Clear seems to be the clear winner, Ubuntu not so really. At least accordindg this test carried out by Phoronix:
I feel more and more that pacman is the most intelligent package manager.
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I also consider Arch and the closest EndeavorOS to be quite fast. I already think I’ve customized it pretty well. Perhaps what I like best about it is that, unlike other distributions, you don’t have to overcomplicate anything.
No, it wasn’t that.
The semi-rolling model didn’t help as much in practice as it did in theory. Also, software availability was something of a challenge.
Ultimately, it was nearly identical to Arch but didn’t offer any practical advantages that I could see.
Clear is pretty universally top, 2nd seems to be a coin toss in Phoronix benchmarks. It was Ubuntu for a long while but now it seems to be between suse, alma, and Debian with fedora and arch covering the rear most of the time with Phoronix. I question the methods some times as he will benchmark a non stock/tweaked Ubuntu vs stock Arch or any number of somewhat bias setups even if not intentionally.
That said I would at least generally agree Arch isn’t the fastest ootb while clear will usually be fastest ootb. Ubuntu tends to have pretty good defaults for most situations and fedora tends to just be slower on default.
At least in the test I linked to, it says:
Each operating system was cleanly installed on this same Intel Xeon Scalable server and benchmarked in its freshly-installed, out-of-the-box configuration
in that specific one it was fine, but hes had previous Arch vs Ubuntu ones where Arch was stock and Ubuntu had updated mesa and liquorix kernel. You need to make sure to read his test conditions because sometimes its a little funky and makes Arch look worse than it is.
edit: like here is one from last year that has mesa git vs stable in the ubuntu vs arch benchmarks on the strix g15. https://www.phoronix.com/review/arch-linux-5900hx
just gotta read the fine print sometimes as the comparisons arent always apples to apples. I dont think Arch wouldve won this shoot out either way but just something to be aware of
interesting thing to note @pebcak in the one you linked it looks like all the top performers had “Transparent Huge Pages: always” and Arch was the only one not using intel pstate.
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lmfao
Yes, the semi-rolling model is not the best solution if we always want to use the latest packages. Ah, the good old days, when LMDE, developed by the Linux Mint project, was still practically a semi-rolling release a good ten years ago and based on Debian Testing. I liked LMDE and tried it until they decided to switch to stable Debian.
How much does speed really matter and what do we mean by it? Is the boot time or the speed of handling the user interface itself the deciding factor, or maybe both? I think it’s important for players for different reasons, and it’s important for average users for different reasons, or for those who use the system for work.
These are obviously important to me, but the most convincing thing for me, for example, is that I can use the best Wiki in the Linux world, and even if I haven’t read the relevant information about a question, there will always be someone on this forum who knows the answer.
Couldn’t say it better.
It’s overtaken Ubuntu in use more than a couple times in recent months.
There is a lot of practicality to this question. My hunch is for the majority of users the speed difference from one distro to another is not noticeably impactful in day to day use. To me some outliers would be 1) if the distro’s repos are slow it sucks - especially on a rolling release with lots of updates. 2) for devs - if for some reason the setup of one distro compiles code much faster than another I can see that being huge. I would think though, that what makes it faster could likely be replicated anywhere.
Said another way, it’s probably like chasing 600 MB of RAM used instead of 900 on boot. Doesn’t really matter (for anything not 10 years old).
For me the biggest differentiation is the documentation.
I’m a huge fan of openSuse and like tumbleweed to, in case of problems it is hard to find good documentation.
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For me there are two side aspects worth considering. 1) the arch wiki is quite comprehensive, and 2) knowledge in arch based user forums is generally beyond 101 to solve problems.
especially in this forum 
This forum is definitely the most fun I visited. Plus others are a bit antique, Ubuntu and Debian for example. I spend some time there in the past, the Ubuntu forum was my first Linux forum 
I have to contend for my own case, because I don’t have any single UEFI computer, so Clear Linux is out for me. As for Ubuntu, Arch is always way faster on any Legacy-Bios machine.
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There is actually only one thing from my point of view: the AUR
Some other distros also have a rolling release model. So that is not a differentiator anymore. But AUR is a differentiator.
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The speed itself doesn’t matter that much to me either. It’s more that, despite the very frequent package updates that are common with the rolling release model, EndeavorOS works as stable for me as any other point release.
Documentation is also important to me, which, aside from the Arch-specific parts, can often help with questions related to any other distribution. I also use openSUSE Tumbleweed, but I rarely look at its own documentation. OpenSUSE is said to be a beginner-friendly distribution.