Trying Out openSUSE Leap 15.0 Beta, Comparison Linux Benchmarks

With this morning's debut of the openSUSE Leap 15.0 public beta that is derived from the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 source code, I was curious to check it out and also run some benchmarks. For seeing how the current beta performance is stacking up I ran some benchmarks against openSUSE Leap 42.3, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Clear Linux, and a daily snapshot of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

OpenSUSE Leap 15 / SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 is expected to ship by this summer. This first public beta of openSUSE Leap 15.0 Beta features the optional KDE Plasma 5.12 near-final desktop components, RPM 4.14, plans to use the Linux 4.14 LTS kernel (although as of writing is on Linux 4.12), and many other updated packages compared to what shipped in Leap 42.3. Firefox remains the default web browser.

If you are planning on using openSUSE Leap 15 as a desktop, the components are very recent and even include LibreOffice 6.0.

Dragon Player is the default multimedia application on Leap 15.0. K3b is also still around if you need to burn any CD/DVDs....

The YaST installation experience is about the same as with openSUSE Leap 42.3. By default, openSUSE Leap continues to use Btrfs for the root file-system and XFS for the home partition.

Some other components worth pointing out for this first beta release of openSUSE Leap 15.0 include Linux 4.12.14, X.Org Server 1.19.5, and GCC 7.2.1. The default kernel build at this time was providing Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) but not Retpoline coverage for Spectre.

The Intel Core i9 7980XE test system was used for some initial benchmarks with its ASUS PRIME X299-A motherboard, 4 x 4GB DDR4-3200 memory, Radeon R9 Fury graphics card, and 256GB Intel 760p NVMe SSD for storage. I did a fresh install of openSUSE Leap 15.0 Beta, openSUSE Leap 42.3, openSUSE Tumbleweed 20180129, Ubuntu 18.04 20180131 daily, and Clear Linux 20610. Each Linux distribution was tested out-of-the-box for representing the vendor defaults and what users will find upon doing a standard desktop Linux install.

All of these benchmarks were automated via the Phoronix Test Suite. As the openSUSE Leap 15.0 / SLES 15 release nears in the months ahead, you can expect to find more benchmarks and comparisons on other hardware on Phoronix. With this 15.0 beta being less than one day old, these are just some preliminary benchmarks for those curious.