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

[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.

[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]

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?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[ssokolow]

Calling it GNU/Linux is completely correct. Userland is full GNU, including the vastly used Linux API implementation: glibc. Graphics interface is an add-on that doesn't count and is outside the main user land.

Even without X11 or things that are useless to servers like libalsa and PulseAudio, GNU componentry is a shrinking fraction of the core userland.

No mainstream package manager is part of GNU. Neither SystemD, nor Upstart, nor OpenRC are part of GNU. None of the cron daemons that I've ever seen in my distros have been part of GNU. D-Bus and udev aren't part of GNU. PackageKit and RedHat's various other contributions aren't part of GNU. OpenSSH isn't part of GNU. Many common command-line utilities aren't part of GNU.

I could go on and on.

If they want people to call it GNU/Linux, they should rename "gNewSense" to "GNU" so it's a distro name comparable to "Ubuntu" and "Android", release a "GNU/FreeBSD" like Gentoo and Debian do so there's reason to contrast Linux against something, and offer something appealing enough to the general user base for it to become a mention-worthy name. (Unlikely at this point in time, given their hard-line stance on closed blobs.)

Hell, FreeDesktop/glibc/Linux makes more sense than GNU/Linux these days.

[emblemparade]

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.

Not all current Android apps use Dalvik: many games, for example, are written in C, using the Android NDK. Actually, such games or apps would be very useful as benchmarks to compare Android vs. iOS on more equal grounds. The challenge would be to find hardware that can run both OSes.

[jimbohale]

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.

I've used that mouse and HATED it. I don't expect things to work, but that's why I'm not using Linux as my daily driver.

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.

That's just not true. It looks very little like GNOME 3. If anything, GNOME 3 looks like OS X. I don't think either are true, though. It hasn't recently adopted any GNOME 3 technology, either. I don't know where you got that information from. Having used both quite extensively, I can say that that's just not true. The only thing it gained was tabbed finder windows which is just an obvious thing, I don't think GNOME played any part in that. OS X has so many more features that work so much better than on GNOME 3, specifically share browsing on Linux is *terrible* and when you're dealing with remote working that tends to be an issue (by remote I mean for example on a laptop at the same house). GNOME 3 looks nice, though, I think they're doing a good job any sort of crap functionality isn't their fault.

Not all current Android apps use Dalvik: many games, for example, are written in C, using the Android NDK. Actually, such games or apps would be very useful as benchmarks to compare Android vs. iOS on more equal grounds. The challenge would be to find hardware that can run both OSes.

Yeah, that's true, although I can't say I really care enough about my phone hardware to run both OS's, I'm cool with one or the other. I'm not particularly picky about my phone so I don't care. I'd happily run a Nexus 5, it's nothing special but it would work.

You see, in my opinion, the various Linux distributions focus too much on having the most functionality they don't focus enough on making things work well. Yes, Linux has samba browsing using a variety of things such as the fuse module (smbfs i think?) or the GVFS module that allows browsing in GNOME or the like. They *all* suck. NFS isn't any better. The only solution that's worked well for me is iSCSI but that's not practical nor safe to use in a network with guests so I don't use it. On OS X, I see my shares, I click them, it works. I can use them from any application just like they are a normal file. It doesn't randomly freeze, it is as fast as my network. When I open an application, I know that it's not going to be missing libssl0.9.8 (when compiling yourself or not) and I know that it's not going to be missing gtk3.1.4.1.5.9.2.restofpi ( ) that was removed from the repository last week. I know that X11 isn't going to randomly crash because some application was being dumb, and I know that something written several years ago will still run today. I don't get that on Linux, and while some people don't care it's important to me to have those things.

Both of them get ZFS (OS X's is much more recent and obviously third-party but so is Linux's) which is important to me so that's a non-issue.

I just think that most Linux distributions are a mess because it's impossible to coordinate that effectively when you have that many people and projects attempting to work together. Certain people such as lennart and con kolivas are making it better for us but there are not many people who recognize what's important in a desktop OS. My hope is that once Wayland has been out for a while and lennart does other things that help fix the linux desktop it'll be usable for me again.

Now, it sounds like I'm bashing Linux to which I technically am but only because I want it to improve because I want to be able to use it as my daily driver. Linux has so many appealing things like KVM, kernel stability particularly with networking, great security and improving with end-user-doable things like what systemd is doing with the read-only mounts, *fantastic* sound system (PulseAudio), filesystem support for everything I could ever want in particular XFS and thankfully OpenZFS supports Linux, I despise btrfs I have lost far too much data to which it's not a stable FS yet so it's not it's fault but obviously I'm not going to use an unstable FS, plus it's beyond slow. Expanding on the ZFS thing, ZFS uses a metric fuckton of memory, but I like that because it means that it's caching a lot which I have the RAM for. I have 32GB of RAM, more and more people are having more, I would like it to be used in practical places like FS caching.

Window tearing will hopefully be fixed with Wayland because it's an extreme issue with my NVIDIA card (nouveau & proprietary) and my AMD card (obviously sucks because AMD's Linux support is crap). I'm not going to use my native Intel driver (i7 3930k), sorry, I need 3D performance.

[emblemparade]

I just think that most Linux distributions are a mess because it's impossible to coordinate that effectively when you have that many people and projects attempting to work together.

You are mostly right, I think (I am assuming you are talking about desktop distros). Early Linux-based operating systems had to rely on what free software packages were available, and those had mixed quality: some were very good, some were just "good enough," but many still suffer from poor testing, limited developer support and documentation, etc.

I'm using the past tense because I do think things are changing. We have companies, both big and small (IBM, Redhat, Novell, Canonical, etc.), investing in the free software ecosystem, and making an effort to replace the older components with higher quality software. Because of the free software licenses, these investments get to be enjoyed by all free operating systems. It's going to take time to get the work done, but we're living in an interesting time right now. Wayland and Mir are poised to replace the antique X11 graphics stack, systemd will clean up that awful mess that happens in the first few seconds of the operating system running and straighten out its basic service management, FreeDesktop.org standards are making it easier for application to live happily on all desktop environments, etc...

Quality assurance has also drastically improved. Not many people are aware of this, but Canonical's Launchpad service is a huge continuous-integration environment with many modern testing subsystems. It's a long-term investment that will pay off in terms of reducing breakage during ongoing development and upgrades, even for 3rd-party components.