Ubuntu 10.04 LTS: Lucid Lynx Benchmarked And Reviewed

Features
By Adam Overa
published

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is pinning its hopes of OEM acceptance on the Lucid Lynx. We've put the screws to this new Long Term Support (LTS) release, comparing it to Canonical's previous LTS release, 8.04 Hardy Heron, to look for progress.

Benchmark Results: Multimedia

HandBrake

We used the 64-bit version of Handbrake 0.9.3 CLI (Command Line Interface). We went with 0.9.3 instead of the current 0.9.4 because the newest version was never packaged for Ubuntu 8.10 and older. Fortunately, the 0.9.3 .deb, originally packaged for Hardy, works just fine on Lucid.

Ubuntu 10.04 smashes 8.04 in the HandBrake benchmark, finishing over a full minute before the older LTS.

Lame

We used Lame version 3.98.2 and a 542.1MB .wav test file, which we encoded to MP3 at 160 kbps.

Lucid actually finishes 16 seconds behind Hardy on this one.

POV-Ray

We used POV-Ray version 3.6 and the 1.02 benchmark for our POV-Ray test.

The newer LTS once again beats its elder, this time by a good seven minutes.

Blender

We went with the non-official Blender benchmark version 0.2 and Blender version 2.49b.

The Lynx performs slower than the Heron again, but this time by a slim 10 seconds.

RAW Therapee

We used 10 ultra-high resolution RAW image files of various file extensions from an assortment of digital cameras as our test files in this benchmark, the combined size of which is 128.8MB. We applied the crisp post-processing profile to our test images, and used the HPHD method as our demosaicing algorithm.

Two different tests were run using Raw Therapee. In the first test, we set the output file type as 8-bit JPG, which took our test files down to around 78MB. In the second test, the output was set to 16-bit PNG. This inflated the files to over 473MB.

In both cases, a stopwatch was used to time how long it took Raw Therapee to process the 10 test images. We ran each test for five iterations, removed the longest and shortest values, then averaged the remaining three to arrive at our final time.

In both the PNG and the JPG tests, Ubuntu 10.04 beats Hardy Heron by mere seconds.

Adam Overa
89 Comments Comment from the forums
  • My Logitech Wireless Wave keyboard and mouse didn't work with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Desktop x64 on VMWare Workstation 7.01. It works in the beginning with text screen, but once it goes to GUI screen keyboard function is lost. ;_;
    Reply
  • WheelsOfConfusion
    There's lots of talk on the Phoronix forums about how Ubuntu + nVidia binaries don't play nicely, while some other distros don't have that problem. This was reflected in an Ubuntu vs. Arch bench-off: surprisingly, Arch only really thrashed Ubuntu in the games and everything else was about even. This might be behind those pitiful scores with the game benchmarks.
    Compiz also has a measurable, negative effect on game benches with nVidia, but not so much with ATI hardware/drivers. I'm not surprised that turning off desktop effects changed the game so much.

    What do you think is going on with 7zip, an ext4 issue?
    Reply
  • jsowoc
    With 10.10 planning btrfs and GnomeShell, it's a sure recepie for tragedy :-). Very nice article.
    Reply
  • adamovera
    @WheelsOfConfusion:
    RE: desktop effects - I'll be adding an ATI card to the mix a little earlier than I had intended in order to look at the desktop effects issue. Stay tuned.
    RE: Gaming FPS - The interesting thing is that the actual games didn't have that big of an impact from desktop effects. It was the unigine benchmarks that showed seriously significant drops in frame rates with them enabled.
    RE: 7z - I suppose it could be EXT4, but I believe EXT4 is the reason for the speed gains in all other comp/decomp tests, as well as the copy time tests. Comprehensive filesystem and archiving benchmarks under the same release should tell us whether or not it's an EXT4 issue.
    Reply
  • apoq
    Why no benchmark against Windows. You yourself said Ubuntu should be aiming to convert Windows users more than Mac users (and I whole heartedly agree with you). I love Ubuntu and I use most of the time, but every time I boot into Windows (7) I am left with the feeling of a way snappier OS. I think this is where Ubuntu is really lacking.
    Reply
  • killerclick
    Linux still doesn't have the software I need so I can't use it. However I've noticed a sharp decrease in stupid problems in the past three years (prolly thanks to Ubuntu). Currently my favorite distro is Mint but I remain a Windows user mainly because of a lot of software I own and am proficient in.
    As for the latest Ubuntu, why can't they have a bland business-like theme? Are the Phoenix Suns now paying them to use their colors?
    Reply
  • For your Skype visibility issues, go to Skype settings and change theme to GTK+. Did the trick for me.
    Reply
  • samspqr
    looks nice, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions, like:
    * will it play 1080p24 H.264 videos smoothly, with GPU acceleration?
    * will it play vimeo/youtube high-res videos smoothly?
    given how good you say it is on the other fronts, I'll give it a try and see for myself (I'm currently on 8.04, so convincing me to spend an afternoon updating my systems is no small feat)
    Reply
  • zybch
    So, will this year be another "Year of Linux on the Desktop" like its been claiming for the past decade year in year out? Or will it remain a niche OS which people needing to do actual work on 'real' programs can continue to dismiss out of hand?
    Reply
  • flightmare
    You can set the minimize, close and maximize buttons to the right again in gconf-editor. Browse to apps/metacity/general and edit button_layout to your likings.
    Reply