A Five-Way Linux Distribution Comparison In 2010

Our first test was with World of Padman, but Arch Linux results are not available for the OpenGL tests due to problems with the system. Fedora, Ubuntu, and openSUSE all performed about the same while PCLinuxOS was slower, which isn't to much surprise considering PCLinuxOS 2010.1 is using the older Mesa 7.5 release where as most distributions shipping in H1'2010 are using Mesa 7.7/7.8. With this ThinkPad notebook and the Mobility Radeon X1400 graphics, World of Padman would not be playable at 1400 x 1050. With the Gallium3D driver stack this ioquake3 game should run faster, but no distribution is currently shipping the ATI Gallium3D driver by default at this time.

The OpenArena performance results were interesting with PCLinuxOS being much faster than the other Linux distributions, which may be signaling a regression in the Radeon DRI driver since Mesa 7.5. openSUSE 11.3 RC1 ran at the same speed as Ubuntu 10.04 while Fedora 13 was set back a bit.

When upping the OpenArena resolution from 800 x 600 to 1400 x 1050, PCLinuxOS continued to beat out the other desktop Linux distributions with the newer Mesa stack. With the 1400 x 1050 test, however, openSUSE fell and was only running at an 8 FPS average frame-rate while Ubuntu and Fedora were at 21 FPS.

With our first Bullet Physics Engine test, Arch Linux came out ahead of the four other Linux distributions but it was only faster by the slowest distribution in this test (openSUSE 11.3 RC1) by 5%. The other four Linux distributions performed close to the same speed.