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

Intel's optimized Clear Linux was leading in most of the other real-world benchmarks.

For those wondering how quickly these different Linux distributions boot, Clear Linux was by far the fastest while Fedora Workstation 29 and Ubuntu 18.10 were much slower than the rest.

In total I ran 43 benchmarks across these eight Linux distributions. Of these various mostly real-world benchmarks run with very few synthetic tests, Intel's own Clear Linux was the fastest 67% of the time followed by Debian Buster Testing leading 16% of the time and the others all leading each less than 10% of the time. Most often the slowest Linux distribution was CentOS 7, which was in last 35% of the time -- not too surprising considering CentOS 7 / RHEL7 rely upon older but mature and reliable code. EL7 operating systems tend to be very stable and reliable over the long term but not necessarily close to the most performant especially for newer CPU microarchitectures.

Those wishing to dig through more of this Intel Core i9 9900K Linux benchmark data in full can find the numbers over on OpenBenchmarking.org.