15-Way Linux Distribution / Operating System Comparison, Including Windows 10 & WSL

The CacheBench numbers for CPU cache performance was a bit interesting with Windows 10 doing very well and in the same boat as Manjaro, Debian 9 on WSL, and Clear Linux for first place. Ubuntu 18.04 and CentOS 7 were now the slowest.

When it comes to x264 video encoding performance, Windows 10 and Clear Linux were duking it out for a first place finish ahead of the other tested operating systems.

With the OpenMP-based GraphicsMagick image manipulation program, Debian Testing scored a win while Windows 10 was now the slowest along with the WSL-based distributions.

Under the Stockfish chess engine benchmark, openSUSE Leap 15.0 had an extremely narrow lead over Clear Linux and others while Gentoo-based Sabayon was noticeably slower than the rest. Windows 10 and the WSL distributions were in line with the native Linux platforms in this CPU-heavy workload.

Under the ebizzy synthetic benchmark trying to resemble server performance, Debian 9.4 was the fastest followed by Clear Linux and then Debian 9 on WSL while CentOS 7 derived from RHEL 7.5 came in much slower than the others.