Operating Systems Linux Reviews & Articles

There have been 1,001 Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles on Phoronix for operating systems. Separately, check out our news section for related product news.

As part of my ongoing benchmarking of the newly-released Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Linux distribution, today's focus is looking at the high-end Intel Core i9 14900K and AMD Ryzen 9 7950X desktops while comparing the performance across Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu 23.10, and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for dozens of workloads.

With the Framework 16 laptop one of the performance pieces I've been meaning to carry out has been seeing out Linux performs against Microsoft Windows 11 for this AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS powered modular/upgradeable laptop. Recently getting around to it in my benchmarking queue, I also compared the performance of Ubuntu 23.10 to the near final Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on this laptop up against a fully-updated Microsoft Windows 11 installation.

With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS due out later this month and the beta now available, I've been spending more time recently testing out the latest development state for this next Long Term Support installment of Ubuntu Linux. Similar to seeing some Ubuntu 24.04 performance gains on server class hardware both from Intel and AMD, testing on workstation hardware is also showing some gains over the current Ubuntu 23.10 release. Here are some comparison tests of the System76 Thelio Major with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X.

Intel 5th Gen Xeon Scalable processors already offer some nice generational improvements with improved AVX-512, faster DDR5 memory support, and also the new Optimized Power Mode option. But if wanting to maximize the performance capabilities even further, Intel's Clear Linux distribution continues working out well for maximizing the performance capabilities of Intel x86_64 hardware.

Following recent benchmarks looking at how the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release is looking on Intel Xeon Emerald Rapids as well as the performance gains for AMD EPYC 9004 series on Ubuntu 24.04, I next turned to the Ampere Altra ARM64 server processor for seeing what the performance is looking like there with this Long Term Support Linux distribution release due out in just over one month.

While Ubuntu 24.04 LTS won't be officially out until the back-half of April, here is an early look at how the Intel Xeon Scable "Emerald Rapids" performance is looking right now compared to Ubuntu 23.10 and the current Ubuntu 22.04 LTS series in a variety of benchmarks. As largely expected with the software updates, the new Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will help achieve greater server/HPC performance on recent Intel processors.

As part of Red Hat evaluating x86-64-v3 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, there is the CentOS ISA SIG that's been experimenting with ISA Optimized builds for the x86-64-v3 target. Via the CentOS ISA SIG there is the easy ability to transition an existing CentOS Stream 9 system/server over to using the x86_64-v3 optimized packages. In this article are some benchmarks on a modern Intel Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids" server showing the performance benefits when the entire Linux server OS is recompiled for x86_64-v3.

The Arch Linux based CachyOS Linux distribution aims to be a "blazingly fast and customizable Linux distribution" that is aggressive with its performance optimizations. CachyOS takes to leveraging compiler optimizations like Link-Time Optimizations (LTO), the BORE scheduler, and also offering package archives compiled for x86-64-v3 and x86-64-v4 in allowing the distribution's packages to be catered toward newer Intel and AMD processors. In this article is a comparison of CachyOS packages from their main archive, the x86-64-v3 optimized packages, and then the x86-64-v4 wares that can be beneficial for modern Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC / AMD Ryzen systems.

One of the exciting innovations currently being explored by Canonical ahead of the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release is an x86-64-v3 build of the OS / packages. The x86-64-v3 micro-architecture feature level makes AVX/AVX2 support assumed by default as well as other modern x86_64 ISA features typically common of AMD and Intel processors the past number of years (with exceptions). Canonical's determination around what to do with a possible complementary Ubuntu x86-64-v3 build/archive is still being determined but they had released an experimental Ubuntu 23.04 based build that I decided to take for some benchmarking.

Gigabyte (Giga Computing) recently sent over their G242-P36 HPC/AI Arm server platform built for Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max processors. This 2U server platform can accommodate up to four graphics cards or a mix of GPUs and DPUs if so desired, for maxing out the AI possibilities on Arm. I'll have up a full review on the G242-P36 soon while in this article is a look at the direction of the Ubuntu Server Arm performance from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to now with Ubuntu 23.10 ahead of the important Ubuntu 24.04 LTS cycle.

Given the interest in the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX Linux performance and the benchmarks of Ubuntu Linux vs. Windows 11 on this 96-core / 192-thread workstation processor, I've extended that comparison to now feature five Linux distributions up against Microsoft Windows on this HP Z6 G5 A workstation for greater perspective into the results.

Following last week's release of FreeBSD 14.0, I've begun testing out this major FreeBSD operating system update on a number of servers. What's clear so far is the performance being much improved with FreeBSD 14.0 on modern x86_64 Intel/AMD servers over FreeBSD 13.

With currently reviewing the HP Z6 G5 A workstation powered by the new 96-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX Zen 4 processor, one of the areas I was curious about was how well HP's tuned Microsoft Windows 11 compares to that of Linux. In this article is looking at how the Microsoft Windows 11 performance is out-of-the-box with the HP Z6 G5 A workstation as configured by HP versus a clean install of Ubuntu 23.10 with the Linux 6.5 kernel.

While the recently released Ubuntu 23.10 is bringing some performance improvements to Intel Xeon Max / Sapphire Rapids, Ubuntu Linux still isn't delivering the best possible out-of-the-box server performance. For that Intel continues to show the importance of software optimizations with the likes of their in-house Clear Linux platform as well as the likes of CentOS Stream having more sensible defaults. Here is a look at the Intel Xeon Max 9480 performance across Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 23.10, CentOS Stream 9, Fedora Server 39, and Clear Linux 40130.

