16-Way Linux OS Performance Comparison

Building on our earlier 11-Way Linux/BSD Platform Comparison, starting a new week we're up to a 16-Way Linux operating system comparison. Added in now are results from PCLinuxOS, ROSA, the lightweight antiX distribution, and then the Gentoo-based Sabayon and Calculate Linux Desktop distributions.

Concluding our mass comparison of different Linux (and BSD) distributions from the Core i7 3960X "Sandy Bridge" Extreme Edition system are the results from 16 different operating systems. The new results from this same test system are:

PCLinuxOS 2013 - "Full Monty" and was released a few days ago as a distribution suiting beginners through advanced users.

Sabayon Linux 13.04 - One of the very interesting and worthwhile Gentoo-based Linux distributions to be popular on the desktop.

ROSA 2012 R1 LXDE - ROSA is a promising Russian Linux distribution that's gained attention in the time it's been around. The 2012 R1 LXDE release happened just a few days ago.

antiX 13.1 - This is a lightweight Debian-based Linux distribution designed for old hardware and was already talked about on Phoronix.

Calculate Linux 13.6 - The latest version of the Gentoo-based Calculate Linux Desktop was just released. Calculate Linux is one of my personal favorite Gentoo Linux distributions and it's very easy-to-use and at least provides some sane defaults for testing the rolling-release platform.

All of this testing happened from the same Intel Core i7 3960X EE system with 8GB of RAM, OCZ Vertex SSD, and Radeon HD 4650 graphics. The other distributions already part of this comparison include Debian GNU/kFreeBSD 7.0, Debian GNU/Linux 7.0, Manjaro 0.8.5, openSUSE 12.3, Mageia 3, Linux Mint 15, Ubuntu 13.04, Fedora 18, DragonFlyBSD 3.4.1, and PC-BSD 9.1.

Every benchmark used was run in a fully automated and reproducible fashion using the open-source and cross-platform Phoronix Test Suite automated benchmarking software.