Slashdoters discuss today the possibility of people finding MacOSX slow in general (regardless of hardware) or not. What do you think, is the whole MacOSX 10.2.x experience slower than other modern operating systems, generally speaking? Let’s allow users to vote and decide over this!Note: The Poll is now closed. Thank you for participating.
I have a PowerMac G4 with 512MB RAM and dual 1.25 processors. It’s a 4,000 dollar computer. It’s faster than almost every other Mac out there.
It runs just about as fast as my AMD 1800+ which runs at 1540 Mhz with the same RAM. Unbelievable.
Nice piece of software, but c’mon. It’s not responsive. That’s been my problem with Linux for some time, and it hasn’t got some amazing accelerated graphics engine to benefit it (or not!).
I also have talked about it in the past, the OS running on my G4 (MacOSX) is not as fast as the OS running on my (old) PC (WinXP). I believe that the hardware is not too bad, it is the same or a bit faster than their x86 equivelants, but the MacOSX OS is just _slow_. Unresponsive. Scrolling and resizing is unbelievably slow (anyone tried to scroll on a Finder detailed view with more than 500 files in it? or try to resize that terribly slow browser, Chimera?)
Its the most painfully slow thing I have ever used.
OS X has all sorts of Gee Whiz features, gui enhancements (enhancement is an opinion I do not share), but the lag and the ‘spinning beach ball of death’ sometimes make me feel like I am trying to run KDE 3 on a 486DX 60mhz with 1mb video ram.
Yet I am not, I am on a g4 400, with 512mb ram, ATI Rage Pro 128 (16mb vram), with OS 10.2.
To me its just sad..
I agree with Eugenia, OSX is slow not the hardware. I don’t have much experaince with them (I haven’t used MacOS X for more than an hour or so at a time) but my athlon xp 1900+ running WinXP (pro) is much more responsive. I like OSX a lot, but they need work on their speed.
I just upgraded OS X on my macs (Mac G4 and UMAX SuperMac with G4 upgrade). The SuperMac I expect to be a bit slower, but it’s slower than it should be. I don’t think the hardware’s age (PCI video) is fully to blame. Controls, windows and menus don’t draw slowly; they just react slowly. It’s like the visuals of the UI are given precidence over actual “actions” of the UI.
I expected a performance increase on the Mac G4 after updating to 10.2, but several apps show apparent performance LOSSES. Photoshop and Limewire for examples. I know Limewire is slow, but it was good enough that I didn’t know it was a Java app until it was pointed out to me (it’s the most well behaved Java app I’ve used yet). The Limewire problem was somewhat eased by reinstalling it, but not entirely (menus disappear so slowly you can see each step of the fadeout). Solving strange behaviors by reinstalling? Now, that’s retarded. Is this MacOS or Windows??
This confirms my belief that Apple is playing catch-up with Windows XP, not with BeOS. Would I be as bothered by OS X if I weren’t a BeOS user? Yes. Because the desktop in MacOS X performs far worse than OS 9. If you want examples, just ask.
This is NOT the evolved form of Mac OS. It is a pretty Unix that has adopted the Mac OS identity. There are so many reasons why this design is less modern than the 1980’s MacOS…
It’s a tad sluggish but lets not make mountains out of molehills.
From my experience with OS X on older machines it is slow but still very useable. I think OS X on a G3 500 feels about the same as Win2k on my AMD K6-III 450. I think this is a fair comparison, no?
Um, yes. And unresponsive? I though it was just me, but apparently not
Macs suck.
Here come the BEOS testimonials again.
“BEOS is so fast I didn’t even bother upgrading, I just installed it on my Commodore 64 and *bam* instantly I could play 16 mpeg4 videos at once without a single frame being dropped — And I thought GEOS was amazing!”
Yada yada yada.
BEOS is dead.
BSD is alive!
Yes, OS X is pretty slow. Among other things, we have a 1 GHz DP Quicksilver G4 with 1.5 MB RAM. There are only only a few programs (like AppleWorks) that are really snappy. Our big Adobe apps don’t take a long time to open, but are also not real speedy.
There does seem to be a threshold for some things. Eugenia mentioned Chimera. I get the window re-sizing business on our iBook, but not one the FP iMac and, of course, the big G4. The problem doesn’t exist at all on those.
I can’t imagine using OS X on early iMacs or the other early G3’s.
No, they don’t.
Mmmm, I have an old K6/2@333 +256MBRAM with Win2k, and using just the OS its as fast as my newer Duron750. Win2k is extremely fast(with enough RAM).
OS X is not as fast, but it doesn’t slow you down.
Non-opaque window resize. Window resize speeds seem to be one of the biggest complaints with OS X, and I see no need for opaque window resizes over non-opaque ones. At the very least it should be an option.
This is in my opinion.
BeOS : Most responsive / Good looking .
Aqua : Least responive / Nicest looking.
Windows : Fairly Responsive / Fairly good looking.
X : Poor responsivness / Fairly good looking.
Give me the responsivness of BeOS, coolness and static UI of Aqua (I hate skins) and a pinch of the good UI layout Microsoft is known for, and throw it all into X and I’m happy.
You have to split up OS X in two parts here: Darwin and Aqua/Quartz/etc.
I believe that Darwin itself is not the problem, since it a very stable and fast Kernel.
Aqua/Quartz/etc. are damn slow at the moment, but they imrpoved vastly since OSx 10.0, so I think we’ll see improvments there in the future.
And I just used WinXP on a 1ghz machine and it seemed slower than the average OSX/G4 Mac to me…
dev0
MacOSX looks nice, but that’s about it. I’m a video editor, and if it wasn’t because I love Final Cut Pro 3, I wouldn’t be using it. Getting to applications and/or browsing the system is a pain in the but. In this regard I got to hand it to Explorer and Nautilus for their easyness of use. Im using a G4 dual 1.25 with 1.5MB ddr, but it only feels fast when comparing it to older G4, or G3 models. Other than that it is a nice system, so far no crashes; thanks to Darwin.
I agree that Aqua is slow. Pretty, but slow.
But is OS X slow? I don’t know. Judging the UI will not answer this though; the UI is just one part of the OS. — an important part, I agree, but not the only part.
How fast are context swiches? What’s the performance of the memory manager & the process scheduler compared to other systems?
I’m not reading the Slashdot comments (time constraitns) so I don’t have time. But whether the UI is responsive is not the same question as whether the OS is slow.
This is a stupid debate, because you can’t define “slow.” Or you haven’t, anyway.
Currently I have 32 _GUI_ applications open. I’m compiling PHP and MySQL AND the latest version of Apache in three transparent terminal windows which are overlapping a DVD being played without dropping a frame.
I’m typing this in Chimera. Yeah, if I resize the window it’s a bit slow… but at the same time, NONE of the other things I just mentioned, including those 32 GUI apps, drop their performance.
Slow? No. Slightly unresponsive GUI? Yeah.
Yes, I admit that there are faster machines. But I don’t give a rat’s arse about gaming. I’ve seen faster Linux machines, but I have no plans to put Linux on my PC for at least another 3 years.
The OS responsive enough for anything I’ve used it for.
My positive OS X experiences on a 600/G3 are what made me decide to purchase a G4 tower.
with my 700mhz ibook with 640 megs of ram at 16bit colour. Its not as visually responsive as my 1900+ athlon desktop, but I can get things done faster, and it doesnt require wicked customization to be usable by me.
