Is Linux faster than OSX?

OSX has a bit more configurability than a Nintendo.

Anyhoo, I was going to try Yellow Dog, but I realized how useful WorldBook 2004 has been in my history class. I suspect there are no offline free encyclopedias for Linux? I use Wikipedia at home, but I can't access the internet during class.
 
You can run OS X under Linux by running a program called Mac-On-Linux that comes installed with Yellowdog Linux.
 
Hang on just a second here, I would like to see some good benchmarks here. I know for a fact that YDL runs quicker on my 300Mhz biege G3(OS X.2.8). Even in the console there is a noticable difference in the speed at which processes run. Now I've also noticed that YDL Vs. Panther, or maybe its just another illusion who knows, I am wrong 99.9% of the time but....YDL Vs. Panther on a 1 Ghz eMac it appears to be a bit of a tie if panther is not faster.
 
ElDiabloConCaca said:
Yes, it's faster than OS X. Simply because, again IMO, Linux looks like crap ... I would suggest a dual boot setup with OS X and Linux, and Yellow Dog's site has plenty of FAQs and tutorials that teach you how to do this easily.
Click to expand...

I second that.
 
Viro said:
Linux gives the illution of speed because the GUI is very cut down, and doesn't have the frills that OS X has. It isn't actually faster, once you get down to business. I made that mistake sometime ago and assumed that Linux was faster than OS X without testing it out for myself. Imagine the shock I had when I found out that OS X was faster.
Click to expand...


i second that
 
If you're using Panther, just install X Windows from the Panther CD. OpenOffice works fine for me, use it all the time. If you're taking notes in class, just use TextEdit or BBEdit. If you're creative, you could consider using Mozilla's Composer to write your notes in HTML. Then when you install GoogleBar (http://googlebar.mozdev.org/), you can VERY easily find exactly what you're looking for, and perform searches in PARALLEL when reviewing for tests, quizzes, and exams. Many people are correct, you have to think outside of the Windows box and use your Mac like a Mac. Messing with the Macintosh System is REALLY bad, instead, just use Aliases (Shortcuts) for your folders, files, and programs. You have to remember, what you see on the screen is not what is inside the computer. The GUI is a representation for humans to easily associate with the inner workings of a computer. Apple has put much thought and research into its interface; it has purpose so use it as such.

Incidentally, I am a chemist and have recently installed several high-end open source and FREE chemistry molecular modelling programs (Chimera, PyMol, VMD, Kinemage, Jmol), ALL OF WHICH REQUIRES X Windows. All of the software works flawlessly; this is just like working on the SGIs back in college. X Windows is our friendly link to all good things UNIX/Linux.
 
Yellow Dog is announcing v4... maybe you should wait for it ? I use YDL 3.0.1, smooth, but some integration could be done better.
 
@RacerX and ElDiabloConCaca:
VERY well said!

As for you, One Sick Puppy, you can always use the mighty TextEdit! It is fast and simple enough ESPECIALLY for taking notes! :rolleyes:
 
I'm barely using MacOSX anymore. I've tested most Linux distribitions for the PowerPC architecture. If you want a easy to use, pretty-interfaced system, YDL is good. Debian Linux is also pretty easy to install and it has got an enormous package system with precompiled programs. You'll never have to compile anything from source code with Debian :)
If you want a more of a do-it-yourself system, go with Gentoo, CRUX or a BSD system like OpenBSD or NetBSD. I've experienced OpenBSD as the fastest OS, but I dunno, it is also easy to install. I guess the difference between them isn't too big. But, Linux and pure BSD systems are much faster than MacOSX.

If you have a spare partition you can run MacOSX and another system on the same disk. On Linux, just skip the step where you partition your disk, and when you come to the point where you format the partition, just enter "mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda(your partition number)"

On OpenBSD, use pdisk.. Do not modify your macosx partitions.
 
For those of you using Linux on your Macs, and if you're running KDE, have you tried out a nifty little package called KSmoothDock? You guessed it, it mimics (quite well) the OSX dock. I but my normal KDE kicker bar to autohide instantly, and sticky it to the left or top of the screen. Trouble is finding a decent Aqua widget theme for KDE.
 
