Back in August upon the launch of Apple's Snow Leopard we delivered benchmarks comparing Mac OS X 10.5 and Mac OS X 10.6 along with initial benchmarks of how Ubuntu 9.10 was running against Mac OS X 10.6. Since that time though Ubuntu 9.10 has been officially released with various changes since last August and Apple has issued two point releases for Snow Leopard, now putting it at version 10.6.2.

Earlier this month PC-BSD 7.1 was released. With the Phoronix Test Suite now having enhanced support for PC-BSD, we decided to see how well PC-BSD 7.1 performs against Kubuntu 9.04.

Last Friday we published Mac OS X 10.6 benchmarks and then on Monday they were joined by Ubuntu 9.10 vs. Mac OS X 10.6 benchmarks. One of the requests that has come up since publishing those articles are to carry out a set of tests comparing the performance of LLVM and LLVM-GCC.

Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4 was released last week and with all of its updated packages and changes compared to Ubuntu 9.04, we decided to carry out a fresh round of benchmarks comparing Ubuntu 9.04 to Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4.

A recent set of Linux distro benchmarks appears to show some surprising results. Yet it also shows the dangers of relying too heavily upon such benchmarks to make real-world technology decisions.

Six months ago I posted some benchmarks of popular gtk+ engines. It's time to revisit those benchmarks and test the engines again, this time using FOSS drivers for my new hardware.

With the Linux 2.6.34 kernel development cycle getting into swing, we have decided to provide a historical look at the Linux kernel performance, we have ran some fresh benchmarks going back to the Linux 2.6.24 kernel and ending with the recently released Linux 2.6.33 kernel.

For my recent review of the latest KDE 4 release candidate, I used an OpenSUSE Live CD image. I've gotten a few e-mails this morning from readers who are looking for an equivalent Live CD based on Kubuntu, so I figured I'd take this opportunity to point out that the Kubuntu KDE 4 RC 2 Live CD was released yesterday. A KDE 4 PPA repository is also available for Kubuntu 7.10 users.

Last week we delivered benchmarks of Fedora 13 Alpha and Ubuntu 10.04 (along with testing the Fedora 11 and 12 too), but today we have a new set of comparative benchmarks that are covering the latest development versions of Ubuntu 10.04, Mandriva 2010.1, PCLinuxOS 2010, and openSUSE 11.3. Here they are.