Ubuntu 9.10 Off To A Great Performance Start

[L33F3R]

(*) If you asked me, I'd tell you that using a closed source protocol for something as inherently open as communication between people is quite a contradiction and a rather bad idea. And maybe you wouldn't expect that from a 'Windows troll'. The thing is that everybody and their cats, be it for lack of concentration, reading skills, capacity or pure intellectual dishonesty and propensity to self-deceit, seem ready to jump to conclusions without thinking for a couple of seconds before vomiting their junk all over the rest of us.

Amen

next time i go to court, your my representation

[kraftman]

@Yotambien

Now, although quite generous, there's a limit to the amount of shit I'm ready to get from anybody. I have, directly or indirectly, been called stupid, idiot, troll, accussed of having some sort of agenda to promote god knows what and I apparently even have some psychological problems. I want to believe that this will stop now and here.

Actually, you gave a lot of bull here and some idiotic examples, so this childish trick won't make look smarter. Stop writing nonsenses and then it will stop.

P.S. There must be some reasons why people call you that.

The thing is that everybody and their cats, be it for lack of concentration, reading skills, capacity or pure intellectual dishonesty and propensity to self-deceit, seem ready to jump to conclusions without thinking for a couple of seconds before vomiting their junk all over the rest of us.

It concerns you and some of your follower as well.

[susikala]

Well, one'd have to sum up that whole Windows-is-better preaching as at least minor trolling, since this is a Linux BBS, after all.

[Apopas]

No, you have not got my point, and by a long shot. But I'll make it again because you look like a nice, honest guy. My point is that I want to have high quality applications and drivers available in my OS of choice--and why it is my choice I don't feel it's relevant. I named those two cases, pdf handling and Skype(*), as two examples of what closed source solutions can bring in terms of quality to this platform. You may disagree about the quality difference between Acroread/whatever and Skype/whatever. But, however great an affinity you have for open source applications and ideals, I want to believe that, at least, you don't really consider those two programs to be 'a piece of crap' in terms of how good they are at what they intent to. Now, skip all the trash and go back some pages in the thread; remember what was being said about stable ABI or not? There you have it, so again it goes: I want companies to consider Linux seriously and make their products available to this platform. I want the _enormous_ gap between Windows and Linux in terms of existing software to narrow. I think Wine is NOT a solution in any conceivable way--leave alone that it doesn't actually deliver--and what is needed, open source or otherwise, are native applications. So let's complete the chain: I also happen to believe that the fact that the Linux kernel (and distributions) appear to always be a moving target makes it harder for anybody to create and maintain code for this platform.

We are going to disagree again mate about stabl;e ABI and such. A stable ABI and the major import of every proprietary application (despite its quality) will make Linux a bit more free version of Windows in my opinion but no reason to speak again for this. We'll never agree. But you must admit that your phrase

The rest of the world uses something else.

can be misunderstood even by the smartest ones.

If you asked me, I'd tell you that using a closed source protocol for something as inherently open as communication between people is quite a contradiction and a rather bad idea. And maybe you wouldn't expect that from a 'Windows troll'.

Then why use Skype? Despite its features is not an application someone needs for a living! like photoshop or 3dSmax. Since the inherently attribute (that's the corect word?) of communication, as you said, is so important then why to not "sacrifice" these more options and use open source protocols?

[Apopas]

That Acroread 'piece of crap' thing renders the text better than xpdf, Kpdf, Evince or Okular (I tried them all, thankyouverymuch), is faster at doing it, more flexible (try it and look at the options, or try to disable sub-pixel smoothing in Kpdf, for instance), and doesn't _miserably_ choke when loading BIG pdf files with high (as in high) resolution images. Filling pdf forms in linux was one of those exotic things people would try to do with pdftk or loading the file in Inscape, Gimp or Scribus, adding some text and exporting back, or some other braindead solution. Acroread can do this. In all fairness, it seems that Okular and latest versions of Evince have catched up with this, which IS good. There is, of course, a long way to what Adobe Pro can do, and unfortunately there's not a Linux version as of yet--so I have to do shit with, say, pdftk, to achive the simplest things. For a change, you could start realizing that there's a world beyond what you know that have some needs about which you may not have a clue.

Well I can hardly see this quality of Acrobat's and the crapiness of the other programs! I couldn't stand this thing at all so download and installed Adobe's software and made a comparison with Evince (unfortunately i can't install Okular which is even better imo because I'll need to compile the whole KDE)!

