8-Way Linux Distribution Benchmarks On The Intel Core i9 9900K - One Distro Wins 67% Of The Time

Of the I/O disk benchmarks run, Clear Linux won several though Debian Buster ended up finishing in front. Besides Clear's compiler optimizations, one of the kernel settings that it and openSUSE use is the decision to default to the MQ-DEADLINE scheduler for this Samsung NVMe SSD. The other Linux distributions (and most in general) default to no I/O scheduler for NVM Express solid-state storage. The slowest Linux distribution in these I/O tests tended to be Ubuntu 18.10. As a reminder, all of these Linux distributions were defaulting to EXT4 except for CentOS and openSUSE Tumbleweed preferring XFS (in the case of openSUSE, XFS for the home partition and Btrfs for root).

Just a few games were run for this comparison to check on the driver performance while the games used were OpenGL titles outside of Steam for simplicity. For the Radeon RX 580 Polaris graphics, Clear Linux with its Linux 4.18 + Mesa 18.3-dev graphics driver stack was leading while CentOS 7 with its older enterprise components tended to be the slowest. Fedora Workstation 29 with using (X)Wayland by default for gaming also led to some performance hits.