Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Performance

While the text and gears tests had better results with the newer version of Ubuntu, with the image-scaling test it was a different story where there was a drop in performance.

The OpenGL back-end with QGears2 had also regressed, similar to our early Ubuntu 9.10 development benchmarks from a few months back.

Overall, Ubuntu 9.10 provides some nice performance boosts to netbook users, as our results show from both the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 and Samsung NC10. The boot performance is also faster, but the key areas in Ubuntu 9.10 where there is improved performance is with disk-intensive tasks due to the EXT4 switch and other optimizations along with the graphics performance due to Intel's new Linux graphics stack maturing. Besides the performance changes, the KDE and GNOME desktops have been updated, there is now Ubuntu Moblin Remix, and many other features can be found in the Karmic Koala release to excite mobile Linux users.