A Five-Way Linux Distribution Comparison In 2010

With the LZMA compression performance, Ubuntu 10.04 and openSUSE 11.3 RC1 were the fastest, but there was a very small difference between them and the other Linux distributions.

Again, the 7-Zip results are not too interesting.

All five Linux distributions were using an EXT4 file-system, but there was a great difference in the results between the operating systems. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS produced the best result, which was followed by openSUSE 11.3 RC1, Arch Linux 2010.05, Fedora 13, and then PCLinuxOS 2010.1.

Lastly, with our test profile that looks at the time needed to unpack the Linux kernel .tar.bz2 file, openSUSE 11.3 RC1 ran the fastest followed by Arch Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora, and then PCLinuxOS.

Stay tuned for more tests and a greater number of Linux distributions being tested across a wider variety of hardware to get a better idea for the truly fastest Linux distribution. As you can see though, with an older Intel dual-core notebook at least in many tests the five Linux distributions performed close to the same speed, but depending upon your specific workload there may be benefits to using one Linux distribution over another.