No, I think you're quite wrong if you really think osx is in any way faster than linux.

Sure, parts of the GUI on linux are faster. Parts of the osx gui are faster too.

But, I wasn't comparing the GUI, as they're so completely different, there is no reason to compare them.

Not to scare you, but a simple gunzip in ppc linux is easily twice as fast as the same operation in osx. And I guarentee you, your scientific applications, as well as my scientific applications (BLAST, various tigr apps, etc) will easily run faster with linux. No contest.

Once again, if you have experienced otherwise, you're either smoking crack (which I doubt), or you have things configured wrong. Its very easy to go with the default kernel, and have a few bits of unsupported hardware lead to a completely bad experience.

If you want to get technical about it, examine how the kernels multitask. mach is great for running one or two tasks at once, but the substantial overhead of multitasking is just horrible compared with linux's 2.4 kernel, or even FreeBSD 4.

You could strip osx down, build your own mach kernel variant (I did, its not hard), and try and get close. But I'm certain it wouldn't be anywhere near.

OS X may be great for 3d effects, useability, and vender-supported render farms (did I mention apple supports Shake on linux clusters?), not to mention vender-supported hardware. But if you want absolutely raw processing power, linux is the way to go.
 
kilowatt said:
Not to scare you, but a simple gunzip in ppc linux is easily twice as fast as the same operation in osx. And I guarentee you, your scientific applications, as well as my scientific applications (BLAST, various tigr apps, etc) will easily run faster with linux. No contest.

Once again, if you have experienced otherwise, you're either smoking crack (which I doubt), or you have things configured wrong. Its very easy to go with the default kernel, and have a few bits of unsupported hardware lead to a completely bad experience.
Click to expand...

That has not been my experience. My simulations run faster under OS X than Linux. I never really bothered with benchmarking gunzip so I can't comment on those.

I assure you I'm not smoking crack, the CPU was set to run a maximum performance and DMA on harddisks was on.

If you want to get technical about it, examine how the kernels multitask. mach is great for running one or two tasks at once, but the substantial overhead of multitasking is just horrible compared with linux's 2.4 kernel, or even FreeBSD 4.
Click to expand...

Most of my apps are single threaded. I'm not bothered with forking new processes or spawning new threads. That takes too much time and I don't think it is even possible to parallelize (sp?) a time series.

This is the whole microkernel vs monolithic kernel debate. You know, there aren't really any numbers on the web that demonstrate that Darwin is visibly slower than Linux. Perhaps you could show some as I am quite interested and google doesn't show any recent OS X vs Linux benchmarks.

OS X may be great for 3d effects, useability, and vender-supported render farms (did I mention apple supports Shake on linux clusters?), not to mention vender-supported hardware. But if you want absolutely raw processing power, linux is the way to go.
Click to expand...

And not to mention commercially supported software. Hardware support under Linux is still quite poor on PPC. The nVidia line of cards don't have 3D hardware acceleration, Airport Extreme cards don't work, and sleep doesn't work.
 
http://www.desertsol.com/~kevin/ppc/#dvd

Counter example. I've never known the mac to drop frames during DVD playback, even on an iBook 500 MHz. This guy running Linux on what could possibly be the most supported Mac (iBook 700 MHz) still gets dropped frames. What's more, he is running Gentoo with a custom compiled kernel. Can't really get more customized than that.
 
I would like to chime in and say that Gentoo is a nightmare. After three hours of configuring my installation, I got a compile error.

You can imagine my frustration.
 
Viro said:
and sleep doesn't work.
Click to expand...
Sleep does work, it worked over a year ago when I was running Gentoo on my iBook.

Viro said:
Counter example. I've never known the mac to drop frames during DVD playback, even on an iBook 500 MHz.
Click to expand...
My iBook 800 MHz plays DVDs choppy. *shrugg*

Ricky said:
I would like to chime in and say that Gentoo is a nightmare. After three hours of configuring my installation, I got a compile error.

