How Intel's Clear Linux Is Competing Against Late-2020 Linux Distributions

As it's been a while since running a fresh Linux distribution comparison with Intel's Clear Linux platform and given all the autumn distribution updates inbound, here is a fresh look at the rolling-release Clear Linux up against a snapshot of Ubuntu 20.10, Fedora Workstation 33 Beta, openSUSE Tumbleweed 20200929, Arch-based Endeavour OS, and Debian Testing from the start of October.

All six Linux distributions were freshly installed on the same system and tested at their defaults to see how all of these bleeding-edge Linux distributions are competing but with a particular emphasis on how Intel's Clear Linux is competing with the more prominent distributions. Clear Linux has traditionally walloped the rest but earlier this year Intel divested in Clear Linux from the desktop perspective and there also haven't been any major breakthroughs to report on in recent times. With Ubuntu 20.10 also now pulling in GCC 10 and other components, it brings it close to the current state of Clear Linux.

The system used for all of the testing featured the Intel Core i9 10980XE, ASRock X299 Steel Legend motherboard, 4 x 8GB DDR4-3200 memory, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics, and the Samsung 970 PRO 512GB NVMe SSD. Each distribution was running at their software defaults.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite dozens of different workloads were tested across all six distributions.