If you don't mind to spend 10 minutes from your life check these

Well, here is some kind of comparison I did between the last versions of Evince and Acrobat Reader. I did this to prove that Evince doesn't suck and chocks the system with big files. as some guys believe and its a reliable, fast and comfortable application for everyday use. I used a big enough pdf file with a lot of text and high quality pictures.

keep in mind these:
a) My proccessor is a 5 years old athlon 64 one. From the first 64 bit proccessors that were born. I believe In a newer CPU things would run much smoothly and hardly any difference will be noticeable.
b) The performance decreased dramatically because of the recording program which ate a lot of my cpu and enough memory. In reality these two programs perform much better (I didn't notice any big difference, actually). Consider this as if I had Firefox and media player up as I use to do.
c) My Gnome Desktop was running apps I run always like (compiz, avant, cairo clock, yarssr etc). I didn't disable them because I wanted the benchmark to belong in the real world since I read pdfs and do every job with that kind of stuff up and running.
d) Each test took place just after a system's full restart. I didn't want to keep anything in memory etc... (look the uptime on the bottom of gkrellm)
e) Some artifacts and weird shadows are just record's problem.

Here are the videos, almost 7 mins in length both and 50 MB large.

http://rapidshare.com/files/23712160...roread.7z.html

CONCLUSIONS:
1) It seems that under heavy load, Evince performs better. Especially in pages from 32 and above this is more obvious. Even in pages that seems to need more time to be loaded it loads them correctly while Acrobat Reader seems to load them instantly but needs a second "check" to display them correctly.
2) Evince was more responsive. Notice that the number of the page on the top is displayed simultanesouly with the page, while in Acrobat Reader first you see the number to change and then the page to be displayed. That means you click for the next page and Acrobat looks as if needs few milliseconds more to understand what's going on.
3) The amount of RAM Evince needed was lesser than Adobe's software by 25% and needed lees time to run.
4) The text and image rendering was perfect and identical in both applications.
5) Evince's package was 980 KB and it needed just 3.5 MB for installation. ( I admit it needs poppler libraries for pdf support but they are just few KB as well and already installed with Gimp)
6) Acrobat on the other hand needed 143.6 MB for installation but asked for xulrunner-bin to be installed as well which was 40.8 MB. So the total amount of installation was 184.3 MB! (As a 32 bit application it needed even more libraries to work under a 64 bit system).
7) Acrobat Reader had many more options than Evince. But its subjective if the casual user really needs them. It reminded me when I go to the supermarket and then I discover that I need things I never needed till then... (just personal opinion I repeat).
The most important feature I didn't find in Acrobat Reader was support of my native language.
8) And last, Acrobat Reader was like a "foreign body" with the rest of my desktop.


PS: Seriously even if AR was opensource I wouldn't use that thing...

[yotambien]

Hey, nice videos.

I'm afraid that I'll have to stand by what I said, though, after checking Evince, Kpdf and Okular again. You made me think for a second that things had actually improved since the last time.

I installed Okular (4.4.2-2) and Evince (2.26.1-2) from Debian sid. Kpdf and xpdf were already installed.

So let's try them out. First Okular. Type okular in the terminal...After some abnormal unresponsiveness I notice that there are already something like 30 informative error lines. After a while, the program comes out in a half-assed way, and a nice error window complaining about D-bus greets me. I click 'OK'. I try to browse my home directory and, after several seconds, the very same window gives me the very same information. I click 'OK'. No files or folders appear in the browser window so I type the location of the file I want to open. 'Enter'...[wait]..."Could not open file:///blablabla.pdf". I click 'OK'. At this point something like 4-7 different error messages in the terminal are competing with each other for the last position at the bottom part of the screen. Out of some of those, it seems that some KDE component cannot connect to DBUS or some utter bollocking like that. I decide to risk my life and run Okular as root, to see how it goes. Voila, it's happier now. It seems that, after all, I will be able to, at least, _run_ the bloody program. No, I'm not making shit up.

So let's do some seriou pdf'ing. How about an A0 size (841x1189 mm) poster with a bunch of embedded high resolution images (up to 2740x1360)? That surely will stretch the viewers a bit, won't it? There we go. All of them, Acroread included, struggle with files like this, but xpdf and Kpdf get the crown at the lamest ones, I won't waste any comments with those. Evince uses a curious strategy: it loads the whole page in low resolution mode (quick, but useless) and then proceeds to load the real thing, which is what we actually wanted in the first place, thanks. This takes ages. Once loaded, though, it goes lightning fast--as long as you don't zoom in/out again, of course. Similar thing with Okular. It takes fucking ages to respond when changing the zoom level, and once it loads the whole thing is instantaneous. Acroread, on the other hand, loads the different elements of the file at different pace, no screen redraw takes longer than 2 seconds, and it doesn't load the whole stuff at any time--so it doesn't respond faster after you wait at the same magnification. The most productive of the lot is Acroread, I'm afraid. Nobody wants to experience 10-20 seconds freeze continuously when working with files that you can't display entirely in one single page.

