Phoronix has compared the performance of macOS 10.13 High Sierra with Ubuntu Linux

Apple this week released macOS 10.13 "High Sierra" as the latest version of its operating system. Of course, curiosity got the best of me so here are benchmarks of macOS 10.12.6, macOS 10.13, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 17.10 from a MacBook Air to see how the performance compares.

Arguably the most interesting change with macOS High Sierra is under-the-hood and that's the automatic migration from an HFS+ file-system to using Apple's new APFS file-system. After decades of use, HFS+ is finally being replaced by this new file-system that brings support for 64-bit inodes, exclusively optimized for flash storage, built-in encryption, supports snapshotting, better data integrity, etc. I already posted some benchmarks showing APFS generally having much better performance than HFS+ while it wil lbe interesting to see how it compares to EXT4 on Ubuntu.

MacOS High Sierra also brings Metal 2 as the new version of the Apple-exclusive graphics API, though that isn't being tested for this article today. As part of their graphics update also comes support for VR devices, external GPUs, and an updated Quartz compositor. OpenGL hasn't received much love in 10.13 and Apple still is not supporting the Vulkan graphics API. Other macOS 10.13 changes include HEVC hardware extensions, kernel security improvements, Siri voice improvements, and other refinements to its various bundled applications.

  macOS 10.13 High Sierra vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance