A Five-Way Linux Distribution Comparison In 2010

With many Linux distributions receiving major updates in recent weeks and months we have carried out a five-way Linux distribution comparison of openSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, PCLinuxOS, and Arch Linux. We have quite a number of tests comparing the 32-bit performance of these popular Linux distributions on older PC hardware.

Our test system was a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 notebook with an Intel Core Duo T2400 (1.83GHz dual-core) CPU, 1GB of system memory, an 80GB Hitachi HTS541080G9SA00 SATA HDD, and ATI Radeon Mobility X1400 graphics. Below are some of the key software components for the different distributions that were tested in this article.

openSUSE 11.3 RC1:
OS: SUSE LINUX 11.3, Kernel: 2.6.34-9-default (i686), Desktop: KDE 4.4.3, Display Server: X.Org Server 1.8.0, Display Driver: radeon 6.13.0, OpenGL: 1.5 Mesa 7.8.1, Compiler: GCC 4.5, File-System: ext4

Ubuntu 10.04:
OS: Ubuntu 10.04, Kernel: 2.6.32-21-generic (i686), Desktop: GNOME 2.30.0, Display Server: X.Org Server 1.7.6, Display Driver: radeon 6.13.0, Compiler: GCC 4.4.3, File-System: ext4

Fedora 13:
OS: Fedora release 13 (Goddard), Kernel: 2.6.33.3-85.fc13.i686.PAE (i686), Desktop: GNOME 2.30.0, Display Server: X.Org Server 1.8.0, Display Driver: radeon 6.13.0, OpenGL: 1.5 Mesa 7.8.1, Compiler: GCC 4.4.4, File-System: ext4

PCLinuxOS 2010.1:
OS: PCLinuxOS release 2010 (PCLinuxOS) for i586, Kernel: 2.6.32.12-pclos1.bfs (i686), Desktop: KDE 4.4.3, Display Server: X.Org Server 1.6.5, Display Driver: radeon 6.12.4, OpenGL: 1.4 Mesa 7.5.2, Compiler: GCC 4.4.1, File-System: ext4

Arch Linux 2010.5:
OS: Linux, Kernel: 2.6.33-ARCH (i686), Desktop: KDE 4.4.4, Compiler: GCC 4.5.0, File-System: ext4

Tests included World of Padman, OpenArena, Bullet Physics, C-Ray, TTSIOD 3D Renderer, LAME MP3 encoding, FFmpeg, x264, Himeno, GraphicsMagick, LZMA compression, 7-Zip compression, PostMark, and Unpack-Linux. All testing was done through the Phoronix Test Suite. Each distribution was left in its stock configuration.