Taking a look at what each program has to offer, Evince comes as the typical braindead Gnome product. Basically, there is no single set of options you can touch: zero, nothing; to be honest, I didn't remember it to be so stupidly lame. Okular comes across as a more ambicious piece of software, in the usual KDE fashion. Still, something like choosing the font rendering method is simply absent. Acroread, as oppossed to them, is a fully featured serious application that has more tools, options and plugins than you thought existed, from tabbed display ala Firefox and selective rendering options for images/text, to online collaborative pdf sharing and creation.

The last bit, and most hilarious one--although seeing Okular breaking had no price--is the rendering. This was a fucking joke. You won't believe me either when I say that this was just the second (2nd) document I tried (being the 1st the poster), and not something chosen on purpose, but anyway...Basically, neither Evince nor Okular used the RIGHT FONTS for it, and the result, of course, is the saddest thing I found in a good while. No, you don't have to believe me, I've got a nice screenshot. Left: Acroread; middle: Okular; right: Evince. The zoom level is the most approximate I could get. If Okular didn't have its zoom fucked up (it probably wasn't aware of the dpi settings of my system) I could use the exact equivalent (Evince got it right). But who cares, at this point? Now look at that image and tell me with a straight face that the rendering is 'identical' and 'perfect' amongst Acroread and the other piles of crap. Again, I could only make the comparison activating sub-pixel smoothing in Acroread since the others don't have the option. Apparently the developers have kindly decided what's best for me beforehand and made sure I won't make a mistake by digging through the options. So long for freedom of choice. Repeating the test with a document with which Okular and Evince didn't have some pathological missunderstanding produced what I remembered; their rendering quality is sub-optimal compared to Acroread--but without getting to the aforementioned gore levels. Between the two, Evince has the lead being able to render small fonts in a more legible way than Okular, as well as spacing the letters in a more homogenous and aesthetically pleasant way.


I have wasted enough time with all of you. Having to prove each and every thing I say--especially the things I know because I work with this shit everyday--is boring, tiring, and doesn't get me (or you) anywhere. Use what the hell you want to use and don't ever break your bubble. OSS FTW.

[Apopas]

Now I have to see where the hell I did mistake and the things work for me while not for you or I'll just accept that I'm paranoid and I have edited my videos with Adobe Premiere to look in the way I want to...

I have wasted enough time with all of you. Having to prove each and every thing I say--especially the things I know because I work with this shit everyday--is boring, tiring, and doesn't get me (or you) anywhere. Use what the hell you want to use and don't ever break your bubble. OSS FTW.

Now, after what you're saying I'm going ofcourse to begin use Acrobat since it seems you see things I don't but I should. And who knows, maybe one day I'll be so smart and brave to break, finally, my bubble and enter totally to that beautiful world of proprietary, where no bubbles and other limits exist, everything works as it should and where people have the freedom to buy high quality and useful projects...

[kraftman]

@Yotambien

I have wasted enough time with all of you. Having to prove each and every thing I say--especially the things I know because I work with this shit everyday--is boring, tiring, and doesn't get me (or you) anywhere. Use what the hell you want to use and don't ever break your bubble. OSS FTW.

Hehe, thanks for confirming why people called you that. You're just stupid troll. You consider apps should behave and look exactly as you want and you can't or don't want to understand other people have some different expectations. I don't know what you did to make such problems. It's as simple as clicking Okular icon in K menu and it works without problems. After reading first part of your post I had no doubt (phew, after reading your first post) you're an idiot. You wasted our time and about bubble. I won't use closed crap. Usually it's closed, because code is a mess, there are patents violations or some spying things and very serious security bugs (when comes to graphic drivers situation is different). You're on the second place on my morons list. Thanks.

You mentioned before about being gently Yotambien 21yo... hypocrite.

[susikala]

You're on the second place on my morons list. Thanks.

Who's on your first place?

[kraftman]

Who's on your first place?

Troll, but he wrote maybe 2 or 3 posts here at Phoronix.