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

[Thetargos]

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.

I don't fully agree... A task/window list is useful, granted, but OS X's (BTW I've always pronounced it as Oh eS TEN, given the X is actually referring to the roman number 10) Dock, while "sexy" (to some, anyway) is pretty much also useless and lame at multitask managing and takes up a LOT of screen real estate, and is a pittyful excuse at window/app managing (sure you can force it to autohide and keep its size to a minimum, as I usually do [but do keep the magnifying effect to actually SEE what I'm clickin on!]), for that you better rely on Expos? (there is a reason why the F keys are actually labelled as their intended extented functions in Mac keyboards!) and its "show application windows" feature... For that, to me at least, it does much more sense to run Cinnamon, Mate or XFCE (these two last with Compiz for the very same reason), while having an actual window/task list (to avoid the term "bar"), and these function paired are much more robust than Expos? alone or a task/window list alone. I happen to hate with a passion the way Aqua and Quartz mange windows and applications by "grouping" and coupling them together... I simply despise that!

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

I smewhat agree with you here, it is convenient to be able to "get out" of fullscreen apps by changing the desktop... But this can also be done in GNOME and other DEs, though it may also depend on the type of application. The fullscren UI layout in OS X is indeed superior, IMO.

- 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).

Indeed... trackpad gestures do make life easier, and you can even configure many of those in Xorg, though I believe they rely on hardware support rather... Last time I checked GNOME indeed exposes only a fraction of the supported gestures actually supported by Xorg and the input driver (say Wacom or Synaptics, for instance)

- 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 !!!

I've discovered that animation smoothness of GNOME/KDE/Compiz on Xorg on Linux has more to do wit the quality of the graphics drivers than anything else... Take the opensource nuveau driver for instance... I use Fedora as my primary Linux workstation OS, so there's a sensible gap between versions and especially in regards to Mesa, DRM, kernels and hence speed of nuveau... F18's nuveau, on GNOME as shipped by F18 (bare, no updates) is indeed sluggish and the window placing animation of the overlay the first time you press Activities or take your point to the upper left corner can be a slideshow, but it also depends on the card in question... For example, my wife's workstation has a Geforce GTX 520, when running nuveau in F18 my older nV 9800GT beat it at desktop animations from the get-go with nuveau hands down. If I installed the blob, they would both be butter smooth... If updated to a newer version of Mesa/kernel/DRM/nuveau (as usually is the case within the lifespan of a Fedora release), things improve dearly... Now we're running both F20, she's running Cinnamon with nuveau on her 520, and I'm running GNOME (S)hell on my GTX 760 with the blob, both smooth as butter. Compiz animations, though seem to be a bit more demanding at times, but also are more elaborate.

- 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.

I fully agree with you on this! The first thing I felt I had been betrayed with on the move from GNOME 2 to GNOME Shell was exactly flexibility and configurability, even by esoteric means such as gconf and such. I hated the guts out of the GNOME guys for that for the longest time when I first used the Shell as my primary DE (in tandem with XFCE at the time), while I forced myself to live up with the new beast... It did and does have much potential... Alas, the new paradigm does need that personal touch!

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.

Sadly for my line of work I do need it to be a bit snappier... Sdder for me, the required application or set of applications are not available to Linux in a manner I could (as an individual) license, but rather a corporate license would be much more beneficial, alas, I sit in the Tux boat alone, speaking of my laptop (while ironically being surrounded by literally, a bunch of other Linux "destructors" and "carriers" at the same time), so I'm "forced" to run OS X for the "required" (more like wanted) application(s)... If not only by ONE application, I pretty much run the very same software stack I do on Linux on OS X, however many programs are much more sluggish (even with native Aqua/Qartz UIs) than the equivalents I've run on this very same hardware on top of Linux (again, with nuveau due to EFI restrictions to install the blob)...

For the purists...

There's a LOT of GNU in OS X, so why don't we call the next version BSD/GNU/Darwin/OS X Yosemite 10.10; Or call the current one BSD/GNU/Darwin/OS X Mavericks 10.9.4???????

In regards to the actual article
I did enjoy and jiggle inside when I saw the numbers, but am also of the opinion that the latest stable release (not the shipped kernel) should have been used... I find it a bit odd that you can configure and LTS Ubutntu to run the latest development kernel, and not the latest STABLE kernel (even if not part of the LTS updates mantenance)... Still I suppose that's why the released kernel in Ubuntu LTS served as point of reference...

[jimbohale]

I don't fully agree... A task/window list is useful, granted, but OS X's (BTW I've always pronounced it as Oh eS TEN, given the X is actually referring to the roman number 10) Dock, while "sexy" (to some, anyway) is pretty much also useless and lame at multitask managing and takes up a LOT of screen real estate, and is a pittyful excuse at window/app managing (sure you can force it to autohide and keep its size to a minimum, as I usually do [but do keep the magnifying effect to actually SEE what I'm clickin on!]), for that you better rely on Expos? (there is a reason why the F keys are actually labelled as their intended extented functions in Mac keyboards!)

