Fedora 16 And GNOME Shell: Tested And Reviewed

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Ubuntu and Mint don't want it; Linus called it an “unholy mess.” While most other distros are passing up or postponing GNOME Shell, Fedora is full steam ahead. Does Red Hat know something the rest of us don't? Or is GNOME 3 really as bad as everyone says?

Benchmark Results: System

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CPU & Memory

Ubuntu 11.10 takes the lead in GeekBench, beating Fedora 16 by about 150 points, but both flavors of Linux are about a thousand points ahead of Windows.

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CPU: Single-Threaded

POV-Ray

POV-Ray version 2.6 is used in Ubuntu, while we benchmark with version 2.62 in Windows. We only need two runs of POV-Ray's built-in benchmark to generate these numbers.

There is no meaningful difference in POV-Ray scores between the two Linux distros, both complete the test nearly four whole minutes after Windows 7.

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CPU: Multi-Threaded

Blender

The 64-bit version of Blender 2.62 is used on all three operating systems. The test file is the Blender Render Benchmark v0.2. Full-sample 16x anti-aliasing is enabled, and testing is performed using one, two, and four threads. We run two iterations of the Blender benchmark per thread.

Fedora beats Ubuntu by more than one second in the Blender rendering benchmark using one thread, a fraction of a second with two threads, and loses to Oneiric Ocelot by a less than one second with four threads. Both distros beat Windows 7 by a few seconds no matter how many threads are being utilized.

On average, Windows 7 seems to have the upper hand in single-threaded applications, while the Linux distros shine on multi-threaded apps.