It could be faster, but any modern OS could be faster. Ram made a major difference, I originally had a 128mb lemon (kept crashing all the time) and added 512mb and it was amazingly fast and responsive.
I really just like the UI, like the dock for instance. I used the quicklaunch mini icons on the taskbar in windows for my main apps, or icons on the desktop, but that was redundant, having both an icon and the app running with a button for each window on the taskbar. Making the little triangles point to which apps are running and just letting you click on the app’s launch icon on the dock to switch tasks is imo better.
With windows its, quicklaunch, icon on desktop, taskbar entry, and/or possibly an icon in the clock area. Its annoying.
Another thing, is the general lack of multiple levels of contextual menus, kinda nice imo. And just the 2-3 clicks to do things I do on windows. Network utility is a great little app, and the logical placing of config files under home/library/etc, tho I have deleted quite a few because of corruption…
It may not be as responsive but its quicker to get many things done without clutter, so its effectively the same if not faster for me.
I agree that Aqua is slow. Pretty, but slow.
A question from a complete Mac ignorant (at work *all* desktops run win2000, at home no Mac too)
Can’t you turn off this (Aqua) GUI and use Mac OSX new features (e.g. command line tools from BSD) in a “classical Mac OS 9 ? (Thanks)
_______
[Also, the consense about general *unresponsiveness* puts me away from $4.000 machines which have only 512 RAM and no GForce4. (I’m used to my “old” dual PIII 1 Ghz with 1256 RAM and my Quadro 2 MX)]
Macs at $4.000? …
But is OS X slow? I don’t know. Judging the UI will not answer this though; the UI is just one part of the OS. — an important part, I agree, but not the only part.
Quartz is impressively fast for what it does. I’d blame a lot of the speed concerns on GUI kruft (Aqua).
How fast are context swiches? What’s the performance of the memory manager & the process scheduler compared to other systems?
XNU is using an antequated Mach VMM and process manager. I still have no idea why Apple did this as opposed to taking the FreeBSD kernel (with arguably the best VMM around) and adding Mach IPC to it.
Can’t you turn off this (Aqua) GUI and use Mac OSX new features (e.g. command line tools from BSD) in a “classical Mac OS 9 ? (Thanks)
This is essentially what OS X server is
Can’t you turn off this (Aqua) GUI and use Mac OSX new features (e.g. command line tools from BSD) in a “classical Mac OS 9 ? (Thanks)
This is essentially what OS X server is
Maybe the old pre 10.0 version of OS X Server, but versions 10.0 and higher are running a full “Aqua”fied environment.
MacOS X is slow in certain respects such as resizing windows and scrolling, as well as when you move your mouse over the dock, and the dock animates can lag a fraction of a second, which is annoying. However, I think with just a few small impovements, such as outline resizing instead of live and improvements to scrolling can be made. There are hacks out there to turn off all the extra crap, and you can turn off dock resizing and genie effect in system preferences. Apple seems to be listening to it’s customers regarding the speed issues, and they are getting better with time. Perhaps MacOS X 10.3 will show more improvements in speed, give OS X time, it is still a relitively new OS, and has a lot of both UNIX/NeXT and classic Mac legacy baggage to support. The core OS is not slow, just the GUI, so, it is not completely a loss. Besides, windows XP isn’t all that fast either, and is much less stable (at least on my machine).
For reference, I own a 600mhz ibook with 368MBs RAM on the mac side, and an 800mhz PIII with 256MB RAM on the PC side.
Skipp
I want to say that its a little bit slower than the average, but on the whole its pretty good. I think Apple added an incredible speed boost between 10.1 and 10.2. And its only going to get better!
<<Here come the BEOS testimonials again.
“BEOS is so fast I didn’t even bother upgrading, I just installed it on my Commodore 64 and *bam* instantly I could play 16 mpeg4 videos at once without a single frame being dropped — And I thought GEOS was amazing!”
>>
Heh..the truth hurts doesn’t it?
BeOS does rule.
Bascule:
Right but as I’ve already said once today XNU uses a _modified_ version of Mach. So who’s to say that the problems you mention have not already been addressed by Apple?
Unless you are pretty intimate with the internal workings of XNU I don’t think you (or I for that matter) can really comment on the issue.
This would be an interesting question for someone inside Apple who has a good working knowledge of XNU.
Ah…. I can only imagine what OS X would be like on a dual 1.25 GHz …
…as I’m typing on my 180Mhz 7300 and Mac OS X.1
(holding out for a G5)
OS 10.1 on a 180mhz 7300….?!?
Are you serious? That must be like — well — it must be like watching golf on tv.
Or similiar to my experiences with KDE 3 on my p200. Heh.
The one thing that people never realize when they try to compare window resizing speed under OS X and say, BeOS. When you resize a window under BeOS, Windows, Linux, whatever, even if the window frame grows along with the mouse, the window contents don’t automatically grow along with the frame. Instead, you see the contents sort of “catching up” with the mouse. Under BeOS, this was incredibly fast and so no user noticed. With Mozilla, this can be an exercise in frustration.
With OS X, with the exception of a very small set of programs, you will never see an incomplete redraw of the window on the screen. Every time the window frame grows you’re looking at a complete re-render of the window contents. One of Apple’s goals for the Aqua user experience was to prevent the user from seeing the “ugly” things in traditional user interfaces, including these incomplete window renderings.
So, next time you complain about how slow Terminal (for instance) resizes, actually watch it resize. Then watch xterm resize. You’ll see why 😉
I tried OS X on the new machines, like in CompUSA. I have used it for long periods of time and there is definitely a speed problem. When you resize a window you wait. When you click on a scrollbar, the OS doesn’t get it the first time, you have to click again. When you say scroll down, you wait for a while. You clearly see that the OS thinks about something when you give commands to it. It is not as responsive as OS 9.
I think for the current technology OS X was way ahead, it was too ambitious. But this may be ok, because people who use Macs seem not to care about these problems much. It is mostly the apparence and cool effects for them. So I think Apple probably does the right thing, but this also brings another problem, which is they will never get the majority of the market share.
This is essentially what OS X server is
You mean it has left all that clutter parts behind ? Good. I don’t like the *uggly* scroll bars and check buttons of Aqua and company.
If so can one install it (OSX Server) on a regular Mac G3/4 ?
Or does the Mac boot bios of the (rack mount cased) Mac Server (e.g. different from Amiga G4 maainboards’s bios
demand for a hardware check at boot ?
(Thanks again)
We are only working on Mac OS X as in 10.2 Jaguar was a big speed increase. It will only get better.
Be patient Mac fans your day will come.
Meanwhile I work off of Redhat 8.0 on a Dell Inspiron 4000 and gnome 2.0 is a hell of a lot more responsive than KDE 3 but it could get better. Don’t blame all of Apple’s problems on Aqua either.
It is like blaming X for everything bad in Linux. Everyone blames X for the slowness in Linux Guis and while the X Free code base needs updating and work sure it is only a tiny part of the problem. If you use say WindowMaker then X does not feel slow. In fact, it feels snappy as hell.
