Phoronix compared the performance of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS against upstream Debian

If you're curious how Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is running against upstream Debian, given that SteamOS is Debian-based and Gabe Newell runs Debian, here's some fresh benchmarks comparing several flavors of Debian against Ubuntu 14.04 in its current development state.

All benchmarking for this article was done from the same Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" system with HD Graphics 4600, 16GB of RAM, and 120GB Samsung SSD 840. No hardware or settings changed between the clean installs of the different Linux distributions. The operating systems tested from this Intel Core i7 desktop were:

- Debian 7.4 "Wheezy" stable with the Linux 3.2 kernel, GNOME Shell 3.4.2.1, Mesa 8.0.5, and GCC 4.7.

- Debian 8.0 "Jessie" testing with the Linux 3.12 kernel, GNOME Shell 3.8.4, Mesa 9.2.2, and GCC 4.8.2.

- Debian "Sid" unstable with the Linux 3.13 kernel on top of the Jessie changes.

- Ubuntu 14.04 with the Linux 3.13 kernel, Unity 7.1.2 desktop, and Mesa 10.1-rc3.

  Debian Wheezy/Jessie/Sid Benchmarked Against Ubuntu 14.04 LTS