While Ubuntu 23.10 isn't a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, for those curious about the evolution of Ubuntu Linux performance for Intel Xeon Max (Sapphire Rapids with HBM2e) on this new release just six months out from the all-important Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, here are some benchmarks showing the dual Intel Xeon Max 9480 performance on a Supermicro X13DEM platform while comparing Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu 23.04, and the brand new Ubuntu 23.10.

With Ubuntu 23.10 due for release on Thursday, I've been benchmarking a number of systems to look at the Ubuntu 23.10 performance against prior releases like Ubuntu 23.04 and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Besides the open-source graphics driver performance for Intel and AMD Radeon graphics always being a stand-out improvement, one area that is particularly exciting with Ubuntu 23.10 is for those with newer AMD processors where there are some nice performance gains to find with this new Ubuntu Linux release. Here are side-by-side benchmarks of an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X desktop along with an Intel Core i9 13900K desktop while testing Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS / Ubuntu 23.04 / Ubuntu 23.10.

As some complementary data points to yesterday's Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 AMD Linux laptop review, here is a look at how the out-of-the-box Microsoft Windows 11 Pro performance compares to that of the upcoming Ubuntu 23.10 on this AMD Ryzen 7 7840U "Phoenix" laptop.

Released late on Friday was the much anticipated SteamOS 3.5 preview for the Steam Deck with ongoing work around HDR and enhancing color management, VRR for external USB-C displays, various platform issues resolved, auto-mounting external storage, and more. With SteamOS 3.5 it also means some lower-level OS upgrades too like moving to the Linux 6.1 LTS kernel. For those wondering about the performance impact of going from SteamOS 3.4 stable to the SteamOS 3.5 preview release, here are some early benchmarks on the Steam Deck.

When carrying out the recent Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 23.04 benchmarks with the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D Zen 4 3D V-Cache desktop processor, I also took the opportunity with the Windows 11 install around to check in on the Windows 11 WSL2 performance. Here is a fresh look at Ubuntu with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2 on Windows 11) compared to the bare metal performance of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on the same hardware as well as the new Ubuntu 23.04.

Today marks the release of Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" and I've already been trying it out on a number of test systems. Up today are some initial Ubuntu 23.04 vs. 22.10 laptop benchmarks. If you were hoping though for this release to improve performance, unfortunately that doesn't appear to be the case with overall across a range of workloads Ubuntu 23.04 is similar to -- or in some areas trailing -- Ubuntu 22.10 on both Intel and AMD hardware.

For those wondering how the NVIDIA Linux gaming/GPU performance is looking relative to Windows 11, here are some benchmarks using the GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 graphics cards. Both NVIDIA RTX 40 graphics cards were tested on Windows 11 Pro and Ubuntu 23.04 while primarily focusing on games making use of Valve's Steam Play to reflect current Linux gaming trends as well as featuring some other cross-platform GPU accelerated software.

With the recent launch of the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, several Phoronix Premium supporters expressed interest in seeing how well the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance compared for this Zen 4 3D V-Cache processor. Given those requests, here are some CPU/system benchmarks looking at the performance of Windows 11 Professional against Ubuntu 23.04 in its near-final state on the 7800X3D desktop.

For those curious how the performance of Fedora 38 is looking ahead of its official release at the end of April, here are some preliminary benchmarks looking at the performance of this leading-edge Linux distribution as of the Fedora 38 Beta milestone last week. On both Intel Core i9 13900K "Raptor Lake" and AMD Ryzen 9 7950X "Zen 4" desktop systems, the Fedora 37 performance was compared to that of Fedora 38 Beta.

For those currently making use of Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) as the operating system for Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, the newly-released Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) is delivering some worthwhile speed-ups for maximizing your performance and value in their public cloud.

Bavarian Linux computer vendor TUXEDO Computers last year introduced TUXEDO OS as their tailored Linux distribution built atop Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. TUXEDO OS was delivering some performance improvements over stock (K)Ubuntu 22.04, ships with TUXEDO's configuration utilities by default, and other refinements to this desktop OS using the KDE Plasma desktop by default. The team in Augsburg is now preparing to ship TUXEDO OS 2 in the near future while this week they made available a public test snapshot.

As part of other ongoing performance tests of Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" testing, I was curious to see how the more well-tuned Linux distributions are performing with the flagship Xeon Platinum 8490H processors relative to the common Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release. Here are those benchmark numbers alongside AMD's flagship Genoa server platform with two EPYC 9654 processors.

With many Phoronix readers having been excited by the recent helloSystem v0.8 release as a FreeBSD-powered OS taking major design inspiration from Apple's macOS, I decided to run some benchmarks to see how this FreeBSD 13.1 based operating system was competing with a few different Linux distributions from an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X (Zen 4) desktop.

Arch Linux has five different officially supported kernel builds: stable, hardened, long-term. real-time, and Zen, but which of these is the fastest for desktop Arch Linux users? Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the performance out of these different kernel build options for Arch Linux and its derivatives.

With this weekend's release of helloSystem 0.8 as a macOS-inspired open-source desktop OS built atop FreeBSD, I decided to try out this new release on an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X desktop to see how it would go.

Over the holidays some fun benchmarking was to be had with the dual AMD EPYC 9654 "Genoa" processors providing a combined 192 cores / 384 threads and seeing how various modern Linux distributions were competing for this flagship 4th Gen EPYC server configuration. Up on the testing block was AlmaLinux 9.1, CentOS Stream 9, Clear Linux 37930, Debian 12 Testing, Fedora Server 37, Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS, Ubuntu 22.10, and Ubuntu 23.04 daily.