Windows has the OS, GUI and most of the applications running on the OS so yeah it feels snappy. They have also been working on the damn thing for nearly twenty years now if you look at the first version of Windows 1.0 or whatever.
NT was damn slow as a re-write when it came out. Its only saving grace is it did not freak out every two minutes like Windows/Dos 95 crap. NT got better, faster etc…etc…
OS X will get there too.
You mean we actually need a poll to find out Mac OSX is slow?
Trev
Question to Mac OS X users: how’s performance under load? Under Windows, doing a compile or render in the background severely impacts UI performance. In Linux, it doesn’t effect UI response at all. I wouldn’t be able to tell the compile was done unless I heard the disk stop churning. How’s the situation in OS X? Can the OS X scheduler handle load well?
To all those who don’t like skinning, just use the default and pretend someone else is controlling how your desktop looks. Personally, you’ll take away my skinning ability when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands. Not only do I not like Aqua all that much, but it’s color scheme is completely unusable on my laptop TFT. The powerful backlight makes the too-bright colors painful to look at. The default color scheme in KDE is the same way. The default scheme in Windows works on my TFT, but is unusable for me, as someone who isn’t blind. Note to MS UI designers: primary colors are not “c00l.” Besides, well implemented (which it really isn’t in Windows, can’t speak for OS X) skinning is just as fast (it’s all just bitmaps, no matter what they look like) and just as integrated. I run a 100% KDE system, and in general, KDE apps don’t make assumptions about what the UI looks like. Keramik looks just as natural as Qinx or dotNET or Liquid.
Yes, you can run Mac OS X Server on regular G4’s. In fact, somewhere on the Apple site, they talk about that.
The load…once things get going, it seems okay. I often have Acrobat, Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator and even GoLive open at the same time, switching back and forth. There doesn’t seem to be a further slowdown. However, if, for example, you have 15,000 pics in your iPhoto libray, iPhoto will crawl.
I don’t mean this to be off topic, but slowness can be subjective and the kind of thing you get used to if you only use that particular Mac and no other computers. Also, the Apple user experience tends to balance things out somewhat. There are the iApps and, if you have .Mac, expanded use of them. There are standalone apps that correspond to these that you can get, but nowhere are they so tightly integrated. So, the good user experience, in that sense, tends to make you overlook the lack of speed. However, I am not satisfied and Apple *must* speed things up.
At the end of the day they are really just waiting for the hardware to catch up to what they need to render their GUI in a fairly responsive manner. Sure they’ll keep improving stuff but face it, you can only optimize it to a certain extent, especially when you are going for the flashy GUI with all the bells and whistles that they are. I think next version after Jaguar will fine tune their new rendering stuff, but after that I think to reach next level you’ll end up having to buy new hardware.
The current OS X server is in step with OS X 10.2 Jaguar in functionality and GUI. So you’ll get all the Aqua scroll bars and buttons.
I don’t know about G3 hardware, but it installs fine on both G4 and XServe systems. I have it running at work, on a PowerMac G4 Quicksilver 800 Dual CPU system.
And blame X11. I’m sure there are a couple of X11 software developers in there that has caused some problems, with the weird cross platform and network transparency ideas.
As for MacOS X, depends on what you do. If you throw a tonne of memory at the machine, you shouldn’t have any of those problems. That being said, the one downside with Mac’s, is that I would prefer being able to replace the crappy GeForce with a 256MB Matrox Parphillia, but I can’t.
I’m sure most of the performance could be fixed up by simply dropping Mach, replace it with a standard FreeBSD 5.0 kernel (once it has stablised).
“I have a PowerMac G4 with 512MB RAM and dual 1.25 processors. It’s a $4,000 computer. It’s faster than almost every other Mac out there.”
I’m guessing the price you quoted is in American dollars? That’s a pricey system, and for that price I would hope its a great system.
After reading comments like, “It is slow”, “No, its not….it’s snappy with dual CPUs and lots of RAM (read: a $3000 US + system).” or “Be paitient…. the next version will be faster.” doesn’t intrigue me to spend any money on a MAC (nor many others for that matter). Seems to be a short term investment at best right now.
If I’m going to spend that much money on a system, consider that for the same amount I can almost buy 2 dual P4 systems with SCSI drives in them w/ 1 GIG ram in each. I’m sure Macs and OS X are great. But where’s the value for my money? Although I’m very much interested in buying a MAC,I’m going to have to wait for the next CPU iteration and OS X release before I ever consider buying a MAC. Talk all the architectural advantages you want. I want my money’s worth.
The carbonized Finder is the albatross hanging on OS X’s neck. Cut/Paste, open/close, resize, ugh! Funny thing is, my Jaguar intall was really sweet at first, but it’s getting increasingly sluggish with use. Didn’t see the spinning beach ball for several weeks after upgrading; now I get it all the time. I have benchmark scores for the past few weeks that confirm something is slowing it down. But what? Hardware and software all check out A-OK. New iMac G-4 800, 1.0 G RAM, 32 MB DDR Video RAM (GeForce2).
It is not the OS’s fault entirely.
– Old FreeBSD userland [3.x]. Was it compiled with -O2? Is -O2 supported on PPC stably? Is gcc capable of producing decent PPC binaries or if Apple had the know-how (see: Sun, Microsoft, Intel, Borland) to make a compiler, would it be better? Should Apple be helping the gcc team help PPC along, or deprecate Mot-PPC with something more reasonable?
– Horribly outdated kernel – microkernel is out! (Laugh at Andrew Tannenbaum , he flamed Linus about MK vs. Monolithic/modular, look who uses Minux, look who uses Linux) [note: NT isn’t a true microkernel, and solaris/linux/freebsd certainly aren’t, its closest relative is HURD]. Mach was dumped by the progenitors of it, CMU, in 1994. Mach to me is very silly. Linux has hackers in and out as does FreeBSD. No one hacks the Mach kernel for fun. No one gives a rat shit about Darwin. Is there anything compelling about using the Mach kernel over Linux or FreeBSD? (Except Steve Jobs zealotry concerning perpetuating the failed NeXT way of doing things. Arrogant fool.)
PPC. Its SPEC marks aren’t ever published, and when SPEC is run on a Mot-PPC, the results are horrible.
It is a clear combination that makes for a rather unpleasant experience. Let’s face it, Unix aint no BeOS or RT-OS, its thick. Context switches are expensive. Memory protection is real. Userland activities are fairly “slow” (note NFS being in the Linux kernel). It is protected, extensible, capable, generally secure, granular, multiuser, portable, but it is not a speed demon. It values other things before speed.
Couple Unix’s thickness with Mot-PPC’s clear inferiority in terms of general (not vector I’m not listening lalalalalala I don’t care Photoshop lalalalala) performance, it makes for a slow concoction.
I have a G4-500-1MB+1GB ram and a new 7200FDB Maxtor with a new ATI Radeon 7000 32MB with quartz enabled I built out for a friend as reference. I don’t want to hear any claims of greatness, I have verified by running Linux, Darwin, netbsd and OS X on same-era PC, PPCs and other hardware (namely the godly sparc
that Apple is not primarily concerned with speed. If you buy a top of the line PC and a top of the line Mot-PPC at any point in time – now run SPEC. Run “openssl speed”. Run a kernel compile and time it. Run the same hard drive, the same amount of memory, the same video card, but only have a different CPUI and the result always comes up the same. You get less for more money on Mot-PPC machines. Sorry.
