openSUSE Tumbleweed vs. Manjaro vs. Debian 8.0 vs. Fedora 21 vs. Ubuntu 14.10

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 24 February 2015 at 11:50 AM EST. Page 1 of 4. 5 Comments.

The latest Linux benchmarks for your viewing pleasure are a comparison of five Linux distributions tested on the new Intel Core i3 Broadwell NUC with a variety of performance tests.

The Intel NUC5i3RYB with Core i3 5010U "Broadwell" processor and HD Graphics 5500 was at the heart of this five-way Linux distribution comparison between openSUSE Tumbleweed, Ubuntu, Fedora, the Arch-based Manjaro, and Debian 8.0 Testing. This small form factor system had 8GB of DDR3L system memory and 256GB Toshiba SSD for storage.

The stock versions of openSUSE Tumbleweed, Ubuntu 14.10, Fedora 21, Manjaro Linux 0.8.12, and Debian 8.0 Testing were used for benchmarking with keeping to the default settings for each OS to represent a fair out-of-the-box experience.

All five distributions tested were running the Linux 3.16~3.18 kernel where there is Intel Broadwell support, all of them sans openSUSE Tumbleweed were using GCC 4.9.x as the default code compiler, and they were all using the EXT4 file-system except for openSUSE Tumbleweed that defaults to XFS for the home directory and Btrfs for the root file-system. All five distributions defaulted to the Intel P-State CPU scaling driver with powersave governor. When it came to the kernel I/O scheduler, Fedora and Debian defaulted to CFQ while Ubuntu 14.10 defaulted to deadline and Manjaro defaulted to BFQ.

The five distributions were running fine on this Broadwell system, compared to the Mageia 5 Beta having graphics issues that forced us to abandon testing that distribution. If there's any other Linux distributions you'd like to see tested on this system, let me know and I'll work to extend this comparison to include a few more popular distributions.

All of this benchmarks in this article across openSUSE, Manjaro, Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu were facilitated in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.


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