The Most Viewed Phoronix Articles & Linux News In 2014

Written by Michael Larabel in Phoronix on 31 December 2014 at 05:26 AM EST. Add A Comment
PHORONIX
To date this year on Phoronix have been 345 featured, multi-page articles consisting of benchmarks, Linux hardware reviews, and other extensive original information. Meanwhile for the shorter news articles there's been 3,187 news posts this year. After delivering various top lists of 2014 for various categories, here's a look at the most popular Phoronix articles and news of the year.

In 2015 I managed to stick to writing close to one featured length article per day and close to ten originally written news posts per day! Of course, it's been work every day this year and often cranking out 100+ hour work weeks between all of the Phoronix writings, the Phoronix Test Suite / Phoromatic / OpenBenchmarking.org development, and other business tasks... It's New Years Eve and there's still more Phoronix articles to come today.

While to some I may sound like a broken record, this year has been especially tough and exhausting, if you like the Phoronix content be sure to follow us via Facebook, Twitter, and/or Google+. You can also do a lot to ensure great Linux content on Phoronix.com in 2015 by subscribing to Phoronix Premium or making your year-end tip. Thanks for those continuing to support Phoronix over the past ten years!

Without further ado, here's the top articles this year:

AMD A10-7850K vs. Intel/AMD CPU/APU Comparison
Two days ago AMD launched their "Kaveri" APUs to mixed reactions. On launch-day we provided a Linux overview of the AMD A10-7850K APU and followed that with an Ubuntu Linux vs. Windows 8.1 performance comparison for this top-end Kaveri APU. Yesterday was then the AMD Kaveri APU compared to discrete AMD/NVIDIA GPUs and now today we've finally had the time to finish the tests most people have been looking forward to: the A10-7850K comparison against various other AMD and Intel CPU/APUs. These Linux tests cover a range of both processor and graphics testing from Ubuntu 14.04 across a wide selection of Intel and AMD hardware.

Testing 60+ Intel/AMD/NVIDIA GPUs On Linux With Open-Source Drivers
With Thursday marking the ten year anniversary of launching Phoronix.com and also the six-year anniversary since the public 1.0 debut of the Phoronix Test Suite, there's a lot of interesting articles that I've been working on to celebrate these two milestones. For your viewing pleasure today is easily the largest graphics processor comparison that's ever happened at Phoronix... I've tested over 60 GPUs from the Intel HD Graphics, AMD Radeon, AMD FirePro, and NVIDIA GeForce series to see how their performance is when using the very latest open-source Linux graphics drivers on Ubuntu.

Manjaro vs. Ubuntu vs. Fedora vs. OpenSUSE Benchmarks
The latest Linux distribution benchmarks to share at Phoronix are a comparison of Manjaro Linux 0.8.8, Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in its current development state, openSUSE 13.1, and Fedora 20. All tests were done from an Intel Core i5 4670 Haswell system to look at the current state of various Linux distributions when it comes to various areas of open-source performance.

Ubuntu 14.04 vs. Debian 7.3 vs. Debian Jessie Preview
For those curious about performance differences between the current Debian 7.3 "Wheezy" stable release and the upcoming but currently unstable Debian 8.0 "Jessie", here are some performance benchmarks comparing Debian's stable and testing releases on the same hardware. Making things more interesting, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in its current development form was also tossed into the mix.

EXT4 vs. XFS vs. Btrfs HDD Benchmarks On Linux 3.15
After earlier in the week delivering solid-state drive file-system benchmarks in comparing the Linux 3.15 FS performance to Linux 3.14 stable, now it's time to do a Linux 3.14 vs. 3.14 file-system performance comparison with a traditional hard drive. The file-systems being benchmarked here are EXT4, XFS, and Btrfs.

Intel Atom Bay Trail NUC Kit On Linux
With the early Atom "Bay Trail" hardware being disastrous for Linux, when Intel recently announced their Bay Trail based NUC Kit we were anxious and decided to give this unit a go. The Intel NUC Kit DN2820FYK packs an Intel Celeron N2820 Bay Trail CPU and motherboard supporting up to 8GB of DDR3L system memory and 2.5-inch HDD/SSD in a 116 x 112 x 51 mm form-factor. In this article is a rundown of the Phoronix experience so far for this Atom NUC Kit and how well it's running with Ubuntu Linux.

