Ubuntu 23.04 Laptop Performance Mixed Against Ubuntu 22.10

Today marks the release of Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" and I've already been trying it out on a number of test systems. Up today are some initial Ubuntu 23.04 vs. 22.10 laptop benchmarks. If you were hoping though for this release to improve performance, unfortunately that doesn't appear to be the case with overall across a range of workloads Ubuntu 23.04 is similar to -- or in some areas trailing -- Ubuntu 22.10 on both Intel and AMD hardware.

For getting an idea of the Ubuntu 23.04 performance, I ran benchmarks of clean Ubuntu 22.10 (with SRU updates) against the near-final Ubuntu 23.04 state on three distinct laptops: a Dell XPS 9310 with Core i7 1165G7 Tigerlake processor, MSI Prestige 14 (MSI MS-14C6) with Core i7 1280P Alder Lake processor, and then a Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen 3 (21CM0001US) with Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U processor.

Ubuntu 22.10 and 23.04 were freshly installed on each of the three laptops under test for today. The selection of laptops is based on the recent laptop models I had on hand for Linux testing.

Going from Ubuntu 22.10 to Ubuntu 23.04 means going from Linux 5.19 to Linux 6.2, GNOME 43 to GNOME 44, Mesa 22.2 to Mesa 23.0., Python 3.10 to 3.11, and countless other package upgrades. GCC 12.2 remains the default system compiler on Ubuntu 23.04 with GCC 13 not rolling out in the Ubuntu world until Ubuntu 23.10. The kernel and Mesa upgrades with Ubuntu 23.04 in particular are good news for those running Ubuntu on modern hardware.