trying to tell people to call Linux, GNU Linux?

[mmstick]

Whether or not something looks good is pretty subjective. I along with probably most of everyone prefer how OS X looks. They pay people a lot of money to create a consistent UI that looks good to the general population and it appears to succeed, so yeah. Linux can learn a lot from OS X considering OS X has done the research.

Must be why the only thing Apple developers are good at is copying UI elements from GNOME 3.x. Seriously, check out how closely the latest Mac OSX update looks to GNOME 3.x -- check out all the features it's getting that GNOME 3.x developed -- speaks volumes in itself.

[profoundWHALE]

Have you been paying attention at all to the phoronix OS X benchmarks for the last 4 years (I can't speak about before that as that's about when I started reading phoronix)? The only area where OS X has ever beaten linux in benchmarks has been when compared to the Open Source graphics drivers, and even on those Linux is usually ahead. For all other cases OS X is significantly slower than Windows or Linux.

If you stop and think about it, it makes sense, because nobody who cares about performance is using a mac. Super computers are primarily running Linux. Linux, Windows, a few proprietary UNIXes primarily from IBM and HP, and FreeBSD are the only OSes that matter in the server room. Render farms for the big animation companies are all running Linux, and gaming is done on Windows. Thus nobody is pushing apple to develop for performance.

To be fair, Linux (Android) is neck and neck with Apple in the mobile department, so you could say that in quantity:
Mobile: Linux=iOS > Windows Phone/RT
Desktop: Windows XP-7 > 8 > OS X > Linux
Server: Linux > BSD > Windows Server > Others

It's kind of weird when you look at that. To succeed in the mobile department you have to be small footprint, efficient and user-friendly. To succeed in the server market you have to be scalable, reliable, and powerful. To succeed in the desktop you need to be user-friendly, powerful, and flexible. Linux has all of these and yet they aren't so far ahead in the desktop. It'd be pretty neat to go to a computer store where the hard drive and memory aren't actually installed, and you can pick out a hard drive, shove it into an 'OS Loader' or something, and then it's ready to be installed in the laptop or desktop or whatever. Windows would be like $100-$150 and most Linux would be a whopping $0. I can guarantee that the amount of people running Linux would skyrocket just because of costs alone. The problem is that the people making the hardware often go out of their way to make sure it works with Linux, and then they have to price it the same or higher than Windows. It's a little retarded because they end up developing the crapware for Windows anyways.

[Luke_Wolf]

Both systems are great , Linux won't beat OS X in every benchmark, both systems have particular applications which one performs better than the other?.

Have you been paying attention at all to the phoronix OS X benchmarks for the last 4 years (I can't speak about before that as that's about when I started reading phoronix)? The only area where OS X has ever beaten linux in benchmarks has been when compared to the Open Source graphics drivers, and even on those Linux is usually ahead. For all other cases OS X is significantly slower than Windows or Linux.

If you stop and think about it, it makes sense, because nobody who cares about performance is using a mac. Super computers are primarily running Linux. Linux, Windows, a few proprietary UNIXes primarily from IBM and HP, and FreeBSD are the only OSes that matter in the server room. Render farms for the big animation companies are all running Linux, and gaming is done on Windows. Thus nobody is pushing apple to develop for performance.

[dragorth]

System branding. People don't normally say "Linux" in that context you are taking about, instead they say "Ubuntu" or "Red Hat".

But in fact those are GNU/Linux systems. Their generic type is GNU which abstracts Linux.
Today I think I'll download Debian GNU/Linux.

This is a specious argument.

GNU does NOT abstract linux.

GNU is an organization that consists of multiple, loosely coupled software projects that can be used together or separately. One of these projects is GCC. Another is glibc.

GCC is a compiler that implements several standards that provide a platform agnostic abstraction of computer hardware. glibc is an implementation of the C standard library, which is part of the same standard that GCC implements.

THE STANDARD IS THE ABSTRACTION LAYER.

Let say that again.

THE STANDARD IS THE ABSTRACTION LAYER.

By your logic here, we should call it C Standard Linux. In which case, MOST OSes would be named the same way. Why is this true? Because we can compile the kernel using other c standard compilers, using other implementations of the c standard library.

OK, let's look at this from a different perspective.

Intel, Microsoft, AMD, and APPLE provide in some form or another a c standard compiler.

If you create a program from any one of them, you do not suddenly start calling the program Microsoft Autodesk MAYA under windows, Apple Autodesk MAYA under OS X or GNU (or whatever compiler they use on Linux) Autodesk MAYA under Linux. You do not call X11 the GNU X11, or the Apple X11, or the MingW X11.

As an artifact of the c/c++ standard, if you compile a shared library, you should use the same complier version for any program that you want to link against that library. This is not applicable for GCC due to their decision to keep a stable abi. Ironically, this is causing them issues with complying with the new cxx11/14 standard. This means it only makes a difference what system you use due to library linking.

Thankfully, the C++ ISO committee is looking at creating a solution to this problem, meaning multiple compilers and compiler versions could use the same libraries, making the actual implementation matter even less.

Finally, The GCC folks have made it very clear that using the GCC compiler or libraries in no way requires any legal or ethical obligations toward the GCC system, the output of their compiler is in no way related to GCC. If they were ever to specify anything different, they would find many more developers and companies jumping ship from contributing.

[dante]

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

Both systems are great , Linux won't beat OS X in every benchmark, both systems have particular applications which one performs better than the other?.

[xeekei]

Got a high-end mouse? Good luck using that on Linux. It's impossible to configure the mouse speeds decently.

My ROCCAT Kone XTD works flawlessly, and has configuration software and everything. You should buy gear from the companies that support Linux if you want it to work.