Initial Benchmarks Of OpenSUSE Leap 15 vs. Leap 42.3 vs. Tumbleweed

Last Friday the openSUSE community released openSUSE Leap 15 as their newest stable release of openSUSE built from the same sources as SUSE Linux Enterprise 15. Back when this non-rolling-release openSUSE update entered beta at the start of the year we rolled out some preliminary test figures while for your viewing pleasure today are some initial benchmarks with openSUSE Leap 15.0 compared to the former Leap 42.3 and the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed too.

Since last week I have been trying out openSUSE Leap 15 on a few test systems and the experience has been pleasant. OpenSUSE Leap 15 features new enterprise features, support for atomic updates powered by Kubic, KDE Plasma 5.12 LTS as the default desktop environment, and the GNOME desktop version is using Wayland by default. More general details on openSUSE Leap 15.0 are available from openSUSE.org.

Going from openSUSE Leap 42.3 to Leap 15 is quite a big jump. OpenSUSE Leap 42.3 shipped with Linux 4.4 that is now using Linux 4.12 with Leap 15.0, KDE Plasma 5.8.7 to KDE Plasma 5.12.5, X.Org Server 1.18.3 to X.Org Server 1.19.6, Mesa 17.0.5 to Mesa 18.0.2, and the GCC 4.8.5 code compiler to GCC 7.3.1. On the Python side is also the move from Python 3.4.6 to Python 3.6.5 while Py2 support is from 2.7.13 to 2.7.15. From the driver side, one change worth noting besides the Mesa upgrade is that Nouveau driver support is enabled for Leap 15.0 (albeit a warning at installation time about the use of Nouveau) where as with Leap 42.3 the Nouveau support was disabled by default. The default file-system configuration remains with Btrfs for the root file-system and XFS for the home partition.

The openSUSE Leap 15.0 components are roughly similar to what's available with openSUSE Tumbleweed, except notably the rolling-release distribution being on Linux 4.16 and also Mesa 18.1.

For today's testing are just results from openSUSE Leap 42.3, 15.0, and the latest Tumbleweed from a single system. That high-end desktop/workstation system featured an Intel Core i9 7980XE with 18 cores / 36 threads, ASUS PRIME X299-A motherboard, 16GB DDR4, and a 256GB Intel SSDPEKKW256G8 760p solid-state drive.

In the coming days will be a wider Linux distribution comparison featuring these openSUSE releases as well as a variety of other Linux distributions as well as Windows WSL and Windows 10 Pro. Further out will be a wider openSUSE Leap 15 comparison on a variety of different hardware platforms.

All of these benchmarks were carried out via the Phoronix Test Suite as we looked at the out-of-the-box/default Linux performance on each of these cleanly-installed openSUSE releases.