macOS 10.13 vs. Windows 10 vs. Clear/Fedora/openSUSE/Ubuntu Linux Benchmarks

The Python performance was the fastest on Clear Linux followed by Windows 10 WSL and the other Linux distributions while the openSUSE Tumbleweed performance was oddly very slow albeit reproducible in the benchmark.

With the PHP performance, Clear Linux again beat out the other Linux distributions, Windows 10, and macOS.

In a simple Git benchmark measuring the time to complete various common Git commands on the GTK+ code repository, Fedora Workstation and Clear Linux were effectively tied.

Lastly are various synthetic operating system benchmarks via OSBench.

When it came to outright wins and losses, Clear Linux 22780 was the front-runner 59% of the time followed by macOS 10.13.4 finishing first 21% of the time and then Fedora Workstation 28 with winning 10% of the time. For losses, to little surprise considering the I/O overhead, Windows 10 was in last place 38% of the time followed by Ubuntu 18.04 being surprisingly the slowest Linux distribution 30% of the time on this 2016 MacBook Pro.

While Clear and others were performing well on this MacBook Pro and often beating out macOS itself, I still wouldn't recommend Linux on this almost two year old device... The keyboard and touchpad support still wasn't working out-of-the-box on the Linux distributions tested, let alone other features like the TouchBar. Though they may work perhaps with out-of-tree patches/drivers, for the purposes of this benchmarking it was just as easy attaching a keyboard and mouse. Albeit due to those constraints, no battery power tests were done from this laptop.

For those looking for a Linux laptop, there are plenty of better options like the Dell XPS, Lenovo ThinkPads, System76 devices, etc.