January 26, 2013 -- While still a ways from being comparable to the proprietary graphics drivers in terms of features and OpenGL performance, the open-source GPU drivers found by default in the forthcoming Ubuntu 13.04 release are a big improvement over the out-of-the-box graphics drivers found in earlier Ubuntu Linux releases. The Ubuntu desktop is also faster thanks to improvements to its Unity desktop environment and Compiz compositing window manager. In this article are Linux gaming benchmarks looking at the performance of Fedora 17, Fedora 18, Ubuntu 12.10, and a preliminary Ubuntu 13.04 development snapshot. In this first article, the OpenGL performance of Intel and Radeon graphics are being benchmarked.

January 24, 2013 -- The latest performance benchmarks of Fedora 18 to share are of Fedora 17 vs. Fedora 18. Benchmarks were done from two separate systems with clean installs of the "Beefy Miracle" and "Spherical Cow" releases out of Red Hat.

January 23, 2013 -- In addition to open-source graphics driver benchmarking, another area being explored with the recent release of Fedora 18 is the boot performance. Here's some initial results from three systems compared to the Spherical Cow's predecessor.

January 20, 2013 -- On Friday benchmarks were delivered of the Atom-based NVIDIA ION platform with the Nouveau driver against NVIDIA's binary blob. Those results were favorable towards the reverse-engineered, open-source NVIDIA driver. For finishing off the week are more benchmarks from this aging NVIDIA ION system but this time seeing how well the low-end 64-bit Ubuntu performance is when comparing the latest 13.04 development image to the 12.10 and 12.04.1 LTS releases.

January 19, 2013 -- Fedora 18 was officially released this week for x86/x86_64, but the ARM version of Fedora 18 "Spherical Cow" is still under development. Fedora 18 for ARM went into beta last week and since then benchmarks were carried out comparing Spherical Cow on ARM to other popular ARM Linux distributions.

January 14, 2013 -- For kicking off a new week of Linux benchmarking at Phoronix is a round of ARMv7 performance benchmarks using Linaro 12.12. The Linaro 12.12 release from December was compared to Ubuntu 12.10, Linaro 12.10, Fedora 17, and Arch Linux on the PandaBoard ES with its Texas Instruments OMAP4460 Cortex-A9 SoC.

December 26, 2012 -- Unlike many of the Linux distributions out there today that are little more than minor user-facing changes to Ubuntu or another tier-one Linux operating system, Slax for the past many years has followed its own dance. Slax, a LiveCD Linux distribution built around Slackware, is very lightweight and calls itself a "pocket operating system" as with the most recent release it can fit a full Linux OS with the KDE4 desktop in about 200MB. Slax is also intended to be quite easy for others to modify and create custom images via Slackware packages and Slax modules. The recent Slax 7.0 release was the first update for the open-source operating system in several years. For those interested in knowing how this very lightweight and customizable operating system can work so efficiently, Tomáš Matejícek, the Slax creator, has written an exclusive Phoronix article about the process.

December 19, 2012 -- While FreeBSD 9.1 has yet to be officially released, the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD 9.1 "Isotope" release has already been made available this month. In this article are performance benchmarks comparing the 64-bit release of PC-BSD 9.1 against DragonFlyBSD 3.0.3, Oracle Solaris Express 11.1, CentOS 6.3, Ubuntu 12.10, and a development snapshot of Ubuntu 13.04.

December 12, 2012 -- The latest benchmarking adventures at Phoronix.com have been exploring the performance of Debian GNU/Linux versus Debian GNU/kFreeBSD when using the latest Debian 6.0.6 "Squeeze" images as well as the latest Debian "Wheezy" testing images.

December 11, 2012 -- For your viewing pleasure today are benchmarks of the DragonFlyBSD, Ubuntu, CentOS, Oracle Solaris Express, and OpenIndiana operating systems.