No that's just not true. The dock is an extremely effective way to multitask. When you have a larger screen (which is becoming increasingly common) the dock takes up very little real estate, and personally I can afford 30px of the bottom of my screen to switch between open applications without pressing any keyboard shortcuts and with one click. I also MUCH prefer the grouping that's done in the dock.

Also, yeah, the X did represent 10 but it doesn't any more.

[stiiixy]

No that's just not true. The dock is an extremely effective way to multitask. When you have a larger screen (which is becoming increasingly common) the dock takes up very little real estate, and personally I can afford 30px of the bottom of my screen to switch between open applications without pressing any keyboard shortcuts and with one click. I also MUCH prefer the grouping that's done in the dock.

Also, yeah, the X did represent 10 but it doesn't any more.

I hate docks. But that's just me and I appear to be a loner in this regard. I find them obtrusive and offensive in their approach to real-estate. People seem to get wet between the legs over it, though and Apple is laughing all the way to the bank. Thankfully I only see it when people want Apple support. Then I can get back to my pretentious life amongst GNUland and the 'rich ecosystem' that's all the UI's, DE's, apps, applets et al. And Windows. Damn gaming habit.

Also, I believe the X in OS X was both a marketing XxXrtemexXx (you remember all those extreme sports, and extreme cars, and extreme chair sitting everythings from the 90's and 00's?) factor to their obviously sexier looking OS compared to the 'other's' of the time.

And to the guy who is using nuveau in place of nouveau; just use 'nuvo'? Pretty please? You're butchering a word and doing a half-arsed attempt at it!

[jimbohale]

I hate docks. But that's just me and I appear to be a loner in this regard. I find them obtrusive and offensive in their approach to real-estate. People seem to get wet between the legs over it, though and Apple is laughing all the way to the bank. Thankfully I only see it when people want Apple support. Then I can get back to my pretentious life amongst GNUland and the 'rich ecosystem' that's all the UI's, DE's, apps, applets et al. And Windows. Damn gaming habit.

Also, I believe the X in OS X was both a marketing XxXrtemexXx (you remember all those extreme sports, and extreme cars, and extreme chair sitting everythings from the 90's and 00's?) factor to their obviously sexier looking OS compared to the 'other's' of the time.

And to the guy who is using nuveau in place of nouveau; just use 'nuvo'? Pretty please? You're butchering a word and doing a half-arsed attempt at it!

Well you figure the dock is roughly equivalent to the window list in windows or the window list in gnome 2, and I think a lot of people use window lists because it is the easiest mouse driven way to multitask because not everyone wants to use their keyboard for everything since we aren't in the 1980s anymore. Also a company with linux distributions is how bad their indexing is for files and such. In OS X if I need to open a new application I can do so using launchpad or by pressing space and ctrl, quickly typing and pushing enter as soon as it is what I want. Gnome has the overview thing but that's not actually indexing much if anything. I think gnome 3 with improvements would make an extremely productive DE. Also, something that is really productive but I don't use for window tearing reasons (X FTL) is elementary OS. It sounds cliche but I am NOTa Linux noob and I find elementary to be the only distribution that has actually figured out how to care for the end user that doesn't want to configure their OS, which is really important.

[startzz]

I hate docks. But that's just me and I appear to be a loner in this regard. I find them obtrusive and offensive in their approach to real-estate. People seem to get wet between the legs over it, though and Apple is laughing all the way to the bank. Thankfully I only see it when people want Apple support. Then I can get back to my pretentious life amongst GNUland and the 'rich ecosystem' that's all the UI's, DE's, apps, applets et al. And Windows. Damn gaming habit.

Also, I believe the X in OS X was both a marketing XxXrtemexXx (you remember all those extreme sports, and extreme cars, and extreme chair sitting everythings from the 90's and 00's?) factor to their obviously sexier looking OS compared to the 'other's' of the time.

And to the guy who is using nuveau in place of nouveau; just use 'nuvo'? Pretty please? You're butchering a word and doing a half-arsed attempt at it!

I agree. Linux docks sucks, they are all buggy, slow, with bad animations, bad configuring abilities, its like a cheap prostitute with aids... On the other hand mac os x dock is really good, it is fast, it has good animations, it is not buggy. It is essential part of os to have a powerful GUI element to navigate quickly through your top 5/10 programs and to be able to quickly get to the other things. In mac, it is dock, in windows - start menu + taskbar. I dont like many things either in all operating systems, but it is not a permission to mix biggest it companies in the world with sh1t, which is really easy with their noobie actions.

[startzz]

I hate docks. But that's just me and I appear to be a loner in this regard. I find them obtrusive and offensive in their approach to real-estate. People seem to get wet between the legs over it, though and Apple is laughing all the way to the bank. Thankfully I only see it when people want Apple support. Then I can get back to my pretentious life amongst GNUland and the 'rich ecosystem' that's all the UI's, DE's, apps, applets et al. And Windows. Damn gaming habit.

