
Ubuntu 18.04 vs. 20.04 LTS Performance Preview - arnaudsm
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=xeonr-ubu1804-2004&num=9
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user5994461
No explanation why Ubuntu is 10-30% faster in most of the benchmarks? That's a
lot.

Maybe something to do with better spectre/meltdown mitigations in the newer
kernel?

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simfoo
What's a little confusing is that they are not testing the same versions of
the software but (presumably) the distro default version. So these benchmarks
are not useful to test kernel and lower level performance differences.

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pmontra
Their goal was testing two versions of Ubuntu (as per the title), that
includes every difference between them. Example: Ubuntu 18.04 upgrades Linux
up to version 5.3, Ubuntu 20.04 comes with 5.4. There are several other
upgrades. They are listed in the first page of the post.

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jmunsch
That's awesome. Also very cool to see u2f/fido support for ssh.

[https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FocalFossa/ReleaseNotes](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FocalFossa/ReleaseNotes)

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AdamGibbins
Does it only support ecdsa? Surprised they don't use ed25519 in their example.

Edit: nope, seems ed25519 supported too
[https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/en/man1/ssh-
keyge...](https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/en/man1/ssh-
keygen.1.html) although internet seems to suggest hardware support is far more
limited. Tried generating one on MacOS and indeed my Yubikey seems
unsupported.

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jlgaddis
Unfortunately, you can't use Ed25519 keys unless you have the latest/newest
model(s) of Yubikey and that Yubikey came with at least a specific firmware
version (5.2.3, IIRC).

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andy_ppp
Has anyone benchmarked this against
[https://clearlinux.org/](https://clearlinux.org/) ?

EDIT 1: To answer my own question:
[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu20...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu2004-clear-
intelamd&num=1)

With a pre release Ubuntu 20.04 Clear Linux is slightly faster.

EDIT 2: tldr; AMD 8% faster in Clear Linux, Intel 14% faster. AMD is miles
faster (20%) than Intel in almost everything on Linux.

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tiffanyh
ClearLinux is the dark horse doing amazing things that the HN community seems
to shun.

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bpizzi
I, for one, plead guilty of shunning here.

The homepage states that the desktop flavor is aimed at developers ('Clear
Linux OS offers options that are tailored specifically for the developers’
production'), then searching for well known tiling WM (xmonad, i3) on the
packages page yields not result. Not sure what other big things are left apart
too. No thanks.

~~~
SahAssar
They apparently have sway if you are willing to jump ship to wayland.

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hedora
The geometric mean across the tests is 25% faster. That shouldn’t happen. Was
there something wrong with 18.04?

~~~
reddotX
gnome

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bdamm
Some of the specific performance enhancements are quite remarkable. Almost
double the performance with PHP? Wow, that's quite the optimization for a
long-lived (legacy?) technology. And the improvements in ML number crunching
are in some cases just as impressive. Remarkable work within the community to
wring more performance.

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oweiler
How feasible would it be to run a current Ubuntu on an older i5 with 4GB of
RAM?

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skrtskrt
I just tried out both Ubuntu (gnome) and Mint (Cinnamon) on a 2015 MacBook
Air, dual core i5 with 4 GB RAM. Mint was noticeably snappier - I really
didn't enjoy Ubuntu, but a lighter desktop will probably make the difference.

Another comment talked about the RPi 4's capabilities, but mine had multi-
second input lag running a fresh install of Ubuntu/Gnome on a single 4k
screen.

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dhimes
The difference is astounding in virtualbox. Ubuntu Gnome is nearly unusable-
mint works pretty well. Using i3 for Ubuntu helps quite a bit.

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chrismorgan
With i3 (no GNOME elements at all, and precious little desktop environment
stuff), I think my old 1920×1080 laptop tended to idle at using around 60MB of
RAM. With 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, I never set up swap, and over the course
of four years or so this only bit me about three times, and I spent a lot of
that time running two substantial Firefox sessions, a 2GB RAM VirtualBox VM
and a handful of other things like urxvt, Inkscape and Chrome all at once.

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dhimes
What I love about linux is that we have the option of doing this. My main
machine in my office is from 2009- 4GB RAM, linux mint and fluxbox. It's time
to upgrade as I've gotten away a bit from slinging 1s and 0s but damn- still
does a job for that.

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bzb3
Does this apply to computers that do not have Intel Xeon Scalable processors?
Because if not, that's a glaring omission from the title

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Raphaellll
This is again deep linked to a specific test page.

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michaelcampbell
Yes, specifically the page with the overview.

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_eht
They probably just stopped including Amazon referral malware.

