From phoronix.com
With many Linux distributions receiving major updates in recent weeks and months we have carried out a five-way Linux distribution comparison of openSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, PCLinuxOS, and Arch Linux. We have quite a number of tests comparing the 32-bit performance of these popular Linux distributions on older PC hardware.
Our test system was a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 notebook with an Intel Core Duo T2400 (1.83GHz dual-core) CPU, 1GB of system memory, an 80GB Hitachi HTS541080G9SA00 SATA HDD, and ATI Radeon Mobility X1400 graphics. Below are some of the key software components for the different distributions that were tested in this article.
openSUSE 11.3 RC1:
OS: SUSE LINUX 11.3, Kernel: 2.6.34-9-default (i686), Desktop: KDE 4.4.3, Display Server: X.Org Server 1.8.0, Display Driver: radeon 6.13.0, OpenGL: 1.5 Mesa 7.8.1, Compiler: GCC 4.5, File-System: ext4
Ubuntu 10.04:
OS: Ubuntu 10.04, Kernel: 2.6.32-21-generic (i686), Desktop: GNOME 2.30.0, Display Server: X.Org Server 1.7.6, Display Driver: radeon 6.13.0, Compiler: GCC 4.4.3, File-System: ext4
Fedora 13:
OS: Fedora release 13 (Goddard), Kernel: 2.6.33.3-85.fc13.i686.PAE (i686), Desktop: GNOME 2.30.0, Display Server: X.Org Server 1.8.0, Display Driver: radeon 6.13.0, OpenGL: 1.5 Mesa 7.8.1, Compiler: GCC 4.4.4, File-System: ext4
PCLinuxOS 2010.1:
OS: PCLinuxOS release 2010 (PCLinuxOS) for i586, Kernel: 2.6.32.12-pclos1.bfs (i686), Desktop: KDE 4.4.3, Display Server: X.Org Server 1.6.5, Display Driver: radeon 6.12.4, OpenGL: 1.4 Mesa 7.5.2, Compiler: GCC 4.4.1, File-System: ext4
Arch Linux 2010.5:
OS: Linux, Kernel: 2.6.33-ARCH (i686), Desktop: KDE 4.4.4, Compiler: GCC 4.5.0, File-System: ext4
Tests included World of Padman, OpenArena, Bullet Physics, C-Ray, TTSIOD 3D Renderer, LAME MP3 encoding, FFmpeg, x264, Himeno, GraphicsMagick, LZMA compression, 7-Zip compression, PostMark, and Unpack-Linux. All testing was done through the Phoronix Test Suite
tl;dr…
As you can see though, with an older Intel dual-core notebook at least in many tests the five Linux distributions performed close to the same speed, but depending upon your specific workload there may be benefits to using one Linux distribution over another.
