Benchmarking 11 Linux Distributions Across Dozens Of Workloads On The Intel Core i9 10980XE

Coming in first place most often was Clear Linux with wins 41% of the time while tied for second were Debian 10.2, CentOS 8, and CentOS Stream all coming in first ~14% of the time. The remaining Linux distributions all came in first 5% of the time or less.

Coming in last place most often was CentOS with representing 25% of the last place finishes followed by Solus at 15% and Fedora Workstation at 14%.

If taking the geometric mean of all the benchmarks carried out successfully on all 11 Linux distributions under test, here's how that shakes down. From the slowest (CentOS 7) to fastest (Clear Linux) is a 35% improvement out of the same Intel Core i9 10980XE workstation. Worth noting is that while CentOS 7 was the slowest, when upgrading to CentOS 8 or even CentOS Stream rolling-release meant a solid second place finish.

See more benchmark results of this 11-way Intel Core i9 end-of-2019 distribution comparison over on OpenBenchmarking.org.