Sun can get away with a laggy SPARC. They offer a LOT of reasons why you would ignore single CPU performance, and continue to utilize that platform [scalability, support, development platform, reliability]. Apple? No way Jose. As time goes on, and as feature sets converge, and more and more of what makes a Good OS ceases to be Novel, Apple’s schloctkey hardware performance will come under increasing scrutiny.
I run 10.1.5 on a G3 400mhz iMac with 512MB RAM, and a 7200rmp WD special editon HDD (8mb cache) and a badass 8MB rage pro 😉
The resizing of finder winodws with lots of files could be faster, but honestly its not as bad as a KDE window (a file manager window) with tons of files in it. Web browser windows on KDE don’t seem to have any re-size issues though where OS X resizes their a little slow too. But then again my PC is 700mhz Duron 384MB RAM with a 32MB Radeon and a Seagate 7200rpm HDD (2mb cache).
I’m not sure how much of difference 10.2 would make, since my non-upgradable video “card” can’t take advantage of quartz anyways . . .
I laugh at these, I bet most of the votes are from people that don’t even have a mac or don’t have one good enough to run Jaguar. LOL 600 votes? I don’t think there are that many Mac users that visit this site.
I laugh at these, I bet most of the votes are from people that don’t even have a mac or don’t have one good enough to run Jaguar. LOL 600 votes? I don’t think there are that many Mac users that visit this site.
I’ve tried OS X (all versions) and each point release was better than the last. Hopefully, 10.3 will have another speed improvement in it.
What I don’t like about OS X is the Aqua look. I’m an EE and would prefer something more neutral looking with somewhat of a high-tech look. I’m sick of the candy-ish blue.
The finder needs to be improved. I liked the old classic finder better.
Yeah, OS/X is slower than other Windowing systems out there. But so what? It’s doing things that other windowing systems don’t even attempt. And in a year or so, when Macs are being sold with 3D graphics accelerators that are optimized for Quartz (and vice versa), and Macs are using faster CPUs, it will be fast again. Until then, I’m willing to put up with a little slowness (and Jaguar isn’t too bad anyway).
I’ve come to respect your opinions greatly, Eugenia, even though I often disagree with them, but this article is off base. Looks like you might need a lecture on throughput, latency, and the complete undefinability of words like “slow”.
Nothing you have ever posted suggests that you have work habits anything like mine. I tend to have twelve to fifteen applications open for weeks at a time. Often times one (or more) will be taking as much CPU time as it can grab, and it is most often not the one I’m interacting with. I value stability of applications and of the OS. I like to know that I can continue to work on something interactive while my computer finishes a CPU intensive task, but I would prefer a slightly slower interface than the OS hogging productive cycles.
And for the life of me I can’t understand what this obsession with resizing windows is! There are only three apps that I commonly resize windows in, Terminal, Finder and BBEdit, and all are very snappy.
Over and over I find people to be obsessed with useless benchmarks. If we are going to tout benchmarks, how about speed of encoding MP3s while rapidly reloading OS News? Compile times while continuously resizing a window? FTPing ten files while watching four 320×240 MPEGs? And do each of these with an MP3 player playing random tracks from a list of 2000 (well, 1900 right now, but I’m on a ripping spree), and flunk any OS that allows the music to skip even once?
If anyone can recommend a better system for my usage patterns than Mac OS X, I will be glad to give it a try. Windows flunks on OS stability right off the bat (as does Mac Classic). Linux gets major minus points due to application stability, but was my choice between using Mac Classic and OS X. BEOS is dead. Sun and SGI don’t offer enough over Apple to justify the cost. All of them lose points in ease of managing more than a few applications at a time. That is one thing the Dock definitely has going for it.
But all this leads up to one question that has been nagging me for months: Eugenia, what are your usage patterns? How do they differ from OS to OS, and that brings up another interesting question of what is your usage pattern of OSs?
OSX may not be snappy, but it is danm fast.
Sitting here concurrently compliling a couple of applications, I have a concert dvd playing in the top right corner, scattered about are multiple “tails” of local and remote logs, several local and remote “x” apps are doing there thing, chat is going (friend just went to take a crap), folding is crunching in the back-ground, mail is checking every minute, I’m reading (and worse) responding to this stupid thread using chimera, nmap is double checking a new firewall implementation, nessus is checking a friends site (oh well, it just finished), iphoto is waiting for me to finish with the latest batch of pics of the kids (to be converted to a quicktime slide show), quicken is still up since I just finished a doing couple of bills (and therefore excel is also open – don’t ask), I have a few stickies open for quick jots, sherlock had just fetched the movie schedule for tomorrow night and is waiting for my wife’s ok to buy the tickets, calculator sitting there waiting to supplement my feeble brain, and I may just stop the dvd (and nothing else) for a quick game of soldier of fortune.
… and yet there is no perceivable performance difference from when the system was last booted (about 3 weeks ago – system update).
oh, yeah, btw, I use a mouse wheel and scrolling through chimera with it is literally too fast (I have to consously slow myself down or I’ll go to far).
Maybe it is just me… and my duel 1gig gs2002 with 1.5g ram.
i’m on an old imac, g3 graphite 400mhz 384 ram and an 8 meg video card
people are complaining about how unresposive the system is. listen, i run as many apps as i can at once, i’ll play games that should not be played on this machine, my finder is skinned, my proteus is 50% transparent
os x isn’t _that_ slow
sure it’s not os 9, sure it isn’t running at peak efficientcy, but hey, it’s not slow
i’m just sad for the people who use osx on a dp g4 with a better vid card and aren’t happy
i envy you people and your cards!
be happy with what you have, it could be worse
you could be using windows
I’ve got an iBook G3 700MHz w/16MB Radeon mobility. Overall, OS X is pretty quick, but I had to upgrade to 640MB of memory before it was. The only bad part is that reiszing windows and scrolling in web browsers and text windows is SLOW AS HELL. As another reader pointed out, opaque window resizing is pointless… just give me a normal outline, that will work…. at least give me the OPTION to do that. Also, opening, closing, minimizing windows… I LIKED the wireframe zoom that OS 9 did because it was enough animation to look nice, but it didn’t require a 3D card. Basically, all the graphical bells and whistles are great, but Apple should at least let us tone them down a bit so the interface isn’t so damn sluggish.
Cyco said: “Give me the responsivness of BeOS, coolness and static UI of Aqua (I hate skins) and a pinch of the good UI layout Microsoft is known for, and throw it all into X and I’m happy.”
I translated that automagically into: “Go out of business (BeOS), add some heavy overload to it, sleep with the devil and throw it outside the Windows®.”
Mac OS X might not be the fastes GUI available, but it has a lot of features I wouldn’t want to miss any more. And I guess Apple’s well aware on the fact that it’s a bit slow. Look at the speed improvements from 10.0 to 10.2. And with the hardware they’re producing, they’re doing the other part of the equation.
this is something i don’t understand – everybody says it’s slow, in fact that’s all i’ve ever heard. but at work i just got assigned compatiblility testing so i inherited a 600mhz imac running osx. first time using it was yesterday. i found it to be totally fast. i’ve always hated macs but this impressed me!
whatever – y’all can say what you want… i’ll believe what i saw.
