CachyOS, Clear Linux & Debian 13 Deliver The Best Performance On Framework Laptop 13 With AMD Strix Point

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 15 May 2025 at 07:04 AM EDT. Page 9 of 9. 33 Comments.

Out of more than 100 benchmarks carried out on the Framework Laptop 13 powered by the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, racking up the most first place finishes was... Debian Testing, for what will become Debian 13.0 later in the year. Debian 13 Testing was in first place for about half the runs. CachyOS meanwhile was in first place 20% of the time and Clear Linux with first place finishes 15% of the time.

But when taking the geometric mean of all the benchmarks that successfully ran on all of the tested Linux distributions, Intel's Clear Linux ended up being the top-performer. Clear Linux was about 5% faster than Debian Testing and 3.9% faster than CachyOS. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed meanwhile was in a distant last place.

While Debian 13 performed well and was in first place half of the time, it was also a notable outlier with regards to its CPU power consumption. Debian Testing use led to higher CPU power use on average than the others. Clear Linux and CachyOS meanwhile didn't consume much more power than the other Linux distributions while typically delivering better performance. The CachyOS and Clear Linux results show that great performance can be delivered without any significant increase to power use.

Those interested can go dig through all the benchmarks in full. At the end of the day though all of these modern Linux distributions were running well on the Framework Laptop 13 with AMD Strix Point SoCs while CachyOS, Clear Linux, and Debian Testing were the fastest of the bunch.

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