Ubuntu vs. Fedora vs. openSUSE With An Intel Broadwell Ultrabook

The latest Linux benchmarks I have to share from the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon with Intel Broadwell processor are some openSUSE Tumbleweed tests with the results compared to Fedora 21 and Ubuntu 14.10/15.04.

One of the requested test distributions for the third-generation X1 Carbon from Phoronix readers was to see how this new, high-end ultrabook would play with openSUSE. The short story is that with openSUSE Tumblewed the level of support matched that of Fedora 21 and Ubuntu 14.10/15.04 -- it's not much of a surprise really given that Tumbleweed is using the Linux 3.18 kernel, Mesa 10.4.2, etc.

Anyhow, for those that requested it, in this article are benchmark results comparing Ubuntu 14.10 vs. Ubuntu 15.04 daily vs. Fedora 21 vs. openSUSE Tumbleweed. While the package versions aren't too different between the three distinct operating systems, the testing was done with the OS defaults. One notable default difference is openSUSE using Btrfs for its root file-system and XFS for the home filesystem while Fedora/Ubuntu still use EXT4 as the default. Another difference is Fedora and openSUSE use the CFQ I/O scheduler while Ubuntu defaulted to Deadline on this system.

The same X1 Carbon with Core i7 5600U Broadwell CPU with HD Graphics 5500, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB Samsung SSD were used during testing. All of the Linux benchmarking was controlled by the open-source, fully-automated Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.