-dave
– in microsoft word, select text. now, with the trackpad, adjust the selection. on os x 10.2, this is very slow
– also in word, move the selected text around on the screen
– scrolling in excel
– scrolling in the file manager
– browsing
– moving windows around
– using the stupid blue advil caplet to hide/show menu icons
– it goes on on on. pick anything.
there is not one thing that is fast in the os x gui.
and let’s not talk about how lame the anti-aliasing works compared to microsoft cleartype. apple’s fonts are just plain ugly and gross, even on the 17″ monitor with an amazing number of horizontal pixels and sub-pixels.
overall, xp kills os x on usability and speed.
linux, say redhat 8.0, has better usability, about the same speed.
yeah, steve, all those features are great. now tell me why on my 800mhz iMac with 1GB ram they all run like shit???
put os x on a 3ghz pentium 4 with the 533mhz memory bus and hyperthreading… i think it would be really fast.
I just thought of something. It seems that the PowerMac owners think that OS X is fast-ish, while the iBook/PowerBook users think it’s slow. I’ve used OS X on a dual 1 GHz machine, and to tell the truth, it was still rather slow, compared to Win2K or BeOS (or even KDE or GNOME for that matter). But I’d not be at all surprised to find that it help up well under heavy multitasking. While the dual processors in a PowerMac buy you little unless you use Photoshop or Final Cut, SMP machines are known for their responsive UIs during multitasking. I’ve heavily loaded up an 800 MHz G4 iMac before and the results were akin to a 500 MHz celeron I have that (because of a crappy SiS chipset) won’t do DMA for the hard drive. Not pretty at all.
On another note, this whole thread is incredibly silly. Here we are, talking about how OS X will run perfectly fine, you just have to have at least a 600MHz G4 and 512 MB of RAM! It’s absurd! Alex St. John (architect of DirectX, the only project out of MS that I actually respect) once said something along the lines of: Here’s John Carmack, throwing tons of lit, textured, AI-driven monsters at your screen at 60 fps, meanwhile, Microsoft manages to create a browser that visibly redraws just rendering some text and a few bitmaps! To tell the truth, I’m guitly of what I’m complaining about. I have a nice fast KDE 3.1 desktop, but I fed it 2 GHz and 640 MB of RAM to get it that way. Even then, it’s not as responsive as BeOS was on my 300 MHz PII.
yes, os x has some rather sluggish moments. all in all it’s pretty ok though and really well usable. even on my g3-600 ibook i can do video-editing without any problems.
windows does feel faster though… that’s because it stops working every hour instead :o). i guess it has to catch breath.
did i mention i love os x?
But I for one work with my computers. Including my Mac. Since I had complete and utter hardware failure on my two Wintel boxes yesterday, requiring me to buy a new one (fried the cpu), so I know I am a bit biased. But still, the slow term here is just not appropriate.
Slow, like in SLOW, to me, is when you sit in front of your friends or workbuddys Windows laptop, and just wait for the login to complete, which takes 2 full minutes after entering password.
Or launching a program on a machine that six months ago worked like a charm and spat up the program in a couple of seconds, now taking half a minute. Yes, defragmentation does help somewhat, but I have not been doing that on my mac, and the launchtimes are still good.
Slow is perception. Yes, as many have said before, the Aqua GUI should indeed be faster and smoother, but its not bothering my day to day work. I for one am not sitting there just dragging windows across my desktop, trying to look for glitches. Or resize the same windows, just for the fun of it.
I am used to having to rebuild my environment on PCs after aprox. 6 months of use. Then the speed is down to a crawl. A reinstall, and its back on top. On my mac, I dont need to, I have a somewhat less responsive GUI, but I live happily with it that way.
OS X is very slow. I am annoyed every time i have to use it which is a lot since i work with Macs.
Why to Mac users want to pay to become a beta tester?
I wanted a mac before, but seing that the speed really hasnt changed much i dont want to fork over several hundred dollars for every point release up to OS XI where the GUI MIGHT be better.
and let’s not talk about how lame the anti-aliasing works compared to microsoft cleartype. apple’s fonts are just plain ugly and gross, even on the 17″ monitor with an amazing number of horizontal pixels and sub-pixels.
Okay, I can understand the comments on speed, but if you think ClearType looks anything bordering upon ‘good’ you seriously need to have your head (or at least your eyes) examined.
ClearType is not readable. For me at least, looking at text rendered with ClearType causes nothing short of serious eyestrain.
OS X has the best font handling of any OS I’ve ever seen. It’s not just the font rendering, it’s the support for all types of fonts. This is one aspect of OS X that I won’t stand by and watch be criticized.
I wonder what Steve Jobs thinks about the responsiveness?
In his keynote he always says “..and boom”
I wonder is it app launch speed (like KDE on slightly older hardware), or the drawing of the windows and resizing part.
I’ll give them this much, that Aqua in the form that we know it is quite young.
Just one question about the kernel, does it have mechanism that speak with the GUI? If yes, could some of these interconnect mechanisms, not be optimial?
I agree with ClearType giving eyestrain, even though you can adjust it. My brother and I have CRT monitors, mine fully flat, my brothers has a slight curve, and ClearType looked better on his monitor.
I have seen ClearType on laptops in stores and I can’t say I was as impressed as with OSX’s AA.
I have an iBook with a G3/600 processor and 384 Mb RAM running Jaguar. Well, it runs nicely. It’s not BeOS, but it’s very nice. And it performs the same way since I installed it. There is only one problem with OSX Jaguar: iChat. Turn it on and you’ll get an unstable, totally unresponsive system, with the aqua blob of death spinnin’ around. Seriously, iChat is buggy to death.
I have a PIII/600 w/ 384 Mb RAM and a *much* nicer graphics card. It’s not the GUI is unresponsive, it’s that the start menu can take up to 20 secs to open. I can see it redraw, sometimes. I mean, like when you see blanks and then elements (buttons, windows) start to appear?
Seriously, compared to a 10 mths old install of Windows XP, Jaguar is snappy. And, Eugenia, Chimera’s not slow for me… what’s your hardware??
I am a happy OSX user… Granted, I do not spend my time resizing windows. I guess after two years of use they all have found their natural size and position. I use the finder in column view and it makes my file browsing much faster and powerful than what it was in OS9, while being a gazillion times more elegant than windows explorer. Currently I have After Effects heavily rendering, Media Cleaner compressing a quicktime batch in classic mode, I am listenning to boombastic radio on itunes, I have a few php projects opened in project builder, a few cli windows opened, and surprisingly scrolling through this thread in IE is quite snappy, thank you
. I run this on an aging dual g4 450 with 1gig of ram and a 32 megs original radeon board.
No complaints about speed here. Of course I will enjoy hardware/software speed increases, but I am satisfied and pleased with the productivity I currently enjoy. Cheers.
For quiet a lot of operations, OS X seems fast enough. But there are a big problems with some functions ; if i use command line for copying or archiving (with “tar”) big files, all the OS is less responsive (on my Titanium 500 mhz) and sometimes the GUI freezes.
There are also troubles with multithreading : i made some experiences with one of my C++ software that uses intensively multithread : the same code (after recompilation only) run faster under BeOS on PowerMac 4400 than under OS X on Titanium (!!).