Apple OS X 10.10 vs. Ubuntu 14.10 Performance
While I delivered some OS X 10.10 Yosemite preview benchmarks back in August, here's my first tests of the official release of Apple OS X 10.10.1 compared to Ubuntu 14.10 Linux. Tests were done of OS X 10.9.5 and OS X 10.10.1 against Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn when running the benchmarks under both GCC and LLVM Clang compilers.

AMD Athlon 5350 / 5150 & Sempron 3850 / 2650
It's been a busy past few days since AMD launched their "AM1" Socketed Kabini APUs. After the initial Athlon 5350 Linux review on launch-day, I did some tests involving a faster kernel and newer Mesa code along with some reference DDR3 memory scaling benchmarks for these APUs with Jaguar processor cores. Since then the Athlon 5150 and Sempron 3850/2650 APUs arrived. After a busy weekend of benchmarking, here's the initial Ubuntu Linux benchmarks of all four AMD AM1 APUs that are available at this time: the Sempron 2650, Sempron 3850, Athlon 5150, and Athlon 5350. With these four new AMD APUs are also a number of thermal and power consumption tests.

Ubuntu With Linux 3.16 Smashes OS X 10.9.4 On The MacBook Air
As it's been some months since last running any Linux vs. Mac OS X performance benchmarks, up today are benchmarks of the latest OS X 10.9.4 release on a Haswell-based Apple MacBook Air compared to running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on the same hardware with also upgrading against the Linux 3.16 development kernel.

ASUS Zenbook UX301LA: A Nice Intel Ultrabook For Linux Users
As I wrote about at the beginning of March, I bought the ASUS Zenbook UX301LA-DH71T Haswell-based ultrabook to replace an Apple Retina MacBook Pro as my main system. I've been using this latest Zenbook with Intel Iris Graphics and dual SSDs for several weeks now as my main system and have taken it on four business trips so far and it's been running great. Paired with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, the ASUS Zenbook UX301LA makes a rather nice lightweight yet powerful Linux system.

Ubuntu 13.10 vs. Fedora 20 Benchmarks
To complement the many Ubuntu 13.10 Linux benchmarks I have published on Phoronix since the "Saucy Salamander" premiere in October, I've started several Fedora 20 benchmarks since December. So far I've shared Fedora 19 vs. Fedora 20 benchmarks and Wayland OpenGL benchmarks, besides using Fedora 20 as the base platform for unrelated tests, while today are some Ubuntu 13.10 vs. Fedora 20 performance benchmarks.

The Performance Impact Of Linux Disk Encryption On Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
For any Linux laptop users or those concerned about their data's safety on production systems, I highly recommend utilizing disk encryption for safeguarding the data. However, what's the performance impact like these days? In this article with the current development snapshot of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on a modern Intel ultrabook we're looking at the impact (including CPU utilization) of using an eCryptfs-based home directory encryption and LUKS-based full-disk encryption on Ubuntu Linux.

AMD A10-7850K Kaveri: Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu Linux
Aside from sharing the Linux overview of AMD's A10-7850K "Kaveri" APU on Linux, for your viewing pleasure today I also have out some early OpenGL graphics benchmarks comparing the performance of the A10-7850K APU under Microsoft Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu Linux in its current 14.04 development form. These tests are a precursor to many more interesting AMD Kaveri benchmarks in the coming days.

DDR3-2400MHz On AMD's A10 Kaveri With Kingston's HyperX Beast
Earlier in the week I published benchmarks showing AMD Kaveri's DDR3-800MHz through DDR3-2133MHz system memory performance. Those results showed this latest-generation AMD APU craving -- and being able to take advantage of -- high memory frequencies. Many were curious how DDR3-2400MHz would fair with Kaveri so here's some benchmarks as we test out Kingston's HyperX Beast 8GB DDR3-2400MHz memory kit.

