When you're talking Linux, three big names always pop up: Canonical's Ubuntu, Novell's openSUSE and Red Hat's Fedora. Ubuntu has ridden a groundswell of both consumer and commercial support to its current ranking as the most popular Linux distribution. OpenSUSE, with its business underpinnings, has always been popular in Europe and has been making inroads in the U.S.

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.

With it being a while since we last compared many Linux distributions when it comes to their measurable desktop performance, we decided to run a new round of tests atop four of the most popular Linux distributions: OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Mandriva.

PClinuxOS is a Linux distribution that gets mentioned quite a bit actually. It often is mentioned in the same breath and at the same table when we discuss the "big boy" or commercially supported distributions, like ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, etc...

This early development comparison of Ubuntu 10.04, Mandriva 2010.1, PCLinuxOS 2010, and openSUSE 11.3 produced some of the most interesting results as of late in terms of comparing different Linux desktop distributions.

We tested openSUSE, Ubuntu 8.04, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva Linux One, Fedora, SimplyMEPIS, and CentOS 5.1. All performed well, and each had at least one truly outstanding feature.

"In my usual "Linux hopping" travels from distro to distro, I sometimes stretch outside the Ubuntu family of distros. Recently, I have gone between PCLinuxOS to Fedora, and then back to Ubuntu. These are my notes from using both, and my comparison to Ubuntu 7.04."

What Linux desktop is most popular? Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, Slackware, or another distro? Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes that he thinks it’s Xandros. Yes, that’s an unexpected result, but he has a point — Xandros is the distro shipped on the Eee PC, and by SJVN’s count, they’ve pumped out about 1.1 million Eee PCs and are still going strong.

Another distribution to release recently is OpenSuSE 11.2. OpenSuSE serves as the base for Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. In some ways, it's to SuSE what Fedora is to Red Hat. But unlike Fedora, OpenSuSE doesn't live on the bleeding edge.