With the release of Ubuntu 8.10 only a few days away, Phoronix decided to take a look at the performance figures over the past releases - from Ubuntu 7.04 to Ubuntu 8.10. Phoronix used its own extensive test suite on fresh installations, with the same parameters, on the identical hardware. The results are rather surprising. Update: I've added some more information about this, gathered from the Ubuntu mailing list. You can find it in the 'read more'.
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Member since:2005-07-06
While many of the graphical regressions could be attributed to ATI driver changes (they should have used the shipped drivers for all releases if they don't need that driver), I don't see what invalidates some of the other benchmarks such as Lame encoding and compilation. Many people even confirm those observations in the thread.
As for not blaming this on Ubuntu or other distributors, why on Earth don't they have their own regression tests to help them? That's their job, not that of individual projects. After all, they're the ones packaging the whole, they only have six months between releases and fixes for LTS will not be backported.
Member since:2005-08-31
This behavior is described in the social judgment theory (psychology).
And it's called an auto-reference judgment error.
One will attribute it's own success (internal factors), but attributes to others their failure (external factors).
Ex.
Ubuntu is faster: This is a clear advantage of open-source and Linux
Ubuntu is slower: The test is wrong, the author is bias or/and it wasn't configured properly
Member since:2006-11-12
Well there is also the fact that they only tested ubuntu. Users who don't know better will blame Ubuntu when the fault could lie with GCC, or the kernel itself.
Phoronix says they will be testing other distros, but really they should've done this before publishing the article.
Member since:
2006-11-12
This thread is worth a read:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2008-October/026794.h...
Phoronix didn't do a very good job, which is why I personally continue not to trust them as a source