TUXEDO OS Delivering Some Performance Gains Over Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

Linux PC retailer TUXEDO Computers earlier this month released TUXEDO OS 1. The Bavarian Linux PC vendor has long modified their stock Ubuntu installations to cater toward their intended customers/audience and ship with the various software modifications while now with TUXEDO OS is an easy-to-setup ISO image of their customized Ubuntu-based Linux OS. I've been trying out TUXEDO OS on the AMD Ryzen powered TUXEDO Aura 15 Gen2 and ran some comparison benchmarks against (K)Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS.

TUXEDO Computers promotes their TUXEDO OS as having a modified Linux kernel tailored toward TUXEDO hardware, simple by default yet powerful, Linux-qualified customer support, and as using KDE Plasma as the default desktop environment.

While TUXEDO Computers shipped their customized Ubuntu pre-installed on their hardware, prior to this month they hadn't published an easy-to-use installer ISO but previously required customizing the package archive of an existing Ubuntu installation. So for customer ease of use and usability, the TUXEDO OS install images are already a win and much more convenient.

TUXEDO OS 1 works off a modified Ubuntu 22.04 LTS package base and runs the KDE Plasma 5 desktop by default. Their "modified Linux kernel" is based off Linux 5.15 LTS like Ubuntu 22.04, but with various patches. One of the differences I immediately noticed with TUXEDO OS was seeing the Aura 15 Gen2 running with the amd-pstate ondemand driver rather than the upstream Ubuntu 22.04 LTS kernel that defaults to amd-pstate schedutil for modern AMD Ryzen processors.

Another nice difference with TUXEDO OS is it ships with Mesa 22.2 (currently v22.2.2) compared to the stock Mesa 22.0 with upstream Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. The newer Mesa packages is great for providing a more recent OpenGL and Vulkan driver experience for Intel and AMD Radeon graphics hardware.

TUXEDO OS ships with the TUXEDO Control Center pre-installed, which allows for easy monitoring of the fan speeds, CPU temperature, and also the power profiles for changing between the default profile and various power-saving settings depending upon your preference for better performance or maximizing the laptop's battery life. The TUXEDO WebFAI Creator is also shipped with TUXEDO OS for flashing install images of the OS.

Using the same TUXEDO Aura 15 Gen2 notebook, I ran some benchmarks comparing a clean install of TUXEDO OS 1 against a clean install of Kubuntu 22.04 LTS on the same hardware. Kubuntu 22.04 LTS was used for matching the same desktop environment as TUXEDO OS.