Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS, 12.04 LTS, 12.10 On An Old Laptop

The Parallel BZIP2 compression performance is also slightly improved on this latest version of Ubuntu currently under development.

The Smallpt performance has improved with Ubuntu Linux over the past four years.

Overall there are some performance improvements in moving from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, but in then going towards the latest Ubuntu 12.10 development snapshot with the newer Linux kernel and major GCC 4.7 update, for the Intel Core Duo laptop there isn't too much to gain performance-wise outside of a few select workloads.

As said back in March though, On Old Hardware, Think Twice About Ubuntu 12.04, namely for laptops and mobile devices.