How Ubuntu 16.04 Is Performing Compared To Five Other Linux Distributions

OpenSUSE 42.1 and CentOS 7 came in as the fastest distributions for compile times, but it's to no surprise as they are the ones using the oldest GCC compilers tested (GCC 4.8.5). With the newer GCC releases, there are more optimizations and features that in past GCC-specific compiler comparisons have found the compile times to be slower due to the greater focus being on the performance of generated binaries. Clear Linux with its default compiler flags being much more than what's found on other major Linux distributions was thus the slowest at compile times.

In some synthetic tests, due to Clear Linux's default compiler flags, the performance can be multiple times greater than other distributions.

The LAME MP3 encoding performance had Ubuntu 15.10 and Fedora 23 out front.

The R language implementation shipped by Clear Linux is optimized and again is another test where its performance is multiple times faster than other Linux distributions out-of-the-box.