Fedora 32 vs. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Engaged In Some Healthy Competition Over Performance

After showing yesterday how the performance has changed from Fedora 31 to Fedora 32, you may be wondering about how Fedora 32 -- which is due to be released next week -- stacks up against the brand new Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release. Here are the results from dozens of benchmarks and with some areas seeing some clear performance differences.

Fedora 32 is set to ship next week (pending any last minute delays) with the Linux 5.6.5 kernel and GCC 10.0.1. This differs from Ubuntu 20.04 sticking to the Linux 5.4 LTS kernel and also remaining on GCC 9 with GCC 10 stable not being out yet. Fedora 32 is also using the GNOME Wayland session by default while Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is sticking to the X.Org session. Both Linux distributions have in common GNOME Shell 3.36.1 desktop, Mesa 20.0.4 for the graphics drivers, X.Org Server 1.20, EXT4 by default, and other packages like Python 3.8.2 and PHP 7.4.

Outside of package versions, there are other differences as well including Fedora 32 using SELinux to Ubuntu employing AppArmor and various other changes. Via the Phoronix Test Suite for these initial benchmarks both distributions were benchmarked on an Intel Core i9 10980XE system with ASROCK X299 STEEL LEGEND motherboard, 4 x 8GB DDR4-3200 memory, Samsung 970 PRO 512GB NVMe SSD, and NVIDIA NV132 graphics.