AlmaLinux 9, openSUSE Leap 15.4, Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 11.3 & Clear Linux Benchmarks

Given the recent releases of openSUSE Leap 15.4 and AlmaLinux 9.0, here are some fresh Linux server/workstation-oriented benchmarks on a dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" platform and running the fresh releases of various enterprise Linux choices.

Up for this round of testing was AlmaLinux 9.0, Clear Linux 36520, Debian 11.3, openSUSE 15.4, and Ubuntu 22.-4 LTS for seeing how these 2022 distributions are battling it out on Intel's flagship Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" hardware.

The same hardware was used throughout while simply carrying out clean installs of the given distribution each time. The out-of-the-box/default performance of each Linux operating system was looked at for this quick round of testing.

The "TLDR" though is that Intel's Clear Linux continued to lead in this round of benchmarking... 39 of 68 benchmarks carried out saw Clear Linux in first place.

While tending to be the slowest was openSUSE Leap 15.4 for the out-of-the-box performance.

Or if taking the geometric mean of all the benchmarks run on each Linux distribution:

Clear Linux was about 22% faster than Ubuntu 22.04 LTS out-of-the-box thanks to its more aggressive defaults when it comes to the CPU frequency scaling governor, compiler flags, and a whole lot of patching and optimizations to individual components. Following Clear Linux was RHEL9-based AlmaLinux 9.0 for a healthy second place finish followed by Debian 11.3, Ubuntu 22.04, and openSUSE Leap 15.4.

Let's look at some of the individual metrics now.