With both [1]Ubuntu 25.04 and [2]Fedora 42 releasing this month you may be curious how these two Linux distributions are competing for performance. Well, it's a very tight race for common Intel/AMD x86_64 hardware. In this article are some benchmarks looking at clean installs of Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora Workstation 42 on AMD Strix Point.

[3]

From what I've been seeing so far in testing near-final builds of Fedora Workstation 42 and Ubuntu 25.04, it's a very tight race on common Intel/AMD platforms. Both of these Linux distributions are currently on the Linux 6.14 kernel. Under the past methodology by Canonical, Ubuntu 25.04 would have been on Linux 6.13 but under their modern commitment to be using the latest upstream kernel version as of release time, they are on Linux 6.14 for Ubuntu 25.04. Linux 6.14 was just recently released and now with jumping to that kernel version they are better aligned with Fedora 42 at release time. Both Linux distributions are also shipping GNOME 48 on Wayland as their default desktop version. There are also other common components like the Mesa 25.0 graphics drivers, Python 3.13, OpenJDK 21, and alignment on other key package versions.

[4]

One key difference that's important especially from a performance perspective is the default compiler. Ubuntu 25.04 like the prior Ubuntu 24.10 is still using the GCC 14.2 stable compiler. Fedora in their leading-edge focus is already using GCC 15.0.1, with GCC 15.1 stable not even being out yet. As usual for their early releases of new calendar years, the Fedora release typically falls within a few weeks of the annual major GNU Compiler Collection releases. As such Fedora 42 to no surprise is shipping GCC 15 even though it hasn't had a stable release yet. The newer GCC release pays off for new language features, new CPU targets, new compiler optimizations, etc.

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When talking distribution defaults, Fedora Workstation 42 remains on the Btrfs file-system while Ubuntu 25.04 is sticking to the EXT4 file-system out-of-the-box.

For this initial benchmark comparison of Fedora Workstation 42 and Ubuntu 25.04, the [6]Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 with AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 "Strix Point" was used for benchmarking. This is an 8-core AMD Zen 5 laptop with integrated Radeon 880M (RDNA 3.5) graphics, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB Kioxia PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. The same laptop was (obviously) used for these fresh installs of Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora Workstation 42 for an initial look at how these Q2'2025 Linux distributions are competing.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Ubuntu+25.04

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Fedora+42

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=fedora-42-ubuntu-2504-zen5&image=ubuntu2504_fedora42_amd_1_lrg

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=fedora-42-ubuntu-2504-zen5&image=ubuntu2504_fedora42_amd_2_lrg

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=fedora-42-ubuntu-2504-zen5&image=ubuntu2504_fedora42_amd_3_lrg

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-ai-7-360-thinkpad-t14s-gen6