The Most Popular Linux Stories Of 2013

With 2013 ending, here's the most popular Linux, open-source, and hardware stories covered in 2013 on Phoronix. Enjoy and look forward to many more great and exclusive Linux articles on Phoronix in 2014.

Published on Phoronix in 2013 were 273 full-length, featured articles and 2,886 news stories; almost one multi-page article per day and an average of almost eight news stories each and every day! The day isn't even over yet and I still have a couple more articles to go. All but a handful of the articles on Phoronix each year continue to be written by your's truly with my devotion to the site and the Phoronix Test Suite & Co being a 365-day-per-year focus and routinely investing 80+ hour work weeks. If you appreciate all of the Phoronix articles this year, including many exclusives, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium or making a PayPal tip this holiday season. You can also follow Phoronix via Facebook and Twitter with @Phoronix and @MichaelLarabel.

Let's begin with a look at the 12 most popular full-length articles and reviews this year on Phoronix.

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland
With the continued speculation and FUD about the future of Wayland at a time when Canonical is investing heavily into their own Mir Display Server alternative, Eric Griffith with input from Daniel Stone have written an article for Phoronix where they lay out all the facts. The "Wayland Situation" is explained with first going over the failings of X, the fixings of Wayland, common misconceptions about X and Wayland, and then a few other advantages to Wayland. For anyone interested in X/Wayland or the Linux desktop at a technical level, it's an article certainly worth reading!

Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS vs. Ubuntu 13.04 Benchmarks
For those that may be currently running Ubuntu 12.04.2 as the latest Ubuntu Linux Long-Term Support release but are considering upgrading to Ubuntu 13.04 for better performance, here are benchmarks comparing the two Ubuntu Linux releases when tested on an Apple MacBook Pro and Lenovo ThinkPad. Overall, there's a few areas where the new Ubuntu Linux release delivers worthwhile performance improvements over the year-old Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

SteamOS vs. Windows 8.1 NVIDIA Performance
For those NVIDIA gaming customers running Microsoft Windows 8.1 that have been thinking about giving Valve's SteamOS Linux-based gaming platform a try, here are some early benchmarks of the SteamOS 1.0 beta that compare the performance to Microsoft Windows 8.1 Pro x64 on multiple NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

Btrfs vs. EXT4 vs. XFS vs. F2FS On Linux 3.10
Building upon our F2FS file-system benchmarks from earlier in this week is a large comparison of four of the leading Linux file-systems at the moment: Btrfs, EXT4, XFS, and F2FS. With the four Linux kernel file-systems, each was benchmarked on the Linux 3.8, 3.9, and 3.10-rc1 kernels. The results from this large file-system comparison when backed by a solid-state drive are now published on Phoronix.

15-Way Open vs. Closed Source NVIDIA/AMD Linux GPU Comparison
Combining the work of the recent Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Linux testing and Radeon Gallium3D vs. AMD Catalyst testing articles, here is a 15-way comparison of both the open-source and closed-source AMD and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers when testing a mixture of NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards on Ubuntu Linux 13.04.

Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux
This past weekend I shared the first experiences of running Intel's new Haswell CPU on Linux. While Intel Haswell is a beast and brings many new features and innovations to the new Core CPUs succeeding Ivy Bridge, there were a few shortcomings with the initial Linux support. It still appears that the Core i7 4770K is still being finicky at times for both the processor and graphics, but in this article are the first benchmarks. Up today are benchmarks of the Intel Core i7 4770K when running Ubuntu 13.04 with the Linux 3.10 kernel.

Intel Haswell Linux Virtualization: KVM vs. Xen vs. VirtualBox
The latest chapter to our lengthy Intel Haswell on Linux saga is virtualization benchmarks. From Fedora 19 with the very latest software components for Linux virtualization, the performance of KVM, Xen, and VirtualBox were benchmarked from the Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" CPU.

Here's Why Radeon Graphics Are Faster On Linux 3.12
Yesterday I published benchmarks showing the AMD Radeon graphics being much faster on Linux 3.12. Ten graphics cards were benchmarked and many of them were showing rather remarkable OpenGL frame-rate performance improvements when moving from the Linux 3.11 to Linux 3.12 Git kernel. This large comparison came after benchmarks I did this weekend on a single Radeon HD graphics card showed the Linux 3.12 kernel delivering the best performance of any recent kernel release. The only thing was, this AMD Radeon performance improvement baffled the upstream developers. The AMD developers were taken off-guard and didn't have an explanation why the Linux 3.12 kernel performance is faster... Now thanks to automated testing and bisecting by the Phoronix Test Suite, I have an answer.

The First NVIDIA GeForce Benchmarks On The SteamOS Beta
A comprehensive performance comparison is underway at Phoronix that pits SteamOS against other desktop Linux distributions, but for those anxious to see some performance numbers, here are benchmarks done so far this weekend from seven NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on the public SteamOS 1.0 Beta operating system. In this article are early benchmarks from seven NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards running Valve's Debian Linux based SteamOS on an Intel Haswell system.

Ubuntu 13.04 Linux Can Outperform Apple OS X 10.8.3
In the road to the release of Ubuntu 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" later this month will be a number of articles benchmarking this major Linux distribution update against its friends and competitors. To complement the Ubuntu 13.04 benchmarks already delivered, including Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows 8 benchmarks, here are tests of Apple's OS X 10.8.3 operating system on a MacBook Pro compared to Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu 12.10, and the latest Ubuntu 13.04 (post Beta 2) state. Ubuntu 13.04 is generally competitive with OS X 10.8 and in some new areas is now beating out Apple's operating system on their own hardware.

32-bit vs. 64-bit Ubuntu 13.04 Linux Performance
While nearly all modern Intel/AMD x86 hardware is 64-bit capable, among novice Linux users the question commonly is whether to install the 32-bit or 64-bit version of a given distribution. We have previously delivered benchmarks showing Ubuntu 32-bit vs. 64-bit performance while in this article is an updated look in seeing how the 32-bit versus 64-bit binary performance compares when running Ubuntu 13.04 with the Linux 3.8 kernel.

Ubuntu Linux Gaming Performance Mostly On Par With Windows 8.1
Given the recent release of Microsoft Windows 8.1, at Phoronix we took 13 different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards and compared the performance between Ubuntu Linux and Windows 8.1 with the same hardware and set of OpenGL games/benchmarks. For AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards with their official drivers, the performance is largely similar between the competing desktop operating systems but there are some performance exceptions.