Recently we published benchmarks of Debian with the Etch, Lenny, and Squeeze releases. This is as far back as we could benchmark before hitting the 2.4 Linux kernel and running into hardware compatibility issues and other problems, considering Debian GNU/Linux doesn’t seen an official release nearly as often as Ubuntu, Fedora, or most other distributions. We have now carried out a similar process, but on the Fedora side, and here we were able to go all the way back to the 2004 release of Fedora Core 3. Here are benchmarks of Fedora Core 3 with every release up through the recent release of Fedora 14.
Read more at Phoronix
