Fedora vs. openSUSE vs. Manjaro vs. Debian vs. Ubuntu vs. Mint Linux Benchmarks

[Dick Palmer]

It's possible openSUSE's slowdown is due to sticking to the older GCC 4.8 series rather than GCC 5.x, but Linux Mint is also on the older GCC 4.8 too.

Um, so that'll be *not* possible then. Why not simply and honestly say "buggered if I know why..." rather than forcing us to decipher these vain inane witterings?

[elldekaa]

"Out of the box performance" >> Proceeds to use a beta version of every distro except Linux Mint and Manjaro. In the latter, it's not that hard to use one command to switch to the unstable repos after your install:
sudo pacman-mirrors -gb unstable

And BOOM, mesa 11.

As for Linux Mint, it's as simple as checking a box in your update manager to get to the "beta" repository...

Thanks for the precision, I was asking myself about their poor performance...
I really need to try Manjaro one day... I have good memories of my time on Arch few years ago :-)

[bokal]

Antergos would have been a better choice if you want to test an Arch based distribution.

[djdoo]

Probably btrfs and KDE 5 are the sources of performance problems with opensuse... I still cannot understand why they chose btrfs as the default FS for root, in all benchmarks it is behind ext4 and xfs in performance and it needs a dozen of partitions in order to run a system that a newbie will be really frighten when see the tree at the installation procedure and likely will not proceed... Too bad for opensuse, it took the path to the AMD obscure side.

[tomtomme]

Probably btrfs and KDE 5 are the sources of performance problems with opensuse... I still cannot understand why they chose btrfs as the default FS for root, in all benchmarks it is behind ext4 and xfs in performance and it needs a dozen of partitions in order to run a system that a newbie will be really frighten when see the tree at the installation procedure and likely will not proceed... Too bad for opensuse, it took the path to the AMD obscure side.

the tests ran on the XFS home partition as Michael wrote.
btrfs on the root partition is NOT about performance and was chosen because SLES 12 chose it, same with xfs on home. In combination with snapper, btrfs makes sense in the enterprise market.

[Linuxxx]

Easy explanation for the poor performance of both OpenSUSE & Manjaro:

(Soft) REAL-TIME Linux Kernel [which obviously doesn't make any sense on a desktop system, just like openSUSE & Manjaro don't make any sense!]

Type "uname -a" and look for "PREEMPT", which means that the Linux kernel itself freezes ITSELF for userspace apps, which of course leads to worse performance and increased latency on the kernel side!

[sysrich]

Easy explanation for the poor performance of both OpenSUSE & Manjaro:

(Soft) REAL-TIME Linux Kernel [which obviously doesn't make any sense on a desktop system, just like openSUSE & Manjaro don't make any sense!]

Type "uname -a" and look for "PREEMPT", which means that the Linux kernel itself freezes ITSELF for userspace apps, which of course leads to worse performance and increased latency on the kernel side!

It's not quite THAT simple..but, yes, there are certain areas where a PREEMPT kernel isn't a smart idea

Which is one of the reasons openSUSE is thinking of dropping it in their default kernel (called kernel-desktop)

HOWEVER, openSUSE Leap already has a non-PREEMPT kernel, called kernel-default (it's the default in SLE)

I'd love to see these benchmarks re-run with that kernel, could someone make it happen please?

[Cape]

I still cannot understand why they chose btrfs as the default FS for root, in all benchmarks it is behind ext4 and xfs in performance and it needs a dozen of partitions in order to run a system that a newbie will be really frighten when see the tree at the installation procedure and likely will not proceed.

You have quite a messed up idea of btrfs. I have my root and home in btrfs on a normal HD (no need for dozen of partitions... where did you get that?) and i can't complain about performance. Do you want a good reason for choosing btrf over ext4? Here you go: online, super easy defrag. And don't tell me that linux partitions don't need defragging because i my 10 years linux exp I always experienced a sudden decrease of performance after about 2 years, and defragging always solved.

[sysrich]

I know this is a somewhat blasphemous opinion for this site but there is more to life than Benchmarks..

BTRFS makes perfect sense as the default root filesystem for openSUSE and SLE when you realise that we have snapper, which provides full, system wide, snapshoting, rollback, and boot to snapshot - no more sysadmins or rogue software breaking things in a way that cant be undone

Also, at openSUSE/SUSE, we take time to care about other factors in addition to performance, such as reliability and consistency - last time I checked we're the only distribution to have Write Barriers enabled by default, to ensure that your data is actually written to your disks in the correct order in a consistent manner. That comes with a bit of a performance cost sometimes, but I'd rather be sure my data is actually ON my disk, than hope it is..

That said, I still think there's a little tweaking we can do to openSUSE Leap before we release it in November. It's still in Beta, we got time

[djdoo]

You have quite a messed up idea of btrfs. I have my root and home in btrfs on a normal HD (no need for dozen of partitions... where did you get that?) and i can't complain about performance. Do you want a good reason for choosing btrf over ext4? Here you go: online, super easy defrag. And don't tell me that linux partitions don't need defragging because i my 10 years linux exp I always experienced a sudden decrease of performance after about 2 years, and defragging always solved.

That is what their installer does man and if you have never install a recent opensuse distro please don't say such things... I am using opensuse since it was called suse 8.2 and believe me I know how it works.
I still remember losing grub in 13.1 version and cannot enter any OS when install with btrfs root and it was a known bug then and since that I never used btrfs again afraid not to mess my system with that thing one more time.