August 19, 2009 -- The first development release for Fedora 12 (codenamed Constantine), Alpha 1, was supposed to be released this week. However, Red Hat has pushed back its release to next week Tuesday. While there is this seven-day delay, an Alpha 1 RC1 ISO spin is available and we decided to provide a very early and brief look at the Fedora 12 release.

August 14, 2009 -- Arch Linux 2009.08 was released earlier this week with a new installer, more automatic configuration settings, many core package updates, and other changes to this growingly popular distribution. At the request of some readers, we have carried out some quick benchmarks to get a general understanding of where Arch Linux 2009.08 is performing in comparison to Ubuntu 9.04.

July 29, 2009 -- It has been no secret that we have been working to create our own Linux distribution that is designed to run off a Live DVD/USB device and would provide a standardized free software stack for running hardware benchmarks whether you are a computer review web-site like us, an independent hardware vendor interested in seeing how well their hardware performs on Linux, or just a hobbyist wishing to compare your system's performance against that of your friends. We first shared our plans for this a few months ago when talking about driving Linux-based benchmarking with Sandtorg (a.k.a. Phoronix Test Suite 2.0). We also briefly mentioned this Linux OS again last week when providing a detailed guide to Phoronix Test Suite 2.0, but today we are formally announcing PTS Desktop Live 2009.3 (codenamed "Gernlinden"). PTS Desktop Live is being released as a free download in tandem with the release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 on the 4th of August.

July 16, 2009 -- With it being a while since we last compared many Linux distributions when it comes to their measurable desktop performance, we decided to run a new round of tests atop four of the most popular Linux distributions: OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Mandriva. To see where these Linux distributions are at, we used their latest development releases and then performed all package updates as of 2009-07-15. Following that, we ran an arsenal of tests using the Phoronix Test Suite. Here are the results.

June 22, 2009 -- The first alpha release of Mandriva Linux 2010 was released on Sunday. This development update brings a number of core improvements to Mandriva such as a faster boot time, Plymouth integration for enhancing the boot process, Tomoyo for providing the security framework, Moblin packaging, and various other improvements. In this article we are taking a brief look at Mandriva Linux 2010 Alpha 1.

June 17, 2009 -- Last week we delivered benchmarks comparing the performance of Ubuntu 9.04 vs. Fedora 11 and found for the most part that these two incredibly popular Linux distributions had performed about the same, except for a few areas where there notable differences. However, like in the past when we have looked at Ubuntu 7.04 to 8.10 benchmarks or benchmarking the past five Linux kernels, we are now looking at the performance of Fedora over their past few releases. In this article we have a range of system benchmarks from Fedora 9, 10, 11, and the latest Rawhide packages as of this week.

June 11, 2009 -- Fedora 11 was released earlier this week so we have set out to see how its desktop performance compares to that of Ubuntu 9.04, which was released back in April. Using the Phoronix Test Suite we compared these two leading Linux distributions in tasks like code compilation, Apache web server performance, audio/video encoding, multi-processing, ray-tracing, computational biology, various disk tasks, graphics manipulation, encryption, chess AI, image conversion, database, and other tests.

May 19, 2009 -- We first got excited for Moblin 2.0 back in January when seeing how fast this Linux distribution had booted on Atom-powered netbooks. This Fedora-derived distribution booted even faster with a newer development release that came out this past March. While Moblin 2.0 final is not yet released, there is now more to get excited over than just amazing boot times. Moblin 2.0 will introduce a Clutter-based user interface and from our initial encounters with this release, it is very impressive! In this article we have more information on this new UI along with screenshots and videos.

May 15, 2009 -- The first alpha release for Ubuntu 9.10 was made available yesterday and while it does net yet integrate Plymouth or any other new features, it has picked up a few new packages. Most prominently, Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 1 features the Linux 2.6.30 kernel and GCC 4.4. There are also other updated packages from Debian like GNOME 2.27, but most notable are the kernel and compiler updates. We have tested out Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 1 and compared its performance to Ubuntu 9.04. While this is very early within the Ubuntu 9.10 development cycle, the results already may come as a surprise.

April 28, 2009 -- Red Hat is expecting to deliver the final release of Fedora 11 in just less than one month, but today they have offered up a preview build of this next open-source Linux distribution update that is known as Leonidas. This afternoon we have screenshots of the Fedora 11 Preview release along with information on some of the changes.