linux Ubuntu vs. Pop!_OS vs. Manjaro vs. Fedora | Gnome Speed Test

[BrandonHopkins]

We will be running a speed test on various distros running Gnome. Finding the best preforming Linux distribution is a difficult thing to do. There are so many factors when trying to figure this out. The most important variable is what desktop environment you want to run. Gnome is one of the most popular desktop environments today as it comes pre-installed on many Linux distributions. We will run some general speed tests and benchmarking to see if there are any performance differences to consider.

We will be comparing the performance of Ubuntu 20.10, Pop!_OS 20.04, Manjaro 20.1.1, and Fedora 32. Later, we will add benchmarking for Fedora 33 and Pop!_OS with an updated Kernel.

 

Benchmark Devices:

• ThinkPad: Lenovo ThinkPad T450, i5-5300U, 8gb DDR3, 256gb SSD
• Desktop: Asus x570-p, Ryzen 7 3700x, 32gb DDR4, 256gb SSD, GTX 1650

General Speed Testing

All of these general speed tests were done on the ThinkPad. Overall all systems were really close when it comes to speed, but there were noticeable advantages with both Pop!_OS and Manjaro.

	Ubuntu	Pop!_OS	Manjaro	Fedora
Live Disk Boot	00:41;51	00:25;28	00:43;26	00:52;45
Installation	04:08;50	03:00;14	01:53;21	05:26;41
Regular Boot	00:27;22	0:18;44	00:25;15	00:31;19
File Transfer Test	1:33;50	01:37;31	01:33;15	01:35;01

Gnome Disks Benchmarking

Gnome Disks has a nice benchmarking tool built into the application. Our tests were set with 100 samples with an average sample size of 100mb. Below, the results are listed as the average read rate followed by the average access time in milliseconds. (mb/msec)

	Ubuntu	Pop!_OS	Manjaro	Fedora
Desktop	570/.04	570/.03	558/.03	570/.04
Thinkpad	565/.04	563/.05	563/.05	562/.05

Kdenlive Render Test

For the Kdenlive render tests, I ran a render of the same footage on both systems. On the ThinkPad I rendered out 10 seconds and on the desktop I rendered out 5 minutes. Both renders where done as a .mp4 with 50 percent quality output.

	Ubuntu	Pop!_OS	Manjaro	Fedora
Desktop (5m)	1:46;00	1:45;00	1:45;00	1:58;00
Thinkpad (10s)	2:39;00	2:46;00	1:22;00	2:47;00

Version of Kdenlive officially available on each distribution on 10/03/2020

glmark2 OpenGL Benchmarking

glmark2 is a simple OpenGL graphics benchmarking tool. It has a variety of “scenes” it renders in order to give you a broad ball-park idea of your graphics performance. This test is better for seeing the difference in older computers as it doesn’t place much stress on modern graphics cards.

	Ubuntu	Pop!_OS	Manjaro	Fedora
Desktop	8885	n/a	9896	9165
Thinkpad	846	860	933	881

2020.04-1.fc33

Geekbench5 Benchmarking

Geekbench is a complete benchmarking tool that allows us to score our multi-core and single core CPU performance. (single/multi)

	Ubuntu	Pop!_OS	Manjaro	Fedora
Desktop	1337/8826	1348/8790	1345/8728	1356/8850
Thinkpad	655/925	781/1158	781/1559	776/1538

Geekbench 5.2.4

Across the board there were not any major differences in how these distributions preformed, but Fedora overall did see better single core and multi-core performance on better hardware. There is a reason Fedora is the go-to choice for developers and industry.

Octance 2.0 Java Benchmarking

	Ubuntu	Pop!_OS	Manjaro	Fedora
Desktop	36655	36614	37646	36273
Thinkpad	20104	20684	20711	19567

Octane stopped development in 2017

Basemark Benchmarking

	Ubuntu	Pop!_OS	Manjaro	Fedora
Desktop	869.18	775.95	857.75	792.14
Thinkpad	237.6	227.16	243.34	225.77

[eeeee1]

interesting