15-Way Linux Distribution / Operating System Comparison, Including Windows 10 & WSL

When it came to the time needed to do a default Linux x86_64 kernel build, Clear Linux was the fastest on this Core i9 system with needing just 32 seconds while Sabayon Linux was the slowest native bare-metal distribution with needing 44 seconds. The WSL distributions needed twice the amount of time to compile the kernel due to their I/O bottleneck.

While in the case of compiling PHP from source, CentOS 7 with its old GCC 4.8 stock compiler yielded the fastest build times. Clear Linux and WSL platforms were the slowest -- Clear being slower due to its aggressive CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS getting picked up by the PHP build process in order to generate a faster resulting binary.

If you care about Pi calculation performance, Clear Linux was slightly faster than the others while Windows 10 April 2018 was the slowest with taking an extra second over the other Linux distributions.

With FFmpeg video encoding performance, Windows 10 was able to compete in line with the Linux distributions as were the WSL-running distributions due to not tripping over slow I/O. The fastest Linux distribution at this H.264 video encode test was Clear Linux with its plethora of optimizations followed by Debian 9.

With the JPEG benchmark from the libjpeg-turbo project, the Windows 10 and WSL performance was in line with the other Linux distributions. Debian 9 and Clear Linux had a slight advantage over the rest.