Linked by David Adams on Tue 3rd Aug 2010 17:20 UTC, submitted by lemur2
Benchmarks Here is the continuation of a series of comparison tests that is without doubt bound to cause a huge amount of controversy: Workstation Benchmarks: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu Linux There are performance wins and losses on both sides of the fence, but Ubuntu compares very well with Windows 7, and no doubt these tests indicate a much closer performance comparison than most people would have expected.
Permalink for comment 435392
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE: Phoronix
by molnarcs on Wed 4th Aug 2010 17:37 UTC in reply to "Phoronix"
molnarcs
Member since:
2005-09-10

Really, does anyone still look seriously at their "tests"?

I was about to ask the same question. Long time ago, Phoronix did some good performance comparisons. Recently, basically they post a number of charts and describe them without offering any interpretation or analysis. I see a bar with 1210 and another at 1211, and they diligently describe what I can already see (ie. "In this test the difference between X and Y is negligible") Of course, you can read those kind of sentences in most tests, but they also offer some content, unlike phoronix "tests" that are basically a series of graphs and 90% redundancy in between.

Worse still, they stopped providing necessary background information to interpret those charts. So apart from the redundancy of their "articles" the graphs themselves are completely useless. Providing a benchmarking tool is all fine, but then once they finished working on their phoronix suite, their "tests" became little more than advertisements. Usually they just claim "we used the defaults" - but a casual reader has no way of knowing what those defaults are without installing each OS than digging deeply in settings. Once they compared a number of distroes, among them Arch, saying they used the default install of Arch - which is kind of ridiculous seeing how Arch has no defaults at all (no default drivers, no default sound systems, no DE, etc..)

I found their recent "tests" basically worthless (you know, it does matter what mount options you use when testing filesystems)and I removed them from my bookmarks (I used to read them quite often before). Looking at graphs that are basically useless and reading their redundant descriptions is such a waste of time. Not to mention their sensationalist headlines that drive me up the wall (LOOK WE FOUND A HUGE LINUX CATASTROPHE!!! - or something like that testing a BETA kernel).

Reply Parent Score: 2