sekhon.berkeley.edu — Linux (Ubuntu) is found to be much faster than Apple's OS X for statistical computing. Indeed, in one benchmark, Linux is more than twice as fast . The results on this page were conducted on a MacBookpro with a 2.16Ghz Intel Core Duo chip and 2GB of RAM.
May 6, 2006 View in Crawl 4
wonkavsnMay 6, 2006
Mac also has decent wifi support.
blacklilyninjaMay 6, 2006
i have Ubuntu running in Parallels. I really don't see what all the fuss is about. its a smooth running linux distro. Woopee doo. install was very easy. i hear Freespire will also be easy to instal and use. I like linux more than windows but there are just too many unfinished distros out there. Unless you are a geek or wannabe geek you really arent going to know about linux at all. Although i am going to install Ubuntu on my brother's laptop without him knowing. See what he thinks when he boots it up. I am so mean. Some people just have to learn to let go of bill gates. namely... my brother.however.. i love mac os x.
majormauserMay 6, 2006
Still not one answer to my question other than its free. Which is not what I was asking. I think Linux is used by a very vocal few for the limited server functions and mundane tasks such as render-farms. This is about 1% of the user-base. But because these few decide that is very important to "Spread the word" and that its cool to prove to the world they are the rebels of the industry they must continually spew.OSX and Windows are so far ahead of Linux in so many areas. My Issue is that we are continuing to compare fully mature OS's to Linux shells that a devoid of the same features that the mature OS's are suppling. With Linux the argument is " You can change any part of the OS because it OPEN Source" Its an idiot mantra.... ya its Free its Open Source..... Well that 1% can program away and modify their OS and Skin it to their hearts content.
Closed AccountMay 6, 2006
Yeah, Linux had a crippling disadvantage. And it still tore "The Mac®" a new one.
skaagent11May 6, 2006
You, sir, are delusioned.There are so many great things about linux; I'll touch on a few.1. DesktopThe linux desktop has blown up. You choose your desktop from a litany list of great environments such as KDE, Gnome, XFCE, Enlightenment, Fluxbox, Blackbox, XPDE, windowmaker, etc. that can give you any end of choice in how you want your desktop to look and feel and how much of your system resources you are willing to sacrifice. Not only that, a lot of the same functionality that exists on OS X and Windows is on Linux, making using the Linux desktop that much easier. Spotlight and Google Desktop? We have Beagle. Widgets? We have gdesklets and superkaramba. Your stupid little dockbar on OS X? Yes, someone even wrote that for linux. You can open any document type on linux that you can on OS X and Windows and there are a plethora of free tools to view and edit them. Hell, you can even run Windows and OS X programs on Linux with Wine and PearPC respectively. The newer apps won't run at native speeds, but older applications can even be faster in this regard. If you want just an example of how huge the linux desktop has gotten, go to www.freshmeat.net and look at some of the software being developed. Absolutely phenominal stuff. We might not have every application that exists on OS X and Windows, but most can be run on Wine and some on PearPC and in many cases there are free, open source alternatives that are just as good if not better.2. ProgrammingThis has to be explored because linux is a programmers dream. Most every application for linux is open source, meaning the code is available for you to tweak, modify, and use in other applications. This may seem like nothing to you, but the implications are enormous. Open source = fewer bugs. Period. The concept of "many eyes make bugs dissapear" is true. Not only that, linux is EASY to program for. Try learning Win32 and then learn Gtk and come back to me with what you think. Gtk is an absolute gem. Not only is it easy, you can almost always be guarenteed that you can program using a certain toolkit in any language you want. There are so many bindings for Gtk in different languages it is absurd. Some people love Cocoa on OS X. If they love Cocoa, they'll love GnuStep. Linux caters to programmers. This is not even to mention the thousands of compilers, IDES, debuggers, text editers, etc. which not only make programming faster in terms of workflow but also the speed of your apps, but also enjoyable. XCode and Visual Studio have NOTHING on linux tools.3. UtilitiesThis can depend on your distro, but the perfect place to start is package managers. Say I want to install MySQL on my arch linux computer. I type once command to do so: pacman -S mysql. MySQL and all its dependencies download and install themselves. That's all I had to do. Wow. Say I don't even want to touch the command line. I can use Jacman, a graphical front end to pacman, and do the same thing. Other examples are a cron daemon which I can use to automate tasks depending on various elements, a bash shell which I can program to do certain tasks easily and powerfully, and any number of networking tools for god knows what. I'm no networking accifionado, but there is an absurd amount of tools that seem to do anything you could want.4. CustomabilityI've touched on this a little bit, but it's so huge I have to talk about more. Your system can be as big or as small as you want it to be. Say I want to never see a console in my life while using linux. That is a can do and there are plenty of distrobutions that allow this. Say I want nothing but a console and none of that eyecandy junk. Perfect, I don't need to install X server or a desktop environment. Say I'm not satisfied with the speed of open source binaries; I want to go faster than that. No problem, I can download the source, optimize it to hell using simple gcc flags, and install it from source. If I use a distrobution like gentoo this is done for me. With filesystems I have tons of choices that are much faster than their windows and OS X counterparts. ext2, ext3, JFS, XFS, ResierFS 3, ResierFS 4, etc. Fuse allows you to use things like GmailFS to mount your Gmail adress as a hard drive.This is the tip of the iceberg and is really just a sample of examples of the powers of free software. The bottom line is that free software has generated powerful and customizable software much faster than Windows and OS X while simultaneously having little to no support from hardware companies, forcing the community to write many of their own drivers.
raynevandunemMay 7, 2006
Um, why did anyone mod dbr_onix's comment down? I wholeheartedly agree with his statement that Linux is a server OS that isn't really meant for the desktop, and Mac OS X vice versa. I mean, its a monolithic kernel - by default, a monolithic kernel is meant for performance, speed, and stability (which is why the BSD's - save for DragonFly - and Solaris are also monolithic kernels, and guess where they are used most prominently), the three great standards by which servers are/should be judged rather than a desktop.Maybe XNU for Apple's Darwin is a hybrid kernel for a reason? Maybe the same reason as for why BeOS and Windows NT (the kernel used for XP and the upcoming Vista) are also hybrid as well?Plus, whenever I run a LiveCD, the *last* thing that I need (besides automatic screen resolution configuration at 800x600 for a 1024x768 monitor, even *Ubuntu* does that all the time) is for the PC to run loud like its in boot even after its in KDE mode. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'll blame that on either the kernel structure or the excessive server space included as excess baggage.
webmotivaMay 13, 2006
The funny part of this story is that Linux users and developers are afraid of OSX and are trying to generate hoax item all over the web but the guys that really develop the main interfaces for them use Macs. I know three of the top 5 Linux GUI designers and they use only Macs!
nevynMay 16, 2006
A must-read for anyone who might want to believe this benchmarking:"Since the arithmetic component of the test is hardware bound, Sekhon’s test is essentially a microbenchmark of malloc() and free() for 35 KB blocks....Like R on Windows, it’s a simple matter to compile and link against Lea’s malloc instead of the default one on Mac OS X. What happens if we do so?Mac OS X (default allocator)