Apple macOS Monterey 12 Performance Is Surprisingly Competitive With Linux

Out of more than 120 benchmarks carried out on macOS Monterey 12 and Ubuntu/Clear Linux, Intel's Clear Linux had the most wins with coming in first place 52% of the time followed by macOS 12.1 with first place finishes 30% of the time. Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS and Ubuntu 21.10 combined were in first place just 16% of the time.

While macOS 12.1 came in first place 30% of the time, when it tended to not deliver the best performance it was often in last place... It was in last place 44% of the time followed by Ubuntu and then Clear Linux in last place just 5% of the time. See all the data in full via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.

If taking the geometric mean of all the 120+ benchmarks that ran successfully on all tested operating systems, macOS 12.1 was effectively tied with Ubuntu 21.10 on this 2018 Mac Mini powered by the Intel Core i7 Coffee lake processor. Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS was narrowly in last place while Intel's Clear Linux had a ~5% advantage over macOS 12.1 and Ubuntu 21.10 in these tests.

I've been comparing macOS and Linux performance for more than one decade and this round of testing with macOS 12 is easily the most competitive I've seen out of Apple's operating system. Previously Linux would rack up far more significant wins while under macOS 12.1 the performance was actually quite good and came as a surprise in some of the rendering workloads and other areas to see it leading over Ubuntu Linux and Clear Linux.