Benchmarking Six Linux Distributions On The Framework Laptop 13 Pro

When looking at the Firefox performance on each of the distributions, Arch Linux itself was coming out with a slight lead and even better than the downstream, performance-optimized CachyOS. The Firefox version did vary based upon the distribution and timing of the tests being carried out.

In some of the Firefox browser benchmarks there were more meaningful performance differences among the Linux distributions tested.

Arch Linux led in all the conducted Firefox benchmarks except for a lone WebAssembly test where openSUSE Tumbleweed secured its first victory.

In the code compilation benchmarks, CachyOS began to show off its out-of-the-box performance.

In some tests, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS with the older GCC 15 came out with a narrow victory.

While in compiling Rust code, CachyOS was notably faster than the rest on this Framework Laptop 13 Pro.

Notably the better performance on CachyOS did not lead to any significant difference in CPU power consumption relative to Arch Linux. (No openSUSE power number due to simply forgetting to change the permissions on the PowerCap sysfs interface prior to running the benchmarks...)