Benchmarking Six Linux Distributions On The Framework Laptop 13 Pro
With the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro now shipping powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) and a brand new hardware design, I have spent the past week testing out various Linux distributions on this very nice high-end laptop. All of the modern Linux distributions tested have been playing nicely with this new Panther Lake laptop. Of course, beyond testing for compatibility I also took the opportunity to run some Linux distribution performance benchmarks for this laptop powered by the flagship Core Ultra X9 388H.
The Framework Laptop 13 Pro review unit as a reminder was configured with the 16-core Intel Core Ultra X9 388H Panther Lake SoC with integrated Arc B390 graphics, 64GB of LPDDR5-7467 MT/s memory, the 2TB WD_BLACK SN7100 NVMe SSD, and 2880 x 1920 display panel. It's a wonderful piece of hardware albeit pricey in today's memory/storage-inflated environment.
The Linux distributions tested on the Framework Laptop 13 Pro were Arch Linux, CachyOS, Fedora Workstation 44, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, and also a daily snapshot of Ubuntu 26.10 in its current development form. All of these Linux distributions installed nicely out-of-the-box on the Framework Laptop 13 Pro. All laptops were tested at their defaults besides setting the "performance" platform profile for each of them.
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS uses Linux 7.0 by default while Fedora, openSUSE, Arch Linux, and CachyOS were all on Linux 7.1 stable. Those non-Ubuntu distributions were also using GCC 16 while Ubuntu is still on GCC 15, among other default package differences. Ubuntu 26.10 in its current daily state is still on Linux 7.0 but the plans ahead of the October release are for it to be on Linux 7.2. GCC 16 is also expected for Ubuntu 26.10 but hasn't yet been made the default.
In addition to looking at the performance on each of these Linux distributions, the SoC power consumption via the PowerCap/RAPL sysfs interface was also monitored. Thanks to Framework Computer for providing the Framework Laptop 13 Pro review sample for making this Linux testing possible.