Fedora v. Ubuntu: A Performance Look

We have compared the 32-bit and 64-bit performance of Ubuntu and started a performance comparison of Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu, but how does the performance of the upcoming Feisty Fawn release compare to that of Fedora 7? In this article we have enclosed benchmarks from Fedora Core 6, Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft, Fedora 7 Test 2, and Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd 5. In gaming and desktop benchmarks, which of these Linux distributions is faster? We hope to answer that question today.

It is important to note that testing/development releases of both Ubuntu and Fedora are slower than their final versions, which is partially why we had went back to also include benchmarks from Edgy Eft 6.10 and Zod. Both Fedora Core 6 (Zod) and Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) were released this past October, while Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) will be introduced this April and Fedora 7 this May. Originally Fedora 7 was slated for release around the same time as Feisty Fawn, but a delay in the feature freeze has postponed the release by a month.

For comparing these two versions of two distributions the Linux benchmarks used were Enemy Territory, Timed Disk Reads, Gzip Compression, LAME compilation, and LAME encoding. Below is the hardware selection used in these benchmarks as well as the stock package 32-bit versions in both Fedora 6/7 and Ubuntu 6.10/7.04. On the following pages are our results.