It has been a lot of fun over the past month looking at the performance of AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ Strix Halo powering the Framework Desktop. The newest area being explored is how the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 is looking compared to the current Ubuntu 25.04 release.
Ubuntu 25.04 already features nice out-of-the-box support for the Ryzen AI Max “Strix Halo” SoCs at large. But with newer Linux kernel versions and the latest Mesa drivers there are more Vulkan driver features in place by RADV, more performance optimizations especially around ray-tracing, and other optimizations at large. Plus with the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 release is the switch from GCC 14 to GCC 15 with the newer compiler able to bring some new performance advantages too.
Today’s testing is a preliminary look at how Ubuntu 25.10 is fairing on the Framework Desktop compared to stock Ubuntu 25.04. There still is one month to go until the Ubuntu 25.10 release and Linux 6.16 is currently used rather than the planned Linux 6.17, some Rust system components are still landing, etc. So take these results just as a tentative look for how things are looking as we close in on the Ubuntu 25.10 release.
With the move from Ubuntu 25.04 to 25.10 in current form means going from Linux 6.14 to Linux 6.16, GNOME Shell 49 in its near final state, Mesa 25.1.7 replacing Mesa 25.0.7 drivers, GCC 15.2 rather than GCC 14.2, Python 3.13.7, and various other software upgrades.
The same Framework Desktop was used for all this fresh Ubuntu 25.04 vs. 25.10 (development) testing with the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with Radeon 8060S Graphics, 128GB of memory, and a 2TB SD_BLACK SN7100 NVMe SSD. No other changes were made besides a clean install of Ubuntu 25.04 followed by a clean install of the latest Ubuntu 25.10 daily snapshot as of testing time. Thanks to Framework Computer for having supplied the Framework Desktop review sample that makes this ongoing testing possible.