Is Antergos Arch Linux Really Faster Than Ubuntu, Fedora?
Frequently within the Phoronix Forums it is requested to do benchmarks with Arch Linux since its users tend to be adamant that it's the fastest Linux distribution. In the past I've run benchmarks of the Arch-based Manjaro to look for speed differences as an easy and quick to deploy variant. Today the latest Arch Linux variant I am benchmarking is Antegros Linux.

Lastly, here's the most popular news overall for 2014:

Recapping All The Interesting Talks Of XDC2014
The XDC2014 conference officially ended on Friday and was followed on Saturday by X.Org developers drinking wine and cycling around Bordeaux, France. For those not in attendance that haven't been keeping up with all of the Phoronix articles, here's a summary.

Valve Is Making All Their Games Free To Debian Developers
Valve will be making all of their games -- past, present, and future -- available for free to Debian Linux developers.

Intel's Xeon Phi Is Being Sold For An Insanely Low Price Right Now
There's a crazy discount right now for those wishing to buy an Intel Xeon Phi MIC card that's equipped with 57 cores running at 1.1GHz, 8GB of onboard memory, passively cooled, and over 1 TeraFLOP of double-precision compute power. All of this on a PCI Express card for less than... $200 USD!

Richard Stallman Calls LLVM A "Terrible Setback"
In the days since Eric S. Raymond had some choice words about GCC vs. Clang, the bickering and fighting over GCC vs. Clang compilers has continued. Richard M. Stallman has come out this morning on the Free Software Foundation's mailing list with his views to reiterate.

The Biggest Problem With GTK & What Qt Does Good
Dirk Hohndel of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has talked at length on his experiences in the GTK and Qt tool-kits, including what he views as the biggest problem with GTK.

Wine On Android Is Making Progress, Running Solitaire
Last year was the last time we had a chance to talk about Wine on Android for running Windows programs on Google's mobile operating system. While it's not quite mainline yet, Wine on Android has been making much progress and can now run Windows' Solitaire game on your Android device.

Nasty Lockup Issue Still Being Investigated For Linux 3.18
When Linux 3.18-rc6 was released last Sunday, Linus Torvalds noted in the release announcement that a "a big unknown worry in a regression" remained. Nearly one week later, kernel developers are still figuring out what's going on with this regression that can cause frequent lockups. Worse off, it looks like it might affect the Linux 3.17 kernel too.

The GNOME Foundation Is Running Short On Money
While GNOME has been riding high lately with driving the development of its Wayland-based compositor and being the first major desktop getting there natively for most of its applications, and the overall work on the recent GNOME 3.12 release being fairly exciting, on the foundation side they are running into a budget shortfall and funds are becoming very tight within the GNOME Foundation.

Linux Kernel Developers Fed Up With Ridiculous Bugs In Systemd
A patch was sent out today to the Linux kernel mailing list that would hide the "debug" string from showing up within the /proc/cmdline output. Why? To workaround a systemd bug. This has set off Linus Torvalds on another epic tirade.

Uselessd: A Stripped Down Version Of Systemd
The boycotting of systemd has led to the creation of uselessd, a new init daemon based off systemd that tries to strip out the "unnecessary" features.

The 10 Best Features Of FreeBSD 10.0
With a bit of luck FreeBSD 10.0 will be released in the next few days so here's a look at the arguably ten best features of this next major BSD operating system release.

MPlayer2 Gone Dark, MPV Is Still Happening
The once popular MPlayer2 fork of MPlayer has sadly not seen any new development activity in nearly one year, but another less well-known fork of MPlayer is still showing a future with its most recent activity just being from hours ago.

The Linux 3.13 Kernel Has Many Improvements
With development dragging on for the Linux 3.13 kernel until the middle of January, here's a recap of some of the most important changes that landed into Linux 3.13 that either provided new features, performance improvements, or are worth noting for one reason or another. There's also a rundown of all the Linux kernel benchmarks we've done on this new kernel to date.

An Overview Of The Linux 3.14 Kernel Features
With yesterday's release of the Linux 3.14-rc1, here's a look at the top features that were merged for introduction in the Linux 3.14 kernel.

Cairo Proposed To Become Part Of ISO C++
The C++ standards committee is looking at adopting a Cairo C++ interface as part of a future revision to the ISO C++ standard to provide 2D drawing.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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