Nice

Posted Dec 10, 2025 6:04 UTC (Wed) by rolexhamster (guest, #158445)
In reply to: Nice by josh
Parent article: The (successful) end of the kernel Rust experiment

> Phoronix would be proud of that headline.

Elitist much?

Notwithstanding the low quality user comments on Phoronix and somewhat challenged writing in its news items, the site does provide useful info by way of frequent updates of what's happening in and around the open source ecosystem. Its benchmarks have also uncovered problems in the Linux kernel. In certain ways it's complementary to LWN's coverage.

to post comments

Nice

Posted Dec 10, 2025 7:49 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

And their benchmark suite is genuinely pretty neat.

Nice

Posted Dec 10, 2025 11:09 UTC (Wed) by rossburton (subscriber, #7254) [Link] (1 responses)

Oh it's really not that impressive really. There's nothing readily available that's better but that doesn't mean it's objectively good.

Fun fact: Clear Linux wins in many of the phoronix benchmarks because the default bashrc does export CFLAGS=-O3.

(caveat: this was the case when I was researching what Clear does to get better scores on identical hardware some years ago, but I don't believe anything has changed since then)

Nice

Posted Dec 10, 2025 17:12 UTC (Wed) by higuita (guest, #32245) [Link]

Of course they could be better, but while you dig what is happening, most people will not or even can't not dig in to all apps/systems/distros. While i understand some kernel options or apps , others are totally unknown for me.

Phoronix benchmarks makes no clain or change, install the system and test... that is the result. if you do not do anything else, expect those results! if you dig in to it, you can finetune more ... but on other end, you also see that "optimized distros" can have much better results in some items, but almost no difference on others, so you also know if it is even worth investing time trying to optimize something or not. For many apps/games, is not worth the time to optimize it more to get 5% or less more performance (and like O3, risk of getting more bugs)

A benchmark that tries to optimize every single app is not only lot of work, but also no system and workload is the same, the best option for one setup may not be the best one for another, so that would be always a problem for someone.

As for hardware and distros/kernel evolution over time, they are actually very useful, we can see how a new hardware is performing and even postpone buying one a few months, where you get better performance and possible better price also.
or how much updating the distro may help in some setups.

finally the news, yes, he tends to overreact to some news or rumors, but it got much better with time and for one men show, he actually track way many projects and report back when something happens, so you know things that usually don't show up in other places

So yes, phoronix is not perfect, it could be better in some areas, but is good enough, specially being a one men show and not aa team of people. Many of the issues would probably be mitigated if there was more people working as different opinions and reviewing would catch most of the issues or too personal opinions

Nice

Posted Dec 10, 2025 9:26 UTC (Wed) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link] (1 responses)

we all know it's a guilty please

Nice

Posted Dec 10, 2025 9:27 UTC (Wed) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link]

*pleasure

sorry, commenting before my morning frontal lobotomy

Nice

Posted Dec 10, 2025 11:08 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

Phoronix also tends to benchmark in the "dumb but obvious" way - just follow the instructions, don't take the time to understand it in depth and tweak obsessively until it's as good as it's going to get. This is useful, because it exposes cases where something is genuinely useful once tweaked into shape, but where the defaults are bad and need fixing.

Nice

Posted Dec 13, 2025 10:23 UTC (Sat) by bluss (guest, #47454) [Link]

And Phoronix is doing something that we like in science - endurance. They keep doing benchmarks and creating a lot of data, with consistency. It will be useful someday, and we can see long term trends.

Nice

Posted Dec 10, 2025 17:36 UTC (Wed) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link]

Phoronix has long had a toxicity problem. Moderation is horrible to non-existent, and news items often touch far too frequently on low-value information. For example, how many news items are needed for display manager contributor issues or file system drama?

I do like that Phoronix can cover useful desktop news.