2019 Linux Performance: Ubuntu Up ~1%, Fedora Up ~2%, Clear Linux Up ~7%

Last week I posted benchmarks looking at the performance of Intel's Clear Linux over the course of 2019 with roughly 7% better performance across dozens of benchmarks on the same system. But how does that compare to other Linux distributions with the same hardware? Here is a look in showing the performance for both Fedora and Ubuntu at the end of 2018 to the end of 2019.

With Clear Linux being a rolling-release distribution but in performing multiple "releases" per day and its swupd packaging system allowing roll-backs to older revisions, it was quite straight-forward in comparing Clear Linux 26970 as their last revision for 2018 to Clear Linux 31890 as the latest release at the time.

In the case of comparing Ubuntu over the course of 2018 to 2019, Ubuntu 18.10 was benchmarked followed by Ubuntu 20.04 LTS using a daily development ISO as of this past week for representing the bleeding-edge Ubuntu experience at the end of 2019.

For the Fedora comparison, Fedora Workstation 29 was tested for the end of 2018 experience (without stable release updates, since it ships new kernel releases and more significant updates that came out in 2019) and then testing Fedora Workstation 31 with all available updates as of this week.

So in the end it showcases roughly the Fedora Workstation and Ubuntu experience for the end of 2018 and end of 2019 alongside the Clear Linux results. Dozens of different tests that worked across all three tested distributions were in use.

The same system was used throughout that consisted of the Intel Core i9 7980XE with 4 x 4GB DDR4-3200 Corsair memory, ASUS PRIME X299-A, eVGA NV124 graphics, and Samsung 970 EVO 500GB NVMe SSD given that all those hardware components were mature / well supported well before Q4'2018.