While having the new System76 Thelio Mira in the lab I ran some benchmarks of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS vs. 26.04 development on that AMD Ryzen 9000 series powered desktop. Those results were interesting for how the Ubuntu performance has changed over the past two years, but even if drilling down to just the past six months there have been some nice gains on the AMD Zen 5 desktop. In this article is a look at how Ubuntu 26.04 in its near-final state is performing relative to Ubuntu 25.10 with this Ryzen 9 9950X desktop.
With Ubuntu 26.04 LTS due for release in three weeks and now with it on the Linux 7.0 kernel and other near-final software packages, prior to shipping the Thelio Mira review unit back to System76 I had run some 25.10 vs. 26.04 development benchmarks. The system as a reminder was configured with the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X, 4 x 32GB DDR5 memory, 4TB Crucial NVMe SSD, and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 graphics.
Ubuntu 25.10 shipped back in October with the Linux 6.17 kernel, GNOME 49, GCC 15.2, Python 3.13, and other software up-to-date for the time. Ubuntu 26.04 meanwhile is running on the Linux 7.0 kernel that isn’t even hitting stable until mid-April. Ubuntu 26.04 also pulls in the fresh GNOME 50 desktop, is still using the GCC 15.2 compiler, upgrades to Python 3.14, OpenJDK 25 as the new default Java version, and other leading-edge software packages. The NVIDIA R590 series Linux driver is currently available in both Ubuntu 25.10 and 26.04. For those making use of the open-source Intel or AMD graphics, there is Mesa 26.0 with Ubuntu 26.04 for better performance and new OpenGL/Vulkan capabilities.
This is quite a straight-forward benchmarking comparison of Ubuntu 25.10 vs. 26.04 out-of-the-box on this AMD Ryzen 9000 series desktop, so let’s jump straight to the results.
