Ubuntu 7.04 to 8.10 Benchmarks: Is Ubuntu Getting Slower?

With the release of Ubuntu 8.10 coming out later this week we decided to use this opportunity to explore how the performance of this desktop Linux operating system has evolved over the past few releases. We performed clean installations of Ubuntu 7.04, Ubuntu 7.10, Ubuntu 8.04, and Ubuntu 8.10 on a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 notebook and used the Phoronix Test Suite to run 35 tests on each release that covered nine different areas of the system. After spending well more than 100 hours running these tests, the results are now available and our findings may very well surprise you.

For our testing we had used the final Intel 32-bit releases of the four most recent Ubuntu releases except for Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex” where we used the Intrepid release candidate. We had installed each of these releases with the same set of options and identical configurations during testing. A clean installation of Ubuntu was done each time over the entire hard disk drive. Once each distribution was installed we simply setup the proprietary ATI graphics driver and then proceeded to install our selected tests using the Phoronix Test Suite. Following that (and after a reboot of course), we then carried out our testing. We had used Phoronix Test Suite 1.4.0 Beta 1 “Orkdal” and all of their settings and test parameters were left at their defaults.
Read more and look test results at Phoronix