Macs or PCs

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Ubuntu is probably the flagship Linux distro. People always seem wowed by my spinning cube and burning windows. In terms of mouse clicks to accomplish a task, GNOME is definitely more efficient than Windows 7.


All other categories? Like, say, security, stability, and performance?

Yeah, those categories. Except arguably security.

There's no way you can argue that the UI experience of any Gnome or KDE based environment is equal or superior to Windows 7. It doesn't work that way.

Security is not arguable at all. Windows is hands down the least secure operating system on the market today. You can give the excuse that it's "only because Windows is targeted more" but that doesn't change the fact that you aren't going to get hacked if you run Linux. Stability- my roommate got a blue screen the day after installing Windows 7 onto a brand new hard drive. Performance- not even a competition. Even the bloated mass that is Kubuntu is noticeably faster than Vista or 7.

Yes, I really can. I use Linux, OS X, and Windows 7 regularly. The Windows 7 GUI is an obfuscated mess and nothing is placed in sensible locations. GNOME especially is much more intuitive, and in eye candy Compiz blows Aero out of the water any day.

Is Windows a PC? NO

Then, if Windows is not a PC, what the f**k is it? Like Linux (I know it really is just the kernel, etc) it's just an operating system. Microsoft only does software. The Xbox uses parts from different companies. What parts inside can you say was made by them?

I think my lack of experience with macs is showing. I know linux/windows/mac os are operating systems, but my assumption was that a pc is easier to customise the hardware for... a mac is a bit more of a bundled thing, isn't it?

Funny how a discussion about hardware seems to have turned into a discussion about os's!

stability and security and performance, sorry MyFutureSelfnMe, I have to side with Linux and particularly *nix in general on that one (even with the inclusion of mac os). I've never seen an OS saturate all of it's ram on a 1 GB machine before to merely boot and start a browser until Vista/7. And the security model in windows has been terrible until UAC and DEP were implemented, and they hurt performance alot, especially UAC. UAC is the bloatiest, worst implemented knock-off of sudo I've ever seen. Though to be fair, GNOME and Firefox are catching up very quickly in terms of footprint, they are starting to get really fat. I think Ubuntu now uses a good deal more resources than WinXP

Please don't lump Vista and 7 into the same category here. Vista is a ridiculously bloated, frustrating mess. Windows 7 has a faster boot time than Ubuntu or Red Hat + GUI on most machines I've run it on. I'm going to give you guys the security argument though, I have to admit you're right.

There are relatively few people who prefer any KDE or Gnome based GUI to Windows 7. You may be one of them. Fair enough.

Well yeah, but XP is what, 8 years old by now? Of course it has a lighter footprint than a modern, full-featured OS. But you can still run any number of Linux distros with Xfce or LXDE and definitely get better performance than XP, and plus you have real 64-bit support. FF is (for me at least) heavier on Windows than on Linux. Might be that on Linux it's using some shared libraries. GNOME is starting to get a bit heavy, but for my tastes at least it is the most functional desktop around. If GNOME 3 ends up a mess, I may migrate over to Xfce or even LXDE.

Boot time- pretty bad measure of overall performance, especially when you only need to reboot Linux for kernel patches. On my machine, 7 boots much slower than either OS X or Ubuntu, and the desktop takes quite a while to be usable. When you're actually running it, there is no comparison between Ubuntu with GNOME and 7 with Aero. I I've used Vista and 7. I'll grant that 7 is a huge improvement, but it is still based on the same core and has many of the same problems. It's essentially Vista with 30% less fail.

I'm currently using 843MiB of RAM with Firefox, Epiphany (a Webkit-based browser), AbiWord, OpenOffice, eboard (chess program), Evolution (terribly bloated e-mail client), Compiz, and Pidgin IM. There's also a lot of random crap in terms of background services that I haven't bothered to disable. 7 uses that much memory when it's just booted up and idling.

not really, the differences are not all that dramatic. 7 is slightly less agressive with superfetch and the UAC was toned down a bit. thats really all there is, however, infact, due to the few other things that have been added and tweaked, it actually suffers a slight *degradation* in terms of cpu/memory usage on many tasks compared to vista, while being ever so slightly better on a few others. You can check benchmarks if you dont believe me, here I'll link you one. http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/2886/ ... index.html

Those are niche benchmarks that don't take into account things like boot time (which is literally a few seconds on my home PC - a few orders of magnitude faster than Vista) and other real world use scenarios. They're running memory benchmarks and as far as I can tell not taking account of the difference in memory saturation between the two OSes, which is significant. The end result for me is that most of the things I want to do are virtually instantaneous on Windows 7. Vista pissed me off a great deal, to the point where I downgraded to XP. In most tasks, Windows 7 performs similarly to XP and seems to have a faster boot time. Faster than my Ubuntu 9.10 or RHEL 5 systems.

The main issue I have with it is disk performance when accessing tons of small files, e.g. when doing a large build. ext3 is clearly superior to NTFS.

I've grown up using a PC, so I would favor it for that reason. Otherwise, I find the Mac and PC too similar to compare in my case. Both have internet and word documents, which is essentially all I need my computer for.

ok, I dont really consider boot time an important statistic at all, most of the boot time issue can be attributed to the init process, and thats on its way out to be replaced by upstart in most modern distributions, which is a ridiculous deal faster. I dont think boot time matters really at all to the average user though as long as its reasonably quick. and faster boot time doesnt mean it utilizes the hardware any better whatsoever. I come from a background of servers mostly, and I cant really see how its even arguable that modern windows would have better performance than a modern linux, especially not when linux scales to all kinds of hardware up to super massive clusters very nicely. I can get a ton more running with a given amount of resources with linux than I ever could with 7, and to me and most engineers, that means performance, I am not sure how you define it. Obviously, if I define performance as what you get out of a given amount of resources, our definitions of performance are not the same thing. and as far as stability, whatever, find me a windows box with a 2-3 year uptime that actually gets used. hard benchmarks dont lie and I encourage you to find me another set of benchmarks from a reputable source that show some dramatic difference. I readily invite it, because I dont think those benchmarks exist, and if they dont exist, to me there is no performance difference that is notable between 7 and vista.

Last edited by TOGGI3 on 01 Mar 2010, 12:32 am, edited 1 time in total.

You're a server guy. Your needs are different from end users. End users are largely not using Linux, even though it's free and Windows is not. That is not some fluke due to manipulative market practices.

not saying linux is flawless, nor that free software is always necessarily better. I am strictly arguing linux performance vs windows performance, and 7 vs vista performance. In this scope I think the data is very clear.

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html

That's not any more clear than an IQ is at measuring a person's intelligence. You can get a ballpark estimate, but in real life it depends what you're doing. And I believe that Windows 7 has surpassed the performance of Ubuntu 9.10 and RHEL 5 for most real world *desktop* use case scenarios. But I don't know that anyone benchmarks those.

The quickest example I can think of is booting up, and running Microsoft Word (or OpenOffice as the case may be on Linux). That could easily take twice the time on RHEL 5 vs. Win7. And once you're in, you're using OpenOffice, when you could be using Office 2007. I know which I would choose.

I would still use Linux if I were running a server.