Sometimes i think Apple should buy Be Inc. (adding SheepSahver software, a really good PowerMac emulator for OS 9 application compatibilty).
C.
I have a dual 867M PowerMac G4. The overall speed of the machine is good and, if I use, for example, X-plane, is much faster than a PC, but OS-X is, as you say, “dog-slow” in basic GUI tasks. I guess XP is also slow, and loading time of XP (OS and the apps) is slower too but it’s more responsive. I explain the concept: XP sometime blocks for a while but basic GUI operations are generally fast, OS X never stops (almost 🙂 but overall GUI speed is not as fast as we would expect from such HW. I am planning to buy a nVidia Ti but I don’t know if this will really speed up the system.
Oh, yeah,
I was only talking about the GUI…
The rest is impressively fast (multiple task running together, PDF rendering, etc.)
For my job I have an inherent need to use various operating systems – Mostly Solaris, a lot of Linux, and a little Win2000 (in its various guises). At home I use Linux and IRIX for my various hobbies. I’d used MacOS only a few times previously and I hated it. More than I dislike Windows. Which is a substantial amount.
I had a play with OSX in our design department and thought it a vast improvement over what I remembered of OS9. Over time I grew to love it and I’ve recently purchased a dual G4 with a 22” cinema display (hey, it’s what bonuses were made for) running 10.2.
I’m happy with my purchase. At work I am obliged to use a P4 1.9Ghz with 512Mb RAM running Win2K. For the work I do, my Mac is not that much faster, but has a heck of a lot more ‘grunt, especially when I’ve got some fat processes running and multiple shell sessions open. And, in all honesty, the windows machine does have an extremely annoying propensity to crash (that said, I didn’t build it..
)
OK, it’s not for everyone. I don’t play games – but really I don’t want to. The hardware is expensive, but it really is some beautiful stuff. And there is always room for improvement – but its closer to the mark for me than Windows has ever been.
I can juggle my web clusters in the one hand, whilst typing an e-mail on industry standard mail client, surf the web on a compliant browser, listen to my digtal music collection, and run Gaim or Licq in fink (I conceed that iChat is very poor…)
Bottom line – UNIX on a commercial desktop – there are those of you out there that will appreciate what that means to people like ourselves, and some of those will be able to overcome the techno-snobbery and at least take a look. You may well be surprised.
Final note – Perhaps it should be a question of power rather than speed… In this game that is what I believe it ultimately comes down to.
IMHO
PS My Powerbook 1Ghz with Superdrive is now on order.
In terms of overall GUI responsiveness,QNX smokes all other OS’s. Not even the mighty BeOS is as fast.
>his is in my opinion.
>BeOS : Most responsive / Good looking
>Aqua : Least responive / Nicest looking.
>Windows : Fairly Responsive / Fairly good looking.
>X : Poor responsivness / Fairly good looking.
XF86 is much faster than Aqua regarding responsivness
My experiences is that Aqua on a 350mhz g3 is definitly slower
than BeOS on a 200mhz 603ev…
-A
…you’d choose a PC. But the Mac is about user experience, not necessarily performance. Windows has caught up a lot on usability but still feels unsavoury. So we run OSX/Linux/BeOS (insert favourite here) when compatibility with Windows isn’t a priority.
So in life, dear readers we have tradeoffs. OSX – eye candy galore, feels sluggish and only runs on Steve authorised hardware.
I’ve often thought of spending some $$$$ on a new Mac box to try out OSX. But I won’t for now.
(a) no Java 1.4, now receiving some attention (My work platform, which had been in beta over a year ago)
(b) The alleged price hike on Macs is real in Australia. e.g. a new 700mhz ibook at $US1489 costs $US1826 here
(c) I’ve been burnt once before on intentionally crippled ‘consumer’ machines. See: http://www.rutemoeller.com/mp/ibook/ibook_e.html and
http://lowendmac.com/lc/lc.shtml for details
So bang for buck, I would expect a more responsive UI. But there are stronger considerations in NOT buying Apple computers.
… just a moment … yep … aaaaand … now … as you just saw – this was done in realtime.
I love how people compare osx to beos unfavorably, well heres a lightbulb moment for you, beos isnt even capable of doing lots of the things osx does by defualt. Pretend beos with all twelve of it’s applications was nearly as practical as osx, a unix that runs all the important productivity apps one could ask for in a pretty damn useful development environment. I bought a powermac to consolidate a windows machine and a linux machine into one more efficient working environment. Most of you who think windows is usable only do so out of being acustomed to using it. If you program your brain to do something a certain way it tends to be difficult to do it another way without considerable effort. It took me more than a month before I was fully comfortable using osx day to day.
it’s too bad that apple did not buy both be os AND next.
Via for example bought Cyrix AND winchip.
imagine Apple today if it had Steve Jobs as the CEO, BeOS as its modern OS, and both NEXT and BeOS OS engineering team?
re: e how people compare osx to beos unfavorably, well heres a lightbulb moment for you, beos isnt even capable of doing lots of the things osx does by defualt.
yeah you forget that next was bought WAAAAYYYYY back in 1996, and it took 6 years of development to be where OS X is now.
If Apple had bought Be OS waaaayyyyyy back in 1996, and poured the same resources behind BEOS as they did in NEXT, it would be much further along in its development.
I kicked my Althon 1.4ghz to the floor and used it as a stand for my 867mhz Mac. Just dragging a window around on the screen would cause XP to tank the CPU.. OSX 10.2 barely cares. All the extra pretty GUI effects feel like they cost nothing in performance. The one self induced nit-pick is PC emulation. Virtual PC runs just fast enough to get 98se running. Media Player can’t decode MP3s properly (although WinAMp works just fine). XP Home works just like the real thing – it doesn’t network with other PCs worth a damn
It may be unresponsive, but the UI isn’t the only thing that is slow. Things like Apache, sendmail, perl, etc. are consistently slower on Mac OS X than on Linux on the same machine…
I haven’t played with OS X yet. But the Darwin X86 is the slowest booting kernel I have ever seen. Linux and FreeBSD both boot faster. I don’t even want to compare it to BeOS.
OS X is slow. Anyone who has used it can certainly agree. 10.2 is faster, but still lags in certain areas. The bounce is never as fast as Job’s shows it to be. But, I will give it to Apple; they design on hell of an interface.
It may be unresponsive, but the UI isn’t the only thing that is slow. Things like Apache, sendmail, perl, etc. are consistently slower on Mac OS X than on Linux on the same machine…
Now, this is useful information that OS X is slow. (At last.) Can you give some reference for this, aside from anecdotal?
Is MacOS Slow? does windows blow
will linux ever grow or join beos down below
i don’t know
On an XP box:
Fire up winamp and play some tools.
Have Outlook running for your mail.
Fire up Microsoft Word and start writing instructions doc.
Start IE to copy and paste HOW TO info into instructions doc.
Fire up Excel to copy and paste stats into instructions doc.
Fire up Photoshop and edit an image to insert into instructions doc.
Repeat same move with OS X equivilants:
Itune, Outlook or Apple’s Mail program, Word, Excel and Photoshop. Which has best response?
For the truly geeky:
On Linux — repeat same procedure with GNU apps — Rhythmbox for tunes, Evolution for mail, Mozilla for web browser, OpenOffice Writer and Calc and finally Gimp.
