Apple macOS 10.15 vs. Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 19.10 Performance Benchmarks

In addition to this month bringing the release of the Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine", Apple also shipped macOS 10.15 "Catalina" as the sixteenth major release of their macOS operating system. So with that it makes for an interesting time seeing how macOS 10.15 competes against both Ubuntu 19.10 and Windows 10 on an Apple MacBook Pro. Here are those results from dozens of benchmarks.

Using an Apple MacBook Pro with Core i7-6700HQ Skylake CPU, 2 x 8GB RAM, 250GB Apple SSD, and Radeon Pro 450 graphics, macOS 10.15, Windows 10, and Ubuntu 19.10 were all benchmarked off this same system. All three operating systems were tested with their latest software updates as of testing.

Normally we also include Intel's Clear Linux too for looking at the performance of a very optimized rolling-release Linux distribution, but unfortunately Clear Linux was having issues with its UEFI boot configuration in being able to boot on this MacBook Pro.

It's worth noting that finally in Ubuntu 19.10 is good support for recent MacBook Pro laptops and other Linux distributions using the Linux 5.3 kernel or newer. The Linux 5.3 mainline kernel brought a driver for handling the Apple keyboards and trackpads for the MacBook/MacBookPro devices over the past couple of years. So with the newly released Ubuntu using Linux 5.3, the 2016 era MacBook Pro and newer are finally working decently out-of-the-box.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite more than 80 benchmarks were run on macOS 10.15, Windows 10, and Ubuntu 19.10 from this MacBook Pro.