While having the new System76 Thelio Mira desktop in the lab, I took the opportunity to run some benchmarks to see how Pop!_OS 24.04 is currently performing relative to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for which it is based as well as looking ahead at how Ubuntu 26.04 LTS in its current near-final development form is looking on the same hardware.
All of these Pop!_OS and Ubuntu Linux benchmarks were done on the new System76 Thelio Mira desktop with the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X processor, 4 x 32GB DDR5 memory, Crucial 4TB NVMe SSD, and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 graphics. Thanks to System76 for providing access to the Thelio Mira review sample for some testing at Phoronix.
Pop!_OS 24.04 as of testing was using the Linux 6.17 kernel, COSMIC 1.0.3 desktop, GCC 13.3, and for the most part other packages similar/same as the upstream Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS state. With Ubuntu 26.04 ahead of its official release in April is now onto using the Linux 7.0 kernel in its development state, the GNOME Shell 50 desktop, GCC 15.2, Python 3.14.3, and other updated packages compared to 24.04 LTS.
The intent with this article is looking at how Pop!_OS 24.04 with COSMIC is competing against Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and then a look ahead at the performance changes to expect with Ubuntu 26.04 and presumably a Pop!_OS 26.04 release later on.
