7 min read · Aug 28, 2019
We are going to look into operating systems for the desktop, present some tests, results and answer the question, “what is the fastest operating system?”.
Before years 2000s, Microsoft Windows used to be the dominant operating system in home devices, in the office and to a lesser extent in the datacenter. With the introduction of the iPod and the iPhone in 2007, Mac OS and iOS became an operating system used by a lot of end users. In parallel, Unix and Linux operating systems such as Ubuntu have seen increased usage in the developers community as desktop systems, and Linux-based systems have come to completely dominate in the data-center, ending Windows dominance.
On mobile devices the Linux-based Android overtook all other systems, iOS retains a significant minority share and Windows, Symbian (on Nokia older phones) or Blackberry are now marginal.
On the desktop, the main players are now:
- Microsoft Windows. In 2019, it is the dominant operating system at home and in the office.
- Mac OS. Mac devices such as laptops are quite popular with a young generation and in the creative industry, and such devices run Mac OS by default.
- Ubuntu. Linux-based operating systems are highly popular in the developers community, which despite its small size, holds disproportionate influence on the direction software will take in the future. Ubuntu is the most popular out of all Linux-based operating systems on the desktop.
- Other Linux-based operating systems with less widespread usage such as Fedora, Mate, Axiom, ChromeOS, etc.
The rise of the Unix and Linux system
In the data-center and on mobile devices, the Unix/Linux ecosystem is in the process of taking most market share.
The rise of Unix and in particular the Linux ecosystem can be explained by the few main factors:
- Linux is by large an opensource ecosystem and the kernel has an open development process. This leads to real or perceived higher quality and security software, more hardware supported with higher quality drivers, and generally higher performance across the ecosystem.
- The open nature of the ecosystem has, for practical and ideological reasons, led to to a higher adoption rate among the elite development crowd. This is a highly influential demographic that dictates the choice of systems in organizations.
- The rise of web-based applications (application that can be run within a browser) has made the weakness of Unix and Linux systems in terms of graphical interface less obvious, because browsers behave the same across operating systems.
- The POSIX/Unix interface used by Linux and other Unix systems such as Mac OS is seen as a well-designed, well-documented and practical interface, which has made the life of application developers easier
- Licensing costs. The cost of running a machine with Linux or some other Unix systems is zero.
These points may seem like marginal advantages, but over time they were enough to take over Windows in the data-center.
One of the first versions of Windows, Windows 3.1, was an operating system with a fast user interface and little competition. Subsequent versions, in particular the infamous Windows Vista, were notoriously slow and resource hungry, and were some of the slowest operating systems and user interfaces on the market.
The latest version, Windows 10, is pretty close to its competitors when it comes to speed, while still having high resource usage (such as disk space and memory).
Mac OS on the other hand, never had any dramatically evolution between versions. The system has always been relatively fast and reliable. The latest version seems to show more bloat in the graphical interface, however this does not seem to affect speed significantly.
Unix and Linux-based operating systems have for a long time been high performance systems. The graphical interfaces, however, never seemed to be much faster than their Mac OS or Windows counterparts. In early 2000s, Linux had other numerous weaknesses in terms of performance, but they all seem to have been ironed out by now. The latest version of Ubuntu is 18 and runs Linux 5.0, and has no obvious performance weaknesses. The kernel operations seem to be the fastest across all operating systems. The graphical interface is roughly on par or faster than other systems.
In this article we have run some benchmarks on important operating systems operations that any user can relate to.
We measure the performance of a few operating systems for some important key performance indicators, such as startup time, data transfer speeds, etc.
The operating systems we test in this document are:
* Mac OS
* Windows
* Ubuntu
* Axiom
Axiom is an operating system that can run on any Unix kernel; for our tests we use the latest production version that uses the Linux kernel. Axiom is faster than any other operating system for all tests, so it serves as a useful benchmark.
We explain the methodology followed in these tests below, so that anyone can reproduce them with high accuracy. These tests are clear and easy to perform. The full methodology in details is given here.
We do the tests on 2 different hardware platforms, the Tassig Box and the Macbook.
System startup
We measure the following:
- Startup time
- Shutdown time
- Restart time
These 3 components help us to measure how efficient and well-designed a system is. A “bloated” system will typically perform a lot of lengthy and resource-intensive actions. A “clean” system will do less, and will do it faster.
The startup process can be roughly split in the following successive steps:
1) BIOS step
2) kernel step
3) userland step
The BIOS step takes the same amount of time regardless of the OS, and depends only on the machine. The 2 next steps are OS-dependent:
The kernel step is essentially about loading and setting up software drivers for the machine.
The userland step is about starting system services, the user interface, users profiles, etc.
Data transfer speed
Wifi download speed. This measures the quality of the wifi drivers.
USB hard drive transfer speed. This measures the quality of the USB and disk drivers
Application startup
Time to start applications. This measures how well the kernel is designed to load and start applications. In this test we use LibreOffice and Google Chrome browser as example applications to test. They are both big and feature-full applications.
The following mechanisms and components are involved in the startup of applications:
— loading of executables and libraries from permanent storage to RAM
— set up and startup of the executables by the kernel
The tests show that Windows 10, Ubuntu are roughly comparable in performance. Mac OS tends to perform worse on all measurements. Axiom performs better than any other systems on most measurements.
The startup, shutdown and restart tests show that Windows, Mac and Ubuntu are significantly “bloated”. The situation used to be worse in previous versions of Windows, as most Windows users would have witnessed. Windows 10 seems to have brought significant improvements to the Windows line. In particular, it seems to have caught up with Mac OS on these tests, which was always relatively fast.
Nevertheless, these systems are significantly slower than Ubuntu, which offers an intermediate level of speed.
Ubuntu, despite using the same kernel as Axiom, performs significantly worse than Axiom, which is the benchmark in terms of speed.
An interesting situation is that the Axiom system is much faster than Mac OS on Apple’s own hardware, namely the Macbook. In our tests, we did not even run Axiom from the internal storage of the Macbook, but from a USB drive. Axiom would run even faster when installed on the Macbook internal storage.
For data transfer speeds, Windows, Ubuntu and Axiom show similar results.
Mac OS performs once again significantly worse than Axiom on its own hardware.
Under applications startup time, we see for that cold starts are much faster on Axiom than on Windows and Mac OS, compared to warm starts. The reason is not obvious. Ubuntu also has fast startup times, so we deeper analysis may show that the speed improvements are thanks to the Linux kernel.
Warm starts are only slightly faster on Axiom compared to Windows and Mac OS, and tend to be quite fast, even for big applications. It seems that the CPU is the bottleneck for this task and that the parts that are kernel specific are quite insignificant compared to the parts that are kernel independent, therefore we observe roughly the same performance characteristics on all systems.
We can conclude that there is still room for improvement for Windows and Mac OS until they can catch up with Ubuntu. Overall, Axiom performs better than any other systems on most measurements.
