Ubuntu 13.10 vs. Fedora 20 Benchmarks

To complement the many Ubuntu 13.10 Linux benchmarks I have published on Phoronix since the "Saucy Salamander" premiere in October, I've started several Fedora 20 benchmarks since December. So far I've shared Fedora 19 vs. Fedora 20 benchmarks and Wayland OpenGL benchmarks, besides using Fedora 20 as the base platform for unrelated tests, while today are some Ubuntu 13.10 vs. Fedora 20 performance benchmarks.

The "out of the box" Ubuntu 13.10 performance from October with its stock package-set is being compared to the near-final version of the Fedora 20 packages as of the time of testing in mid-December (due to travels and being out of the office the last two weeks of December through mid-January). Both Fedora 20 and Ubuntu 13.10 were in their default states and the performance was tested on two systems.

First, both Fedora 20 and Ubuntu 13.10 are shipping with the Linux 3.11 kernel while for F20 there is a zero-day update available to Linux 3.12. Ubuntu 13.10 uses Unity 7.1.2 + Compiz by default for its desktop while Fedora 20 has GNOME Shell 3.10.2.1. Both distributions are using as well X.Org Server 1.14.x and Mesa 9.2.x and the GCC 4.8.2 compiler. The key package versions are very close between Ubuntu 13.10 "Saucy Salamander" and Fedora 20 "Heisenbug" so this time around the performance results should be interesting.

One of the test systems used was built around a Core i5 3470 "Ivy Bridge" system with HD Graphics 2500 while the other system was the Lini PC with Intel Pentium G3220 "Haswell" processor and its HD Graphics. All benchmarks for this quick and straightforward Ubuntu vs. Fedora Linux comparison was handled via the Phoronix Test Suite software.