Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 vs. Early Fedora 13 Benchmarks

Given that early benchmarks of the Lucid Lynx were less than encouraging, Phoronix decided to take the latest alpha out for a spin and has set it side-by-side with an early look at Fedora 13. "Overall, there are both positive and negative performance changes for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Alpha 2 in relation to Ubuntu 9.10. Most of the negative regressions are attributed to the EXT4 file-system losing some of its performance charm. With using a pre-alpha snapshot of Fedora 13 and the benchmark results just being provided for reference purposes, we will hold off on looking into greater detail at this next Red Hat Linux update until it matures."

Beta performance testing

[Anonymous Coward]

beta vs beta! Is anyone expecting valid results.?

What is the status on Ubuntu reducing features?

[mrmeval]

Catering to niche users at the expense of the majority.
Removing functionality from X. Deleting the ability to restore a feature.
Making it damn near impossible to troubleshoot X crashes.
Ppppppp-p p p ulseaudio

I'm not much enthused by Ubuntu anymore.

Flash Player is proprietary

[tepples]

or flash objects turn grey and i have to restart firefox

You'll have to ask Adobe about that one. Ubuntu developers cannot trace into software for which they do not have the source code. Or is this happening to you in Gnash?

Re:I LIKE the toboggan ride

[MrHanky]

There's no 'compiling of the kernel, no conf files to edit' in Debian or any other mainstream distro either. Hell, even Arch Linux does well without custom kernel compilations, and most editing of config files as well, IIRC (depends on usage of course; not that I'd recommend it to any newbie anyway).

The 'it just works' factor isn't something unique for Ubuntu: almost all the others have it as well (LFS an exception). The only thing Ubuntu gives you is a package that will mostly fit the average desktop user in the default install. Pretty much like Mandriva and others. Kernel compilation is not and has not been necessary for more than ten years for any of the mainstream distros.

Re:rubbish

[Anonymous Coward]

And, of course, must faster than the final release.

Re:what is the state of ext4?

[Anpheus]

If it breaks user's expectations or destroys user's data, no matter how much anyone tries to convince me otherwise, it is a bug.

Totally useless

[linuxgurugamer]

First off, let me say that I use Ubuntu 9.10 on my system at work. I am also running CentOS on servers, various Ubuntu on servers and a couple of Fedora systems. As you can see, I have experience with all of them.

So why is this review useless? Because they are testing development systems, which are not optimized, have loads of debugging flags set, and essentially are not ready for prime time. Of course it may be running slower!

IMHO, you should ignore benchmarks until the release candidates, at least. I generally ignore benchmarks on unreleased systems. I do, however, like to read and learn about new features which may be present in early releases.

Re:What is the status on Ubuntu reducing features?

[mrsmiggs]

Pulseaudio should be taken outside and shot. I too thought we'd put the troubles behind us but on upgrading to 9.10 I found everything and gone completely to pot again with no audio at all. ALSA at least plays sound but the start up sounds don't quite chime correctly, now I know at some point I'll want to get the thing working again because Pulseaudio has some useful features. However I do have to wonder if Ubuntu's priorities right at all, I shouldn't have to dive into config files and command-line just to get sound working. Please Canonical just get sound working for everyone, once that's done you can worry about the positioning and colour of the notification dialogue.

Re:Flash Player is proprietary

[cecom]

I am guessing it used to work before the OS upgrade, so that is a completely valid question. The attitude "we don't care if software which is not distributed by us breaks on OS upgrade" is not going to fly for long if the OS is to get some real mass usage.

Re:what is the state of ext4?

[Quantumstate]

They resolved an issue which lead to file being overwritten being left empty on a crash. The problem was that they were optimising the write order to make performance better. This lead to metadata being updated too early in some cases so you would get a corrupted file. Now the issue has been resolved which lowered the performance although I think there may be an option you could turn on. So if an application is updating the file you will get the old version or the new version (assuming they have written the program in a half decent way) of the file which is good enough. If you want anything better than that you should be running a UPS which should be correctly configured to safely shut the system down (unlike one system I experienced that had a UPS but then everything crashed when the UPS ran out of battery because the sysadmins were appalling).

Re:What is the status on Ubuntu reducing features?

[mrmeval]

The X issue is CTRL-ALT-BKSP, it's gone and all I got were snide remarks and derision when I asked how to get it back. It's gone from Fedora as well but they had a method to get it restored. It's tedious and pedantic.