Is Antergos Arch Linux Really Faster Than Ubuntu, Fedora?

You can find more of these benchmark results of the Arch-based Antergos Linux within 1406241-KH-ANTERGOS253. You can run your own Linux benchmarks too via the Phoronix Test Suite. At the end of the day, the performance of Antergos Linux was within the same ballpark as Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Fedora 20. The only cases where Antergos was faster was where the rolling-release distribution had quickly pulled in a newer version of Mesa / Linux kernel that benefited some particular graphics tests, etc, but there was no magical performance out of Antergos as many Arch Linux fans would like the Linux community to believe.

For those that will then say "the results are invalid because you didn't tune the system properly" or "you should have done XXX first", my response to which is assuming the distribution defaults given that's what a majority of users will do in the real-world and is the only way for the results to be reproducible and meaningful to any large number of users. For those that insist on tweaked system results, my offer still stands of having such ardent users put together a Wiki page or forum thread that extensively details all the recommended tunables for achieving maximum performance, etc. I'll happily follow such run for a separate article to see the performance impact made and then at least allows the community to evaluate the options and understand all of the tweaks being made so that they too can reproduce them. That really is my offer and belief for any topic, just not about Arch Linux, and from there it's easy to determine who is just blowing hot air.