I would not put too much weight into those benchmarks. Those micro-benchmarks are useful to detect performance regressions between commits in a same system, not to compare different systems. Aggregating micro-benchmarks is even less sensible.

A better type of benchmark is the more realistic stuff TechEmpower does, but they only test web frameworks, not OSes.

There's a number of fundamental problems with Phoronix benchmarks; one of them is building software in a wrong way (using vanilla sources, without neccessary patches), and often simply measuring compiler and not the operating system itself.

"Das Balkenspiel ist schlechter Stil."

"The bargraph game is lame."

edit: To expand on this, there is/was one person who tried to tackle this in a meaningful way.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070607182125/http://www.coyote...

The bitrotten remains of this can be found here: [2] https://github.com/Acovea/libacovea

I'm aware of academic research regarding HPC and superoptimizing, but no one has applied that to generalized distro testing, so far. (At least not in public.)

I think this should be a hook in some reproducible build system.

But everyboody seems to have caved in against the complexity explosion this would involve. And build times.

OpenOffice, Firefox, Chrome, KDE, Gnome....the HORROR!

> using vanilla sources, without neccessary patches

Why is that a problem? From a 3rd benchmark point of view testing the official tarball is the most relevant point to test for a Linux using audience. Different distros has different patches. Some don't even patch the software.

Because upstream often uses defaults that are fine for Linux, but not necessarily anything else. That’s why one should use official ports/packages, instead of hacking things together like its ‘90s.