What Was Striking On Phoronix Last Month

In April on Phoronix there were 221 published original news articles and 20 featured length articles. Here's what was most popular among the plethora of original Linux content with a bent on performance testing, graphics drivers, power management, and Linux gaming.

With 221 original news postings on Phoronix in April that puts the average of over seven news postings per day of the month. Nearly everyone, of course, is single-handedly written by your's truly. There was also nearly one original multi-page featured article every day.

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Anyhow, the most popular articles on Phoronix last month were:

Ubuntu 13.04 Linux Can Outperform Apple OS X 10.8.3
In the road to the release of Ubuntu 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" later this month will be a number of articles benchmarking this major Linux distribution update against its friends and competitors. To complement the Ubuntu 13.04 benchmarks already delivered, including Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows 8 benchmarks, here are tests of Apple's OS X 10.8.3 operating system on a MacBook Pro compared to Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu 12.10, and the latest Ubuntu 13.04 (post Beta 2) state. Ubuntu 13.04 is generally competitive with OS X 10.8 and in some new areas is now beating out Apple's operating system on their own hardware.

Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS vs. Ubuntu 13.04 Benchmarks
For those that may be currently running Ubuntu 12.04.2 as the latest Ubuntu Linux Long-Term Support release but are considering upgrading to Ubuntu 13.04 for better performance, here are benchmarks comparing the two Ubuntu Linux releases when tested on an Apple MacBook Pro and Lenovo ThinkPad. Overall, there's a few areas where the new Ubuntu Linux release delivers worthwhile performance improvements over the year-old Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Windows 7 & Windows 8 vs. Ubuntu 13.04 & Fedora 18
Last month Phoronix published Intel OpenGL benchmarks showing Windows 8 outperforming Ubuntu 13.04 with the latest Windows and Linux drivers from Intel. I also showed that even with the KDE and Xfce desktops rather than the default Unity/Compiz desktop to Ubuntu, Windows 8 still was faster on this Intel "Ivy Bridge" platform. The new benchmarks to share today from this Intel Ultrabook are the Windows 8 and Ubuntu 13.04 results but also with performance figures added in from Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1 x64 and Fedora 18.

32-bit vs. 64-bit Ubuntu 13.04 Linux Performance
While nearly all modern Intel/AMD x86 hardware is 64-bit capable, among novice Linux users the question commonly is whether to install the 32-bit or 64-bit version of a given distribution. We have previously delivered benchmarks showing Ubuntu 32-bit vs. 64-bit performance while in this article is an updated look in seeing how the 32-bit versus 64-bit binary performance compares when running Ubuntu 13.04 with the Linux 3.8 kernel.

AMD Radeon Gallium3D More Competitive With Catalyst On Linux
With the ever-changing state of Linux graphics drivers -- both for the open and closed-source drivers -- new tests have been conducted to compare the OpenGL graphics performance on Linux with AMD Radeon graphics. In this article are benchmarks of nine different Radeon HD graphics cards when being tested on the very latest AMD Catalyst (13.3 Beta 3) graphics driver as well as the open-source AMD Radeon driver consisting of Mesa 9.2-devel and the yet-to-be-released Linux 3.9 kernel.

Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Linux Comparison Shows Shortcomings
One week after delivering updated Radeon Gallium3D vs. AMD Catalyst benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux, we have to share this morning similar results for the open-source and reverse-engineered "Nouveau" Linux graphics driver compared to the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver. While the Nouveau driver has come a long way and does support the latest Fermi and Kepler GPUs, it's not without its share of shortcomings. Eleven NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards were used in this latest Phoronix comparison.

LLVM/Clang 3.3 Very Competitive To GCC 4.8
Benchmarks for sharing this weekend are looking at the performance of GCC 4.7, GCC 4.8, LLVM/Clang 3.2, and the latest LLVM/Clang 3.3 development code. How does the performance of the newly released GCC 4.8.0 compare to the yet-to-be-released LLVM/Clang 3.3? It's interesting.

15-Way Open vs. Closed Source NVIDIA/AMD Linux GPU Comparison
Combining the work of the recent Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Linux testing and Radeon Gallium3D vs. AMD Catalyst testing articles, here is a 15-way comparison of both the open-source and closed-source AMD and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers when testing a mixture of NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards on Ubuntu Linux 13.04.

The most popular news stories were:

NVIDIA Has Major New Linux Driver: Optimus, RandR 1.4
NVIDIA announced the 319.12 Beta Linux graphics driver announcement this morning. While the number may seem mundane, this is a very exciting NVIDIA Linux graphics driver update. It presents work that will benefit the agonized NVIDIA Optimus Linux users, provides new RandR functionality, and other new features.

Valve Publishes Packages For Their Linux Distribution
For Valve's forthcoming Linux-based Steam gaming console the first packages are starting to emerge within a package repository on the SteamPowered web-server.

The Wayland/Weston Fork Is Now "Banned"
It's now becoming quite easy to understand why the developer of the Northfield/Norwood fork of Wayland was ejected from the Wayland development community and banned from development communication channels.

Activision & Raven Open-Source Two Games
The Activision and Raven Software game studios have open-sourced two of their games for "for people to learn from and play with" the code.

Is Valve's Steam Client Bad & Damaging For Linux?
When I exclusively reported last year that Valve would be releasing their Steam client for Linux and Source Engine, most Linux desktop users and gamers were filled with joy. However, now that the Steam client is out in the wild and more and more games are coming to Linux via this digital distribution system, it seems not everyone is happy.

Interesting Features, Changes In The Linux 3.9 Kernel
With the release of the Linux 3.9 kernel being imminent, here's a recap of the most interesting features coming to this next Linux release.

Wayland 1.1 Officially Released With Weston 1.1
The first post-1.0 release of the Wayland Display Server protocol and the Weston reference compositor implementation has been released.

Facebook's HipHop 2.0 Virtual Machine Is Very Fast
Released last month by Facebook was their open-source HipHOp "HHVM" 2.0 virtual machine. Benchmarks of HHVM at Phoronix show that the code does live up to Facebook's performance claims.