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.

Last week we provided benchmarks of Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4, but Ubuntu is not the only Linux distribution preparing for a major update in the coming months. Also released in the past few days were OpenSuSE 11.2 Milestone 6 and Mandriva Linux 2010.0 Beta 1. To see how these three popular distributions compare, we set out to do our usual Linux benchmarking dance.

While a bulk of the Linux community is engaged by the release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS next week, another popular Linux distribution put out its first major update of 2010 a few days ago.

We laid our hands on all the three biggies—Ubuntu 9.10, Mandriva 2010 and openSUSE 11.2—and pitted them against each other. What followed was the battle of the century, as each distro pulled off one unique trick after another to stay on top of the game.

With Ubuntu 9.10 and Mandriva 2010 already released, OpenSuse 11.2 is the third of the "big four" - Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuse and Ubuntu - Linux distributions to release new versions this month. And, despite its name, OpenSuse 11.2 is a significant upgrade over version 11.1 released more than a year ago.

Here are some screenshots of the recent PCLinuxOS 2010.07 release with KDE 4.4.5, the Linux kernel 2.6.33.5, and various up-to-date applications. If you like KDE or are interested in a highly graphical desktop environment, check out PCLinuxOS 2010.07 KDE. PCLinuxOS puts on one of the best displays of KDE and makes a great distro for beginners.

While browsing pclinuxos repos I came across "http://ftp.klid.dk/ftp/pclinuxos/apt/pclinuxos/2010/RPMS.main". The version label "2010" in that ftp URL caught my attention.

In the days when Ubuntu 9.10, Mandriva 2010 and openSUSE 11.2 are having their releases, installing PCLinuxOS 2009.2 seems like taking a step backwards. But how could I refuse to try what I had considered to be my favourite Linux distro?

One of the better features of Mandriva Linux is its updates notification tool, which not only alerts you when there are available package updates, but also notifies the user when a new version is available - a distribution upgrade. This article documents my experience upgrading Mandriva One 2010 and Mandriva Free 2010 to Mandriva One 2010 Spring and Mandriva Free 2010 Spring respectively.