Comparing Windows and Ubuntu On Netbooks 317
Barence writes "With the arrival last month of Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition, PC Pro has revisited a familiar question: which operating system is best for a netbook?. The magazine has run a series of benchmarks on a Asus Eee PC 1008HA running Windows XP Home, two versions of Windows 7 (with and without Aero switched on) and Ubuntu Netbook Edition. The operating systems are tested for start-up performance, Flash handling and video, among other tests. The results are closer than you might think."
Windows, no doubt. (Score:2, Insightful)
Some distros may be better than Windows, but not Ubuntu. It's a bloated buggy hog of a thing that is overkill on netbooks, and Windows will beat it everytime.
Bye bye karma.
Re:Can you even buy a netbook without windows? (Score:2, Insightful)
At least here in Asia they're widely available, and if you don't buy some known brand you can get them really cheap too.
Re:OS X on MacBook Air (Score:5, Insightful)
Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
The way I read the graphs is: XP and Ubuntu win on almost everything (Ubuntu loses once on Flash on iPlayer but that's hardly surprising), maybe only by a small margin by they do, and Windows 7 takes twice as long to boot as they do. The article doesn't recommend bothering to upgrade to Windows 7 if you already have XP on it, and suggests that Ubuntu would be just as good.
Now, let's look at *value*: Assuming you can get them all for the same price, they all provide roughly equal value (it could be argued that 7 is worse value but only by a small way). However, if you have to pay *any* extra for XP or 7, then you're just as well off with Ubuntu. So, it's all back to the old question: who wants to sell me a netbook with an operating system that's just as good as the others but which is FREE for life? In the early days, that's how netbooks became so cheap and so popular - I know, I worked with the original EEEPC's because a school could afford them but MS wanted about £50 a license to "upgrade" them to XP. Now it seems either Microsoft are giving people Windows for free, or Microsoft are stopping manufacturers from supplying netbooks with only Linux on them. I vote for the latter given previous history.
All this article confirms is that, basically, all the OS's are roughly the same now. A bar chart here or there but on average there is no winner. Thus, the free ones should represent infinitely better value. Strange how the manufacturers don't reflect that in their pricing / OS availability any more.
Re:Not very fair testing... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right, the testing wasn't fair at all. It was on usability. These things are not equal.
It wasn't supposed to be fair. It was supposed to see how close general equivalents perform, in a real world scenario, for the casual user. It's not perfect comparison because, as you indicated, that'd be impossible, and as I'm indicating, that's not the point.
Re:why would one use a netbook? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I can only answer this for myself. I have a desktop at home, which for all sorts of reasons (CPU, GPU, memory, dual monitors, full size keyboard+++) is where I like to do anything serious. When I want to go mobile, I want something small, light and cheap I can bring almost everywhere. I'm not a road warrior, so I don't need a powerful laptop. I'm not hauling it from site to site so I don't need a desktop replacement - I did have one of those as a consultant though. I just need a real computer to go and the 10" screen, cramped keyboard and anemic performance are acceptable tradeoffs.
Re:OS X on MacBook Air (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually a netbook is broadly understood to be a cheap low-performance computer for a limited set of common computing tasks, inaugurated by the Eee PC which was explicitly a commercialised equivalent of the OLPC's "cheap but useful" approach to hardware design.
Re:OS X on MacBook Air (Score:4, Insightful)
A notebook is a small laptop, a netbook is an inexpensive notebook.
I recognize the mathematician's answer (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you even buy a netbook without windows?
Yes. Next question?
Ahh, the mathematician's answer [tvtropes.org]. The next question is as follows: Which make and model and which seller do you recommend?
Re:Can you even buy a netbook without windows? (Score:4, Insightful)
When netbooks were new, they all had linux - largely because they were low-spec enough that even XP wouldn't run, back in the pre-atom days.
Windows XP runs fine on a PII 866 with 384 MB of RAM, made in 2000. My Eee PC 900 (on which I ran Ubuntu) had a Celeron 900 with 512 MB of RAM. Add a competent SSD to that, and in my experience, it isn't too much slower than the early Atom CPUs.
Many (including me) suspect that Microsoft is making OEM licences for netbooks available at a next-to-free discount in order to prevent linux becoming established
This is in fact the explicit purpose of Windows XP for ULCPCs and Windows 7 Starter.
Re:Not very fair testing... (Score:1, Insightful)
4. Flash performance - this part was very funny. Anyone who's used flash on linux knows how crap it is. When adobe start supporting it properly...
That's about as reasonable a claim as saying that a Mac is an excilent gaming platform because it's not apple's fault that no one writes games for Mac.
netbooks are meant to do pretty much three things 1. web-surfing, 2. email, 3.run a word proscesor. If a given operating system is poorly supported in one of those three areas it isn't a viable choice for a netbook.
Unfortunately this means that with poor flash performance Linux isn't a practical choice for netbooks until either the internet moves past flash.
Speed benchmarks are all very well and good... (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, On Ubuntu, ccsm, doesn't fit on the screen (Image [imgbin.org]). Little like things like that crop up often with Ubuntu and it's really annoying.
I've no idea of Windows has similar issues because I don't have it installed, so perhaps somebody else will comment.
Re:Can you even buy a netbook without windows? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Eh? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll "Eh?" because it looks to me like XP was the clear winner. It had the best startup time from cold by a lot (resume times = tie), best application open times also by a clear margin, and the only consistently good video performance. Other metrics were basically a tie, but that's advantage XP in 3 of 5 tests.
"Closer than you might think" seems to be code for "Not the result we wanted".