Out of the three for anyone who has all OSes available which feels the most responsive?
My experience is that for single app functionality XP is faster but once you start working between a lot of different apps then X with gnome as the desktop feels faster.
Launch times for Mozilla sucks in any case but I have openoffice quickstart app running which makes OpenOffice launch times way quick (yes, I know another running process and all that).
However, I have only played with OS X 10.2 at the apple store for an hour or so at a time. What is the above type experience like for the Mac or even the BeOS user?
BTW, yes, one reader hit it on the head when they said Apple should have bought Be instead of NeXt but Jobs really has been a wonderous leader type and missing out on having him around would have been a shame.
Because I didn’t have to spend weeks reading multiple books to try and learn how to install and configure a working Linux system. I didn’t have to run fsck everytime I unplug my laptop because Linux panics. I didn’t have to spend hours wading through text configuration files in /etc to figure out why my Wavelan card wouldn’t work. And I didn’t have get that snide look from a Linux weenie when I had to ask him to help me fix my machine after I had screwed it up.
The OS X UI may be a tad unrespnsive at times but I haven’t really noticed because I’m too busy getting my work done instead of fighting with the maintenance of a Linux machine.
There is one thing that’d I’d REALLY like in OS X that X has.
Workspaces.
geoff
most mac users don’t want to admit it but while the kernel may be decent the UI is a POS.
it’s slow and ugly, kinda like my neighbors kid.
http://www.pervasivelight.com/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=switch;action=dis…
>However, I have only played with OS X 10.2 at the apple store >for an hour or so at a time. What is the above type >experience like for the Mac or even the BeOS user?
So what I do with my machine @ home!
So at first I wanna state, that I am not a real BeOS Fanatic! But …
On my x86 box I have installed Win2k(for Programming)/Win98(for Games)/NetBSD&|Linux(changes from time2time)/BeOS(Internet stuff, programming …)
Thow I have a lot of choice I find myself always booting the BeOS!This is just due to speed!When I come home I want to surf the net, read my mails AND continue working on my own projects … and do stuff like burn a cd, listening to winamp
So I fire up BeOS and do starting
CL-Amp (winamp like)
Beam (Mail Application)
Mozilla (sometimes it crashes->thats true, but it gets better and better)
BeIDE (programming environment)
If I want to do some graphics I use Tools like ArtPaint
Picasso (on my PPC box)
So of course I am not average user but all I described
needs on my dual 800MHZ box less time than a minute!
I never meassured this, but it needs significantly less time than QNX, Win98 … or whatever….
And a second very importing thing for not using i.e. Win98 or 2k for surfing is clear… (I don’t trust MS anymore)
Try to do this with any other OS!!!
PS:I never have waited for an application launching that much like I did on OSX. With some “older hardware” it is “for me”(subjective view of point) impossible to use OSX! Its just to slow and I don’t want to waste that much time.
I have a iBook 600Mhz w/256Mb & OS 10.2. I also use a PIII 500Mhz & PIII 800Mhz both w/512Mb & Win2k at work and at home I have a PIII 800Mhz w/384 Mb & WinXP.
The WinXP machine is just (uniformly on every operation) slow, but the two Win2k boxes scream. The iBook I find faster than the 500Mhz box but slightly slower than the 800Mhz w/Win2k in some instances. I generally don’t find OS X slow or unresponsive, although I do have issues with certain apps (IE and Photoshop Elements, in particular). For the most part I use my iBook in preference to my WinXP machine because the “experience” is better all round.
Photoshop filters are fast. UI interaction is slow. I switched to FreeBSD/Gnome2 now and sold my Mac. I’ll look at OS X again after two more revisions.
A GUI on top of UNIX is not my idea of an advanced OS. Jaguar, indeed. Like the car, I suspect there’s a Ford Taurus under the hood.
I am not up on the system layout of Mac OS X. Is it built on top of Unix with the kernel performing no duties in terms of assisting the GUI operations or are the drivers and gui fb support builtin to the kernel and such.
How is the Mac OS X system laid out in terms of interaction between the Interface and the kernel?
Mac OS X itself, and reasonably well written apps, are quite fast.
Unfortunately, many apps are poor quality ports or are poorly designed and implemented for Mac OS X. The most common offenses:
1) Redundant drawing redundancies. Your app doesn’t really need to redraw all it’s text before and after scrolling one line, does it? Does repainting your toolbar 3 times for each character the user types really help? (Real observations of real shipping apps made this morning) Use Quartz Debug, fix the superflous drawing.
2) Mac OS X windows are already buffered. Drawing into that offscreen Pixmap, then copying to the window buffer is a superflous step that just slows things down, and defeats hardware acceleration. Please don’t do that.
3) Polling WaitNextEvent, are we? Use Carbon events. Please leave CPU cycles for someone else. Being able to call WaitNextEvent 50,000 times a second is NOT something to brag about. (You know who you are.)
comparing apples to oranges or osx to windows doesn’t tell me anything about the capabilities of the hardware. First install linux on both, compare the performance and find hardware that is relatively equivelent. Then install windows and osx and compare. Haven’t read all the posts, but until someone does a test like this there no way to know if its the os or the hardware.. at least that’s what I think.
The first few comments on this board seemed interesting/intelligent — but then something happenned — somebody crossed the line, and ever since comment 34 (or whichever it was) this entire conversation went kindergarten silly. Maybe it was at this point that the slashdot kiddies showed up.
Now all I read is anecdotal lies.
“I installed OS X on my dual G4 1.25ghz and it’s slower than windows xp on my p200”
That’s a load of malarky and you know it. I question if these people have ever even touched OS X, let alone own a Mac.
Or there are the wannabe kernel hackers who are only too happy to share their “oh so infinite” wisdom on the internals of OS X.
“OS X is slow because it runs mach.”
“OS X handles threading poorly.”
“mach has a horrible vmm, I don’t know why apple didn’t just use the FreeBSD 5.0 kernel”
….. Okay so lets try and deal with some of this nonsense.
1. The FreeBSD 5.0 kernel is not complete. It’s still very much in development. Does it even run on PPC? Do you people have the slightest idea how the OS X driver system differs from that of BSD/Linux? Don’t give me a line of bull about VM systems — You know anything about them, so don’t pretend you do.
2. XNU (the OS X kernel) is NOT simply mach. XNU uses a MODIFIED mach 3.0 kernel which runs in the same address space as the BSD components. READ: This means it is NOT a true microkernel implimentation. The same way NT doesn’t use a true microkernel. The traditional arguments against microkernels do not necessarily apply here. Running mach in the same address space as the BSD processes eliminates a lot of message passing and consequently improves performance.
Yes, a monolithic kernel would likely be faster — however — with today’s processor speeds you are not going to see much of a difference either way.
3. We are not even going to get into threading here.
Conclusions:
I personally feel that OS X can be slow sometimes — but it is not as slow as some of you people are making it out to be.
From my experience with it on newer hardware it feels pretty snappy. Scrolling could be a tad faster but it’s not really _that_ slow.
On older hardware some of the slowness is more apparent but I still don’t think it’s that big of an issue. Try looking at PDF files in Adobe Acrobat on a p200 — now that’s slow scrolling — so painfully slow it’s hard to use.