You can imagine my frustration.
Click to expand...
There use to be a second CD containing prebuilt binary packages so that you can do a complete desktop (XFree + Gnome/KDE) install without a network connection, no compiling. I don't know if they still do that. There is however, an online repository of pre-built packages. You just edit your make.conf to search that repository and emerge with the -K option.

Finally:
http://www.ly-tech.com/linux/snapshot1.jpg

http://www.ly-tech.com/linux/snapshot2.jpg

http://www.ly-tech.com/linux/snapshot3.jpg

http://www.ly-tech.com/linux/snapshot4.jpg
 
Is this some kind of a FUD comment once more from you, Lycander? I have customers with iMacs G3/400 SE playing DVDs just fine... It is either you or your iBook at fault here :rolleyes: I will bet that the problem isn't your iBook :p
 
Sleep doesn't work with any of the G4 Powerbooks. You're probably using a G3 iBook if you got sleep to work. I'm not sure about the status of the G4 iBooks so if someone has those they could confirm if it sleeps.

Thanks hulkaros. It's good to know that I'm not the only one who thinks that it's ridiculous to have dropped frames on an 800 MHz machine. Furthermore, a machine that is quite possibly the best supported PPC Linux laptop (video accelerated, Airport supported, sleep supported). If it drops frames there, something is seriously wrong. What about other machines that aren't as well supported?

With all the hooha about Linux's supposed speed advantage over OS X, you'd expect such a basic multimedia function to work flawlessly.
 
I offer you my sincere apologies, I overlooked the fact that we were talking about a G4 PowerBook. So in regards to the sleeping issue, ok so I'm wrong.

DVD playback: DVDPlayer (is that what the built in player software is called?) running on my iMac G4 800 was less than enjoyable. This was with an older version of the DVD player software, and running OSX 10.1. It irritates me that the common answer to OSX woes is "just upgrade to jaguar/panther/tiger/whatever".

Alright so DVD playback is better in OSX than in Linux, I'll give you that. But why is it that moving and resizing certain windows can be slow and cumbersome in OSX, but smooth in Linux? And why is scrolling down web pages sluggish, whereas it just glides in Linux? This is without the desktop GUI acceleration from the video card.

Multimedia functions work better in OSX because the software is properly tuned for the hardware. Linux applications are written for portability, so the DVD playback software lacks PPC code to enhance performance. I'm not making excuses for Linux, this is an acknowledgement that Linux is inferior to OSX in this particular area.

It would be more interesting to see DVD playback in Linux now, with a 2.6 kernel.
 
Uhm.. the guy was running kernel 2.6.7-r5. Probably compiled with gcc 3.3.3, and looking at his make.conf, I can't see anything wrong there.

DVD playback works fine on my iBook that uses a G3. It works fine on a friends iBook G3 500 who runs Puma (10.1, hey he's a cheap skate who doesn't want ot upgrade no matter how hard I press him :)). It most certainly isn't altivec or other fancy platform dependent optimizations that are being used since the G3 doesn't support those. On my iBook, I can compile stuff in the background, download stuff in Safari and watch DVDs with no dropped frames at all. Expose doesn't display any visible lag either when doing those tasks. I won't even go into my Powerbook.

I don't buy the 'software is better tuned to OS X' argument. MPlayer OS X and VLC work fine too when playing DVDs on OS X. Just not on Linux and these apps are far more tuned to Linux than they are to OS X.

Scrolling and windows resizing speeds are an effect of QuartzExtreme. I don't see any problems with scrolling on my iBook or Powerbook. It's no different compared to Linux. Resizing windows isn't a big issue, but I think you're referring to the fact that the corner of the window doesn't "track" the mouse pointer. Why is that an issue?

I like Linux and have been running it since late 2000 on my desktops. I've only used OS X for about a year. There are somethings Linux is better at and I don't doubt that Linux is fast on x86. Linux on PPC is another thing entirely and from the tests that I have run, I just can't agree that it is faster than OS X. It may appear faster (like windows resizing) but that's all it is.

Considering that the majority of Linux apps are available on OS X through fink/darwinports/portage, and OS X is faster in most things that users do, coupled with a lot of missing features which I won't repeat again, I don't see why anyone would dump OS X for Linux.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top