Fedora 31 Performance Is Still Sliding In The Wrong Direction - Benchmarks Against Ubuntu 19.10 + Clear Linux

[GdeR]

This article is kinda shallow of you, Michael. That Fedora is "sliding in the wrong direction" is an overstatement in my view.. there are ups and downs in performance in specific benchmarks when the whole system undergoes major changes. This is pretty common. In everyday use, the new Fedora 31 feels so smooth and more responsive than ever. Doing good at specific benchmarks is not what developers really aim at, they try to improve the user experience as a whole. But you are kinda implying that those benchmarks are the final word when it comes to judge systems performance. There's so much more to an OS than that. Just try to use Clear Linux on a daily basis and you will know what I'm talking about. Cheers.

[Britoid]

How so?

I've used it for three years now and the only problems I've experienced have all been due to me running unsupported software or configurations (mesa-git, other AUR stuff, ZFS on root, etc). When one doesn't stray from their ecosystem, Manjaro offers a fine and stable distribution and it and Tumbleweed are the only stable & rolling mainstream ease-of-use distributions.

While I can't speak for their other supported desktops like Gnome or XFCE, they offer a really solid Plasma desktop with quite a few kernel choices like all the current LTS releases, mainline, stable, a couple of real-time options, & release candidates, so whether it's old hardware or bleeding-edge hardware, they have a kernel and desktop combination that should cover everyone.

I've only used their Gnome live, and well, y'all know my feeling about Gnome/Plugins/etc and I last used their XFCE two and a half years ago and while it was nice then, it wouldn't be fair to review it now.

A rolling distro by definition can never be stable. Stable means it doesn't move, rolling as it implies, moves.

Manjaro offers zero of the benefits of Arch, being the KISS approach and closeness to upstream. It's not as if Arch is really that hard to install and maintain anyway, so if you take away the "Arch" part of Manjaro, what exactly does it offer that isn't offered by something like Tumbleweed or Fedora that's actually of value, with both Red Hat and SuSE having history of actually contributing to projects they use.

Kernel choices are pointless too, home desktops should just be kept on the current latest kernel for best performance, features and hardware support. Whilst choice might seem like a good idea, having to make the user choose a kernel is a crappy thing and the user shouldn't have to choose.

I'd blame these benchmarks on Fedora's compile flags, with security > performance. Fedora was one of the only distros that was immune to that journald exploit a while back because of its flags.

[Linuxxx]

Kernel choices are pointless too, home desktops should just be kept on the current latest kernel for best performance, features and hardware support. Whilst choice might seem like a good idea, having to make the user choose a kernel is a crappy thing and the user shouldn't have to choose.

I for one am glad that Canonical/Ubuntu offer me the choice of a "lowlatency" kernel. (Which no other distro does, BTW!)

Keeps my system smooth & respnsive under any load condition; especially gaming never felt any better!

[Britoid]

I for one am glad that Canonical/Ubuntu offer me the choice of a "lowlatency" kernel. (Which no other distro does, BTW!)

Keeps my system smooth & respnsive under any load condition; especially gaming never felt any better!

But my point is kernel should be doing that anyway, having to offer different kernels for what I consider basic functionality is a bug.

You don't grab different kernels to play games on your phone or on Windows? Windows will tweak its kernel when it detects games and a lot of Android phones do similar things, there are things that do it under Linux but I'm not sure on the progress of those.

[skeevy420]

A rolling distro by definition can never be stable. Stable means it doesn't move, rolling as it implies, moves.

Manjaro offers zero of the benefits of Arch, being the KISS approach and closeness to upstream. It's not as if Arch is really that hard to install and maintain anyway, so if you take away the "Arch" part of Manjaro, what exactly does it offer that isn't offered by something like Tumbleweed or Fedora that's actually of value, with both Red Hat and SuSE having history of actually contributing to projects they use.

Kernel choices are pointless too, home desktops should just be kept on the current latest kernel for best performance, features and hardware support. Whilst choice might seem like a good idea, having to make the user choose a kernel is a crappy thing and the user shouldn't have to choose.

I'd blame these benchmarks on Fedora's compile flags, with security > performance. Fedora was one of the only distros that was immune to that journald exploit a while back because of its flags.

We're clearly using different meanings for the word stable. You're using it for "stays the same" and I'm using it for "doesn't crash". Using the former definition, Manjaro, Tumbleweed, Gentoo, Funtoo, etc will never be "stable" distributions because they use the latter definition. Different goals means a different form of and meaning to stability.

What Manjaro offers over Arch is a lot of supported desktop configurations and kernels without needing the user to have to resort to the AUR and go all DIY with an easy-to-use (it could be better) installer, integrated Nvidia proprietary driver installation, graphical upgrade tools for both GTK and QT based desktops, wrappers around Arch tools to make systems management easier (like their wrapper around pacman-mirrors), etc. That's like asking what Ubuntu offers over Debian or Mint over Ubuntu -- noob helpers for the most part.

To comment on both the kernel choices and your response to Linuxxx, some kernel optimization choices have to be made at compile time because there isn't an interface to do that optimization afterwards, real-time and low-latency both fall into that category, and I'd rather the distribution supply and support alternative kernel choices versus expecting an end user to compile a kernel for a specific optimization themselves.

They also allow for update breathing room and long term stability/safety. Like with Linux 5.3, I was having odd issues up until 5.3.6, having the choices of 5.2.* and 4.19.* was nice to have available since it took a few releases for mainline to stabilize on my system and setup. For someone else, they might be having issues with kernels past 4.17 or 4.12 so Manjaro supporting 4.14.* and 4.9.* LTS kernel releases helps people with odd hardware that quit working or started acting funny for whatever reasons. 4.18, for example, ran like crap on my system 4.19 and 4.17, OTOH, were solid. Manjaro providing what I use as LTS backup kernels is awesome.

[flower]

I for one am glad that Canonical/Ubuntu offer me the choice of a "lowlatency" kernel. (Which no other distro does, BTW!)

Keeps my system smooth & respnsive under any load condition; especially gaming never felt any better!

WTF? All Distributions i know offer different kernels.
I am using linux-zen on arch (which is available on debian too) whiich is - you guess - a low latency kernel optimized for desktop usage

[Anvil]

my bet is SYSTEMD at fault, there packing so much CRAP into that which slows it down,

[NotMine999]

What fun to watch the Fedora fanboi acolytes come out...

[archsway]

The reason why web browsers are so slow is because of all the tracking scripts that get run.

Not that I'm suggesting anything to do with Fedora...

[Delgarde]

So, what I notice in those benchmarks is that F31 isn't notably slower than F30+updates, and is quicker in a few places — but both are slower than unpatched F30. So there may indeed be a regression, but it was in one of the F30 updates, not new in F31...