So what can we conclude? Is OS X slow? No, I don’t think so. It’s not as fast as XP, or the “ever so mystical BEOS”, but it’s getting faster with every release. It _is_ getting better, so why are we all bitching about it?
Jesus, I’ve been using a MAC here at work 800mhz machine, 512mb ram, OS 9.2.2 and upgraded to 10.2.1 and have been using it for weeks now and jesus it’s slow.
Example, just websites, caching, loading, just hitting BACK and FORWARD, this was both in 9.2.2 and 10.2.1 both just take ages to load, you want to load a PDF or come upon a website with a FLASH animation, it jerks and halts loading the appropriate plugin.
I was overjoyed to get access to a 666mhz P3 Celeron with 128mb ram we had sitting in our office running Windows ME. Been using it for days now and haven’t even turned on the Macintosh due to no need. Everything just runs faster on Windows.
I know perhaps my Macintosh is not the ideal speed CPU to be running OSX, but OS9.2.2 is nowhere near as fast as my WinME on the Celeron.
I dislike OSX’s complete lack of customization. Yes, yes, you can use the fucking console and optimize some things or download Tweaks and 3rd party plugins to turn shit off but that shouldn’t be what you have to do. Why is there no option to turn off all the lagtastic drop shadows, no option to turn off the graphical effects when minimizing to dock, no option to make menus immediately show up instead of SLIDE down, always with the animation slowing things down even if it is just 500ms it is still too much, why not instant? No option to stop that GOD AWFUL fucking bouncing or limit it to 3 bounces in the dock when there is an activity in an application that is not in the foreground? This is OS10.2 not the beta or 10.0, 10.1, work it out or at least give people the option to turn off all these fagtastic effects… anyway’s a bit of a rant but some valid points as well. It just seems so flawed, I never upgraded the machine because 10.0 and 10.1 seemed so crap was looking forward to 10.2 but it is no better. I don’t want all the pretty I just want something FAST so I can create pretty.
Just happy to have my zippy 666mhz celeron now, no need for my Macintosh powerhouse.
aivars
> comparing apples to oranges or osx to windows doesn’t tell me anything about the capabilities of the hardware.
But this poll, and consequently this thread, isn’t about the hardware, it’s about the OS. If you starting looking at hardware to answer a question like “is OS X slow” then you have to consider the entire range of systems that are being used. The same applies no matter what OS you are looking at. In my earlier post I said that WinXP on a PIII 800 is slow, however I suspect that this isn’t the case on a PIV 1.6Ghz. Likewise I mentioned that I found the performance of OS X on a G3 600 acceptable, but having used it on a G3 700 with only 128Mb I wasn’t too impressed (which says alot about memory requirements, but that’s a long discussion for another day).
If you start looking at hardware to answer questions about the performance of an OS you find that the answer will vary according to the hardware that’s used (obviously). With the question that Eugenia posed, the only way to answer is from experience, which takes into account hardware from the point of view of the experience that the user received using the OS on a particular system. Likewise, comparing hardware using different OS won’t give you an answer about the performance of the hardware because the different OS will be optimised in different ways, etc.
>ts the most painfully slow thing I have ever used.
>
>OS X has all sorts of Gee Whiz features, gui enhancements >(enhancement is an opinion I do not share), but the lag and >the ‘spinning beach ball of death’ sometimes make me feel >like I am trying to run KDE 3 on a 486DX 60mhz with 1mb video >ram.
>Yet I am not, I am on a g4 400, with 512mb ram, ATI Rage Pro >128 (16mb vram), with OS 10.2.
>
>To me its just sad..
You think 400Mhz is a modern day computer… sorry buddy. Just cuz you spent big $$$ on a Mac doesn’t mean it’s going to run modern day software FOREVER. The current top of the link is about 3000Mhz o a Pentium IV, and I think few operating systems can slow this down.
In summary, someone who complains about a modern unix operating system with all of the advanced features of a real operating system (unlike the old MacOS) when running on old crap hardware is just crazy.
OSX is OK for throughput but bad for latency, IMO.
There is GUI and kernel latency.
It would be nice to get some hard numbers from a variety of users, use lmbench (http://www.bitmover.com/lmbench) to do the testing for the kernel. I’d be interested to see how 10.2 fares.
In my experience, OSX has considerable GUI latency – things like even dropping a menu have a tiny bit of hesitation. Once it gets going it seems fast enough.
Resizing is the other problem but I’ve yet to see anything resize nicely, I turn it off on all OSes if I can.
D
Running WinME?!?!? Thats about the most dumbass thing ive heard for months. WinME is GARBAGE!!!! Of course it runs faster. Its an older OS that doesnt hog system resources like Win2k/XP.
kind of funny how so many people answered i don’t know they actually took the time to answer i don’t know thats impressive.
WinME is garbage but runs faster because it doesn’t hog system resources? So what you’re saying is that Win2k/XP are not garbage because they do hog system resources? What’s your point? Wha, huh? If anything your statement is dumbass, doesn’t make much sense.
I’m familiar with all these OSes and yeah sure maybe WinME doesn’t have stability on it’s side if you’re a total idiot who doesn’t know how to configure it properly, but other then that it is comprable to Win2K/XP as long as you know what you’re doing.
I’m just saying my efficiency on a 666mhz celeron running 9x is better then on an 800mhz G4 running 9.2 or 10.2 with 3x the ram for what I do. Both OSes crash about the same as usual, never and I’m fine. OSX may be prettier, prettier is relative to what you define as beautiful, but all that beauty doesn’t help me accomplish tasks any faster and speed is all I care about.
aivars
So basicly what you are saying is there is no comparison, its just slow because your experience tells you so. And you don’t want to put forth the effort to even make the attempt to do an honest thorough evaluation of the platforms and OSs in question because you’ve already determined its slow. Please tell me your not a scientist.
to quote fred…
> You think 400Mhz is a modern day computer… sorry buddy.
> Just cuz you spent big $$$ on a Mac doesn’t mean it’s
going to run modern day software FOREVER. The current top > of the link is about 3000Mhz o a Pentium IV, and I think
> few operating systems can slow this down.
The 400 Mhz he is referring to is on a g4. thats a whole other platform than your pentium. if you have been comparing raw hertz numbers when you buy your computers, i’m afraid you have led down the wrong trail my friend. that 400mhz g4 is NOT the same as a 400mhz pentium-class chip.
I run OS X on a g3 400 and while its no BeOS, its not ANYWHERE near as slow as most these folks are talking.
If you think its slow, take out those $2.50 128MB DIMMs you bought at the Computer Show/Flea Market, slap in a couple sticks of Crucial, cause you’ve got serious hardware issues somewhere.
Reading the same benchmarks that Rajan R has read, there is no reason to dispute that linux will serve web pages faster then osx. The point is: so what? Fast or slow is relative to need. In a previous post, I simply described my desktop and work flow at the moment in time that I was writing the description. The gui went as fast as I needed it, in other words, at no point did I lose any productivity because at no point did I have to wait for the system. Now here’s the kicker, because of the flexibility and robust nature OSX, I was much faster at completing my tasks then I would have been using linux AND windows (I would need both systems if I didn’t have OSX). To me this is the speed that counts.
Let’s try and remember that its the race that counts. So choose the equipment that will allow you to win the races you know you will be running in.