Clear Linux Beats MacOS in MacBook Pro Benchmark Tests (phoronix.com)

To celebrate its 14th birthday, Phoronix.com used a 15-inch MacBook Pro to run system benchmarking tests on the following operating systems:

- Windows 10 Pro

- The latest macOS 10.13 High Sierra

- Windows 10 Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) using Ubuntu 18.04

- Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with the Linux 4.15 kernel, GCC 7.3.0, and an EXT4 file-system.

- Clear Linux 22780 with the Linux 4.16 kernel, GCC 8.1.1, and EXT4.

- Fedora Workstation 28 with updates is the Linux 4.16 kernel, GCC 8.1.1, and EXT4.

- OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with the Linux 4.16 kernel, GCC 7.3.1, and default file-system configuration of Btrfs root file-system with XFS home partition.

The results? When it came to outright wins and losses, Clear Linux 22780 was the front-runner 59% of the time followed by macOS 10.13.4 finishing first 21% of the time and then Fedora Workstation 28 with winning 10% of the time.

For losses, to little surprise considering the I/O overhead, Windows 10 was in last place 38% of the time followed by Ubuntu 18.04 being surprisingly the slowest Linux distribution 30% of the time on this 2016 MacBook Pro.
The article also reminds readers that "For those looking for a Linux laptop, there are plenty of better options..."

Comments

Battery life?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is the benchmark for battery life? One of the strengths of the MacBook Pro and macOS is the power management and long batter life. I would be surprised if Linux was as good.

Windows defender hurts

[LostMyBeaver]

Windows Defender is tuned for Windows kernel integration and performs well there. Although to be honest, recent builds of defender have been a hog as I'm assuming it's being a bit more aggressive at sandboxing for CPU prediction bugs.

That said, Windows defender doesn't seem to understand the WSL stuff at all, however it's using the entire system resources to real-time monitor disk reads and writes.

When running without Windows Defender real-time monitoring enabled, it seems to increase performance of the VM to near bare-metal speeds.

Gentoo

[Bert64]

As i understand it, clear linux is a distribution optimized for modern hardware, with all packages compiled with newer compilers and a lot of legacy cruft disabled etc...
So it would be interesting to see how it compares to gentoo, which is also usually configured in that way.

It's also interesting how badly ubuntu fares in many of these benchmarks, despite being only a small step behind clear linux in terms of kernel/gcc versions in use.

Re: Let's not get silly, shall we?

[Qbertino]

Not a fanboy at all. No, not at all.

My last Mac is a 13" MBAir from 2010. I'm about to sell it.

My main OS is x86 Linux (Xubuntu on my large ThinkPad and Manjaro i3 on my small one).

And while I really like Apple and appreciate some of the very neat stuff they do and I also like the fact that there is some very neat software available on mac, I am not a fanboy. Right now I find them way too expensive and apparently their new keyboards - allthough I really liked typing on them at the Apple store - need a redo to not fail because of dust. Not getting one of those. To risky at that pricerange.

When their current pricerange drops 400 euros across the board, then I might consider them again on my next hardware buying round. Which, as of now, is at least 4 years out.