OS X 10.11 El Capitan vs. Fedora 23 Linux Performance

The latest extra benchmarks done this weekend as thanks to those Phoronix readers taking advantage of our holiday premium deal are some fresh OS X vs. Linux benchmarks. As it's been a while since last running any cross-OS comparison benchmarks between Apple and Linux distributions, I've started running a fresh comparison using OS X 10.11.1 "El Capitan" and the initial Linux distribution for reference is Fedora 23.

OS X 10.11.1 El Capitan was tested with all available updates as of this weekend. The compiler on OS X El Capitan was the latest X Code release providing LLVM Clang. On the Linux side, Fedora 23 was used with all stable release updates as of this weekend. Fedora 23 was tested both with its default compiler (GCC 5.1.1) and when installing LLVM/Clang through the F23 repository, which provides Clang 3.7 stable. Both operating systems were otherwise left at their defaults.

These tests were done on the same Haswell-based MacBook Air with Core i5 4250U CPU with HD Graphics 5000, 4GB of RAM, and 120GB Apple SSD. All of the tests were facilitated in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite.

Follow-up tests on this MacBook Air are likely to happen with Ubuntu and potentially other Linux distributions too. There will also be more tests to come; with OS X El Capitan, some of the PTS test profiles that formerly worked on OS X weren't working on this new release and so those additional benchmarks will come later on.