6-Way Winter 2014 Linux Distribution Comparison

With this week's launch of Fedora 21, here's a performance comparison of the new Fedora Linux release compared to the Arch-based Antergos rolling-release distribution, Debian GNU/Linux Jessie, openSUSE Tumbleweed, CentOS Linux 7, and Ubuntu 14.10.

These six Linux distributions were all tested with the same hardware that came down to an MSI X99S SLI PLUS motherboard with Intel Xeon E5-2687W v3 ten-core processor plus Hyper Threading. The system also had 16GB of quad-channel DDR4 memory, 80GB Intel SSD, and Radeon HD 7850 graphics.

All six Linux distributions were tested with their default installation settings and packages.

The only major problem that came up to report is that when booting the CentOS 7 installer the Radeon HD 7850 graphics attached to a 2560x1440 panel failed to mode-set properly and would not produce a working screen. As a result, the system had to be booted with "nomodeset" to get a working display albeit no hardware acceleration.

All six Linux distributions were benchmarked with the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software.