Canonical released Ubuntu 9.10 last week, which introduced the Ubuntu Software Center and brought a wide variety of other improvements, while Red Hat is scheduled to release Fedora 12 in two weeks. With the impending release and the current development freeze, we took the compose release candidate for Fedora 12 x86_64 and have looked at how its performance compares to Ubuntu 9.10. In this article are our results, which actually show some rather large differences between Fedora and Ubuntu when it comes to the speed of the Linux desktop.