A Look At The Performance Improvements With System76 Pop!_OS 20.10

At the end of last week System76 released Pop!_OS 20.10 as their customized distribution built atop Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla. For those curious here are some benchmarks of System76's Pop!_OS 20.10 versus 20.04 using the Thelio Major with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X and Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics.

Pop!_OS 20.10 has similar key package versions to Ubuntu 20.10 for which it is based: the Linux 5.8 kernel is at play, GNOME Shell 3.38.1, X.Org Server 1.20.8 by default, Mesa 20.2.1, GCC 10.2, Python 3.8.6, and numerous other package updates.

Pop!_OS 20.10 brings changes to its window stacking handling, support for floating window exceptions with its tiling window manager, external monitor support in the hybrid graphics modes, and other changes.

Curious about the performance of Pop!_OS 20.04 vs. 20.10 (and in turn, effectively Ubuntu 20.04 LTS vs. 20.10) with the beautiful and high-end System76 Thelio Major with Threadripper 3990X + Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics, I ran some benchmarks on both releases.

Of some 285 tests run, Pop!_OS 20.10 was faster in 60% of the tests. If taking the geometric mean of all 285 benchmark results, Pop!_OS 20.10 successfully was 13.7% faster on average over the 20.04 state.

Now let's look deeper at that data...