Re:Can you even buy a netbook without windows? (Score:3, Insightful)
I dont think hardware was an issue. Its surprising how well XP runs on old hardware. Well, not too surprising when you remember its release date was 9 years ago.
I think the issue was that these manufacturers needed to hit a very low price point and that $40-60 bulk OEM license raised the price too much. With linux you could sell a machine for $249. With XP you're now at $299.
On top of that, there's real consumer demand for Windows. When I bought my gf a Lenovo netbook with Win7, her coworkers were really impressed it ran Windows. Turns out they were early adopters and have been using Linux and unable to run things like MS office, HP/Canon software, work applications, etc.
That's the larger issue here. Consumers like what they know and demand massive amounts of backwards compatibility. A decent linux distro can handle 80% of their needs, but not getting that 20% is unacceptable. MS quickly realized this and made special pricing for netbook machines. Now OEMs pay half or one-third the typical fees as long as the hardware falls within what they consider netbook spec.
Re:Can you even buy a netbook without windows? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not being ignorant is not the same thing as being smart. There are many ignorant smart people, and many well educated idiots..
Re:Can you even buy a netbook without windows? (Score:5, Insightful)
A genuine Netbook shouldn't be running Windows, it should use a specialty OS that's more appropriate for the form factor. And not just a neutered version either.
Re:Can you even buy a netbook without windows? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Can you even buy a netbook without windows? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have atom based machines that can play 1080p video without a hiccup but try to make a 320p youtube video full screen and watch it stutter and spurt...
Re:Can you even buy a netbook without windows? (Score:3, Insightful)
Consumers like what they know and demand massive amounts of backwards compatibility. A decent linux distro can handle 80% of their needs, but not getting that 20% is unacceptable
Yet many people bought these Linux netbooks and are happy with them, and many people are happy with their iPads etc. These things are all in a really similar price range with overlapping functions, and different intended uses.
How long does it take to start up Windows 7 on a netbook? Part of the reason I originally moved away from Windows was so that when I got home I could boot quickly into an OS for basic media playing and web browsing functionality. My laptop at the time had pretty poor battery life so leaving it on standby wasn't a great option, and in my experience "hibernation" type modes have been nice in theory but often useless in practice.
Re:Eh? (Score:3, Insightful)
which is FREE for life?
free would mean something if the manufacturers were giving discounts for an OS-less system. they don't of course. you pay for it whether you use it or not. even when you can find a linux-based new laptop, the discount is either negligible or non-existent.
moreover, for most people, free doesn't mean anything. their time is more valuable then the $100 the might spend on an operating system that works for them.
i try linux every couple of years. i want to run linux, i really do. the reality for me is that there are always a host of nagging issues. some where i can find solutions (given enough time), some where i can't (but i spend endless hours looking for them and trying things anyway).
i'm at a point in my life where spending my evening scouring forums trying to figure out why my volume keys aren't recognized in unbunu zappy zebra isn't fun anymore.
Re:OS X on MacBook Air (Score:3, Insightful)
I think "netbook" has become one of those terms like "Web 2.0" or "the Cloud". It's a term that's pretty vague and unclear; lots of people think that they're well-defined terms, but if you ask 2 people you can get 2 very different answers.
Originally the term "netbook" was used to describe laptops that were designed to be as cheap and small as possible, which was accomplished by making them underpowered and usually lacking internal storage, and they were called netbooks because they couldn't be used for anything more complex than web browsing. Like you said, it was like a thin client.
Netbooks became popular in concept and a marketing gimmick, but it turned out that people were actually dissatisfied with the idea because they still wanted to use the netbooks for other common computing tasks for which they were underpowered. Manufacturers started beefing up their netbook line to include more capable processors, gigabytes of RAM, and hundreds of gigabytes of storage, also increasing the price. The line between "netbook" and "notebook" has become a bit blurred.
I think it's mostly been settled for the time being by saying that netbooks are small laptops that use Atom processors. I'm not sure it's an important distinction anymore.
My experience: they both suck (Score:2, Insightful)
I picked up a new Samsung netbook recently and installed the Ubuntu Netbook Edition. I've been less than thrilled with it.
First- Windows 7 Starter sucks too. I'm not going back to it, and am not happy with either of them. My main complaint about Windows 7 Starter is the notion I have to pay Microsoft to use an external monitor or set my desktop background. I expect those to come in the stripped down OS and I'm absolutely unwilling to give MS one more cent. In fact, their policy on Windows 7 means my next game console will be a PS3 instead of an Xbox (and I'm tempted by Kinect, have owned several Xboxes and enjoyed them).
Ubuntu issues in the first two months of use:
* right click just stopped working. I have to click and hold left click to access those functions. I didn't mess with anything related to X, and kept things as default as possible. spent a fair bit of time googling without luck.
* nm-applet network manager just stopped working. all interfaces show "disabled" when I resume after suspending. then nm-applet disappears completely. I'm forced to use my crackberry browser to find a solution since I'm on the road. It was painful.
* update manager locks up all the time.
* Many applications put dialog controls out of sight on this tiny monitor. I can't directly fault Ubuntu for third-party apps, but it still seems like the OS ought to detect this condition and offer me some kind of workaround.
That's not all, but those are the biggest complaints that have me looking for an alternative.
Re:Can you even buy a netbook without windows? (Score:4, Insightful)
I run flash on many a linux desktop and the performance is fine. Full screen and windowed, and in HD. I read the article and they really were just playing games. There was no real analysis done. Launching programs? Boot up? That's not a measure of the full OS. I took it with a grain of salt, as they just want web hits for advertising.