Ubuntu vs. Fedora Linux On Lenovo's X1 Carbon With Core i7 Broadwell

With yesterday having delivered some Ubuntu 14.10 vs. 15.04 benchmarks on the third-generation Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, today we're turning the tables to see how Ubuntu on this Core i7 Broadwell ultrabook compares to Fedora 21.

The latest distribution I tried on the X1 Carbon (and the OS I'll ultimately use for running the X1 Carbon in a production capacity as my main system) is Fedora 21. Fedora 21 booted up on the X1 Carbon wonderfully without any issues aside from the trackpoint button clicks being wonky (though the button clicks in the corner of the trackpad works fine). Fedora 21 with Wayland also ran fine on this system with Intel HD Graphics 5500. Overall, it was a pleasant experience without any major problems.

Fedora 21 with stable updates include the Linux 3.17 kernel, GNOME Shell 3.14.3, X.Org Server 1.16.3 RC1, xf86-video-intel 2.99.916, Mesa 10.4.1, and GCC 4.9.2. Fedora 21 already ships Mesa 10.4 as a stable update while Ubuntu 15.04 even hasn't gotten around to using it by default. With Fedora 22 is where the Fedora crew will switch to using the GCC 5 compiler. Fedora 22 is also going to be using the Linux 3.19~3.20 kernel by the time it ships and continue in their tradition of sending down stable new versions of the kernel and Mesa as they occur. When the Fedora 22 release is closer, I'll be delivering Broadwell benchmarks from there along with other interesting test cases.

In case you missed it, last week's Broadwell HD Graphics 5500: Windows 8.1 vs. Linux comparison compared the proprietary Intel driver to various Linux kernel and Mesa configurations for the open-source Intel graphics performance. All of the benchmarks in this article were of what's shipped by the respective distributions. Coming shortly will also be openSUSE tests from this new X1 Carbon laptop. All benchmarks are automated and reproduced using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.