Also, I believe the X in OS X was both a marketing XxXrtemexXx (you remember all those extreme sports, and extreme cars, and extreme chair sitting everythings from the 90's and 00's?) factor to their obviously sexier looking OS compared to the 'other's' of the time.

And to the guy who is using nuveau in place of nouveau; just use 'nuvo'? Pretty please? You're butchering a word and doing a half-arsed attempt at it!

I agree. Linux docks sucks, they are all buggy, slow, with bad animations, bad configuring abilities, its like a cheap prostitute with aids... On the other hand mac os x dock is really good, it is fast, it has good animations, it is not buggy. It is essential part of os to have a powerful GUI element to navigate quickly through your top 5/10 programs and to be able to quickly get to the other things. In mac, it is dock, in windows - start menu + taskbar. I dont like many things either in all operating systems, but it is not a permission to mix biggest it companies in the world with sh1t, which is really easy with their noobie actions.

And to the other linux fans : welcume to the reel wourld, guyz ! mai magik junikorn will gaid ju through the survival game, that people are playing, because thats what they are = *****. But then again, if all the people would be smart and follow all the rules and wont do stupid things, then what the world would be like ? Oh yes, i remembered, it would be a bunch of robots "living" exactly the same extremely boring "life".

[rober]

I've discovered that animation smoothness of GNOME/KDE/Compiz on Xorg on Linux has more to do wit the quality of the graphics drivers than anything else... Take the opensource nuveau driver for instance... I use Fedora as my primary Linux workstation OS, so there's a sensible gap between versions and especially in regards to Mesa, DRM, kernels and hence speed of nuveau... F18's nuveau, on GNOME as shipped by F18 (bare, no updates) is indeed sluggish and the window placing animation of the overlay the first time you press Activities or take your point to the upper left corner can be a slideshow, but it also depends on the card in question... For example, my wife's workstation has a Geforce GTX 520, when running nuveau in F18 my older nV 9800GT beat it at desktop animations from the get-go with nuveau hands down. If I installed the blob, they would both be butter smooth... If updated to a newer version of Mesa/kernel/DRM/nuveau (as usually is the case within the lifespan of a Fedora release), things improve dearly... Now we're running both F20, she's running Cinnamon with nuveau on her 520, and I'm running GNOME (S)hell on my GTX 760 with the blob, both smooth as butter. Compiz animations, though seem to be a bit more demanding at times, but also are more elaborate.

Just using the same video drivers (Mesa, I have Intel graphics) and the same laptop, I can tell you, animations in weston were very smoother and tearing free than those performed in GNOME Shell on X. I also tried to open many apps per second in weston and I cannot see another thing but a rainbow, it's amazing how cool and smooth the animation can be in a Linux desktop by just taking off X from the game. Maybe it's not Wayland by itself, maybe the Weston animation algorithms are just better.


For those criticizing docks, I really feel lost in GNOME Shell without it, it's great to have focus on one app, but I always got lost in the workspace without a visible reference of it. I agree it can take much space in 16:9 screens and I feel that's why MacBook's have 16:10 screens instead. I have my dock in GNOME and OSX always visible and doesn't bother me at all, but in my desktop with a 1600x900 resolution, I cannot say the same thing.

I also agree that there is not really cool dock out there in the Linux world (plank is fine... just fine...)

[dante]

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.

Many of the benchmarks publicated here are graphics benchmarks using 3D games, benchmarkers and some applications, would be nice to see more server benchmarks like databases, web servers and etc, for example PostgreSQL runs a lot faster on OS X than Linux .

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=apple_osx108_ubuntu&num=8

[stiiixy]

Many of the benchmarks publicated here are graphics benchmarks using 3D games, benchmarkers and some applications, would be nice to see more server benchmarks like databases, web servers and etc, for example PostgreSQL runs a lot faster on OS X than Linux .

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...8_ubuntu&num=8

Mike used to do that, I believe. Not sure what happened, though. It pointed out the performance differance between the my, post and that other one used for local single user purposes and small devices SQL's (=P).

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was him!

Give him time, anyway. He's busy finishing moving isn't he? And probably has a backlog of other stuff to do. And his main focus these days is seemingly graphics anyway.

[monkey]

Userland was from NetBSD, not FreeBSD

OS X != FreeBSD, they took the FreeBSD userland, but the DRM kernel work of FreeBSD has no effect on OS X since it uses Darwin which is based on Mach.

That is incorrect, the userland was from NetBSD. There was a black and white "desktop published" brochure from Apple about OS X that stated that explicitly. People at the time were pissed at the netbsd project people about not taking better advantage of the "PR" like FreeBSD was doing. Later one of the bigwigs from the FreeBSD project was hired by Apple and the fact that the userland was taken from NetBSD slipped down the memory hole. I wish I still had that damn brochure

The kernel had work from FreeBSD and mach, the userland was NetBSD.