Ubuntu Productivity

AnandTech ran an interesting (and VERY thorough) review of Ubuntu 8.04. I wanted to highlight my favorite section.

Titled CPU Benchmarks, they test applications running on both Windows Vista and Ubuntu. The amazing thing is the applications running on Ubuntu via Wine performed better than they did on Windows!

Let’s let that sink in for a moment…the open-source project written ½ by volunteers and ½ by commercial interests, intended to duplicate the Windows API on Linux, actually outperforms the software it’s intended to mimic. That’s amazing to me.

Check out these two images from the article that prove Wine can be faster than Windows:

Excel running on Windows & Ubuntu via Wine

Photoshop CS2 running on Ubuntu Linux (via Wine) and Windows XP

The strangest graph of them all is the last one on that page: it shows mp3 encoding on Ubuntu, Windows Vista, and Ubuntu via Wine. The Wine version ran faster that either the native Windows or native Ubuntu test.