PCLinuxOS 2010 Runs Against, But Falls Short Of Ubuntu 10.04
Only one graphics test was run since these tests were carried out with the rather dated Mobility Radeon X1400 (R500 class) GPU, but for that test was the ioquake3-powered World of Padman. While neither Linux distribution was playable with the current open-source drivers on this mobile graphics processor, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was faster, which is really no surprise seeing as PCLinuxOS 2010 is still shipping with Mesa 7.5.2.
Mesa has been quick to evolve lately and it is unfortunate they are not shipping with Mesa 7.7 or even Mesa 7.8 that was released one month ago. While not directly influencing the 3D performance, the Radeon DDX driver found in PCLinuxOS 2010 is also incredibly old and it's a real shortcoming of PCLinuxOS 2010 that it's shipping with such an old X.Org driver when xf86-video-radeon 6.13.0 is available (and 6.13 development snapshots have been used in other distributions for many months) that provides many features like new hardware support, kernel mode-setting support when used with a supported kernel, and many new features. Granted, PCLinuxOS pays more attention to the binary ATI and NVIDIA graphics drivers than they do the open-source stack.
While most would not run Apache on a notebook, we were not looking at the performance of this benchmark on the netbook per se, but to see how it compares between the two Linux releases. PCLinuxOS is not a server distribution, but it was roughly 3% faster than Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with this web-server benchmark, which may be attributed to the scheduler differences.
The PostgreSQL performance was very close between PCLinuxOS 2010 and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, which is not too surprising, but if simply looking at the numbers, Lucid Lynx had the higher (better) number even though the difference would go unnoticed.
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS has a definitive lead over PCLinuxOS 2010 when it comes to the disk performance as measured by PostMark. Ubuntu was 26% faster than the Mandriva-based operating system.