The Performance Of Five Linux Distributions From Early 2016 To The End Of 2018

[moilami]

The default light themes are still really nice and green. No complaints there. Outside of that title bar, the dark themes look decent too (it's easy enough to fix or find alternates). I ended up using Breeze Dark since the SUSE themes seem to be Breeze with tweaked color schemes. Everything is all nice and green until you open up a file manager and icons and whatnot are Breeze Blue.

Well, it will become better.

[skeevy420]

Interesting, thanks for posting. I will myself have to check out how SUSE is. And yes, that aqua-blue is something very awful. I used SUSE some 15 years ago, at those times it had nice green theme. I also bought SUSE hat, which I still have, so it is like going back to home when installing SUSE Back to home after an affair with bitter end

The default light themes are still really nice and green. No complaints there. Outside of that title bar, the dark themes look decent too (it's easy enough to fix or find alternates). I ended up using Breeze Dark since the SUSE themes seem to be Breeze with tweaked color schemes. Everything is all nice and green until you open up a file manager and icons and whatnot are Breeze Blue.

[moilami]

I've been using it for 24 hours now. Coming from Arch/Antergos for 8 years...it's different, that's for sure. I do like its updater -- "There are some running programs that might use files deleted by recent upgrade. You may wish to check and restart some of them. Run 'zypper ps -s' to list these programs." That's handy as hell and is letting me know I need to restart kwin and plasmshell right now...

Yast is also a very nice, very powerful tool. That deserves it's own little line.

So far I've found and installed most of my go-to programs, I have a fully up to date KDE setup, I've got ZoL 0.8rc pools mounting...I just have to learn how Suse builds packages to get one or two things their repos don't have -- mainly an up-to-date PulseEffects...didn't realize how much I relied on that until I didn't have it anymore.

All in all, I'm liking Suse.

My only real complain about something that's actually Suse is their default dark themes/color schemes with Plasma. Whoever decided that bright aqua-green with bright white text was just fine for window title bars needs to be taken out back and sacked.

Interesting, thanks for posting. I will myself have to check out how SUSE is. And yes, that aqua-blue is something very awful. I used SUSE some 15 years ago, at those times it had nice green theme. I also bought SUSE hat, which I still have, so it is like going back to home when installing SUSE Back to home after an affair with bitter end

[skeevy420]

openSUSE seems to be rather interesting distribution.

I've been using it for 24 hours now. Coming from Arch/Antergos for 8 years...it's different, that's for sure. I do like its updater -- "There are some running programs that might use files deleted by recent upgrade. You may wish to check and restart some of them. Run 'zypper ps -s' to list these programs." That's handy as hell and is letting me know I need to restart kwin and plasmshell right now...

Yast is also a very nice, very powerful tool. That deserves it's own little line.

So far I've found and installed most of my go-to programs, I have a fully up to date KDE setup, I've got ZoL 0.8rc pools mounting...I just have to learn how Suse builds packages to get one or two things their repos don't have -- mainly an up-to-date PulseEffects...didn't realize how much I relied on that until I didn't have it anymore.

All in all, I'm liking Suse.

My only real complain about something that's actually Suse is their default dark themes/color schemes with Plasma. Whoever decided that bright aqua-green with bright white text was just fine for window title bars needs to be taken out back and sacked.

[skeevy420]

I'd say the benchmarks tend to suggest that even Clear Linux shows the same trend of performance regressions from then to now, so your argument doesn't entirely hold water. Aggressive optimizations isn't the problem according to those benchmarks. Or at least, it's not so simple as just adding -march=native to GCC. A quick glance at the numbers is roughly along the expected slowdown with the introduction of Spectre mitigations + some on top of that. It would be worthwhile for the FLOSS community to find out what exactly the problem is rather than waving it off as simply a lack of not using generational targeted binaries.

It depends on how you look at it. When Clear is both faster and follows the trends, the faster is the optimizations they do and the following the trend are the mitigations and the compiler changing over time. You're right, it's not as simple as adding -march=native...have a look at Gentoo LTO, Solus, or Clear's build systems...kind of brings out the kid in me....though -march=your_arch or -march=native do produce more optimized code since the compiler can use information like how much cache the CPU has, what instructions are supported...

The problem with generational binaries is even more code bloat. I'd rather have one targeted executable than a wrapper around 5 different executables -- for one or two programs, not a big deal...for the entire system, it's like having 5 distros installed. Sometimes less is more -- less code bloat, more performance.

There are a lot of little things that go into each generation...like my Westmere processors support AES and huge tables that Nehalem doesn't, so each target would have to account for different encryption techniques, AVX, AVX2, how much cache the CPU has, etc -- it's why Clear has some setup like -mtune=skylake -march=something else...going straight -march=generic basically tells the compiler "fuck AVX, AES ain't necessary, there's no such thing as more than 4mb of cache".

[birdie]

Where is Gentoo?, it's very important to compare a that kind of distribution too.

Michael doesn't test DIY distros like Gentoo and LFS.

[josedellabosca]

Where is Gentoo?, it's very important to compare a that kind of distribution too.

[birdie]

Here's the most probable answer: code bloat. Compare a distro from 10 years ago to any modern one and see how every binary and library has become twice as large or even larger. And CPUs IPC hasn't increased that much in the meantime.

[moilami]

openSUSE seems to be rather interesting distribution.

[stormcrow]

Processors might be getting more/better instructions, faster speeds, and more threads as well as constant compiler improvements, but none of that matters if all the software available isn't taking advantage of them.

Just look at the average Linux distribution for an idea of what I mean. They're damn near all compiled with support for x86_64 processors from the earliest of generations. Running Debian x64 on a Ryzen is like running Debian i386 on a Pentium 4 because of what's essentially legacy support due to using march=generic. Clear doesn't do that and they run with more aggressive compiler settings so they come out on top.

I'm honestly surprised some sort of Ubuntu Source or Suse Source type of distribution hasn't been created -- something LTS with optimized & native compiled packages where people don't have to worry about useflags and compiler settings, just a "compiling packages, come back in a day or two" updater. Most people wouldn't need it, but those who do need all the performance they can get might appreciate an easy to use source based distribution.

I'd say the benchmarks tend to suggest that even Clear Linux shows the same trend of performance regressions from then to now, so your argument doesn't entirely hold water. Aggressive optimizations isn't the problem according to those benchmarks. Or at least, it's not so simple as just adding -march=native to GCC. A quick glance at the numbers is roughly along the expected slowdown with the introduction of Spectre mitigations + some on top of that. It would be worthwhile for the FLOSS community to find out what exactly the problem is rather than waving it off as simply a lack of not using generational targeted binaries.