Ubuntu With Linux 3.16 Smashes OS X 10.9.4 On The MacBook Air

While this is welcome, the benchmarks neglect my number one reason for having an MBA: battery. Now, if advancements in 3.16 yield battery life comparable with OSX 10.9, sign me up. Would love to see someone do a proper set of benchmarks on that front.

OS X is slow, I already knew that and have experienced it first hand.

What is more interesting is the performance boost with Linux 3.16 instead of the stock Ubuntu 14.04 Linux kernel. Can anyone explain why this is the case?

Probably includes drivers with optimizations for Intel Haswell chipsets...

Pretty cool results. I wish I could use linux as my main OS but OSX is everything linux is and more. UI and UX is better also so I'll take the trade off any day.

Well package management is not as good on OSX, though.

Smashes battery life too I bet.

Also, why XFCE? Wouldn't Unity be closer to Aqua in terms of resource (ab)use?

Well it's not XFCE that makes a difference since the benchmark shows it's the latest kernel that drives the performance increase.