For those running a Star Labs StarFighter Ultra or other Intel Core Ultra Arrow Lake laptop, the recent Ubuntu 26.10 release is providing some nice performance gains over the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release. Here is a look at how Ubuntu 26.04 LTS vs. Ubuntu 26.10 performs with the Intel Core Ultra 9 285H over dozens of different benchmarks.
The Star Labs StarFighter Ultra continues running well in my Linux testing for this Coreboot-loaded, Intel Arrow Lake H powered laptop. The review unit as a reminder shipped with the Core Ultra 9 285H with integrated Arc 140T graphics, 64GB of LPDDR5-7467 memory, 1TB Samsung 990 EVO Plus NVMe SSD, and a nice 3840 x 2400 display.
Today's testing looked at the performance of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS with its Linux 7.0 kernel, Mesa 26.0 graphics, GNOME 50, and other stock components against Ubuntu 26.10. The new Ubuntu 26.10 release uses Linux 7.3, Mesa 26.2 graphics drivers, GNOME 51, and a variety of other package updates. No other system changes were made to the software or hardware between testing aside from upgrading the Ubuntu Linux release with its stock packages.
Thanks to Star Labs for making the StarFighter Ultra hardware available for continued testing at Phoronix.