A Big Operating System Benchmark Comparison

[L33F3R]

its a simple question of userbase - i agree, i think pclinuxos, simplymepis and others pound ubuntu into the dust as good begginning distro's.... but ubuntu has the press so ubuntu is what people use, so ubuntu is what gets tested.

thats personal preference. I'll take ubuntu over PClinuxos anyday so the argument saying its grind doesnt have any backing. Ubuntu is not the most used distro for being crap, its prolly not for the power user but for the vast majority of PC users it tailors very very well. You get views by being very good or being very bad, not by getting views.

[AdrenalineJunky]

key words being "i think"

obviously everyone has thier own opinions - though i do think users would be alot more evenly spread out of the press hadn't latched on to ubuntu the way it had.

then again, there may be quite a few less people using linux as well.

[Adarion]

Gentoo would be indeed nice though it needs a lot of setup before. Not sure of liveCDs in Gentoo cause they run from CD and they are less likely to find. Normal Gentoo media is just the minimum install with no X and stuff.
Maybe one of these Gentoo-derivates would be an option.
Generally there should not just be Ubuntu all the time.

[Pepazdepa]

Wanna see Fedora and Opensuse.

[L33F3R]

what about vector linux? im not saying it because I use it but the reasons I use it are why it might be worth benching. it is not a bleeding edge distro by any means but its light on its feet and doesnt give you the crap gentoo or arch put you under as far as setup. Because of its conservative nature I have found it to be THE most stable distro I have used.

I figured I would post the request as it would be alot easier than arch or gentoo to actually run tests on, which people seem to convieniently forget.

[nanonyme]

I wish every distro went on to make an internal survey to find out their strengths and weaknesses and then there would be an article about those. :3 I'd consider it interesting to hear distros officially announce what they think they are good at (without comparing themselves to other distros, that just causes a flamewar) and what they think might needs improving.

[sabriah]

My vote for the Debian Sid, as that is the most up-to-date. Not "stable" which is always "outdated", even if "stable".

Otherwise it would be nice to see Win XP and Win 7 too!

64-bit or 32-bit? Hmmm... I would have done 64-bit as as possible.

[kimbombista]

Well, I think its relevant.
I'm an avid Gentoo and Ubuntu user. Although they are linux distro's, in my opinion they live in a very different world.

Ubuntu is no doubt the most popular. Easy to use, beautiful ready made linux OS, but full of things I don't really use.

Gentoo is different. steep learning curve, highly customizable OS, but demands love and most of my night time(compiling stuff).

In my view the linux World is divided into groups:

The populars:
Ubuntu
Suse
Mint
Fedora
etc.

and the "Old sch00l":
Slackware
Gentoo
Arch
LFS

I'd love to see a good benchmarking battle between 2 distro's of these 2 groups. In spite of sharing the same kernel, these two groups
are very different in their usability, I'd love to know How efficient the "old school" are(if they are), when compared with the popular.

Phoronix did something like this in the article "Arch Linux 2009.08 Benchmarks" http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...nchmarks&num=1
by comparing Ubuntu With Arch. the results did impress me, arch won in every front, (apart from the graphics).
I'd love to see comparisons like these more often.

[iop3u2]

can you for once use the same compiler version for everything? or at least use the default compiler of the OS and as a second benchmark use the same gcc version in all the operating systems...

[vermaden]

Its my first post on these forums, so I would like to say 'Hi' to everyone.

I only hope that person that will be doing these tests will read this post, since this thread/comments grown very big.

1. HARDWARE

Many people scream to use ATI or nVidia cards, but AMD does not provide their drivers to NetBSD and FreeBSD, nVdidia only provides i386 driver for FreeBSD, but there is no amd64 version, and no version for NetBSD either.

The only graphics card, that will made all these tests equal for all systems is Intel based integrated card, and a little older one, not the newest one.

For laptop tests (if there will be any) best chioce will be X3100 or GMA 950.

For Desktop tests best would BE GMA 3100 for example.

2. VERSIONS

If you will not include FreeBSD 8.0 (will be released in middle September) tests will not be fair since its one of the biggest FreeBSD releases ever, or at least include tests for 8.0-RC* versions.

I would also include these systems:
NetBSD 5.0.1
Ubuntu 9.04
CentOS 5.3
Mac OS X 10.6
OpenSolaris 2009.06

3. SERVICES/FEATURES

FreeBSD and NetBSD comes as a BARE MINIMAL systems where you can add everything by yourself, Mac OS X, Ubuntu and OpenSolaris comes with all features and services by default, so be sure to disable many features and compare Oranges to Oranges, not Apples to Oranges ...