Windows 11 Pro: about 11% slower than Linux on Intel Core i9 11900K | Hacker News Reader

Windows 11 Pro: about 11% slower than Linux on Intel Core i9 11900K

phoronix.com

345 pointsmarcodiego365 comments

The last windows 10 vs linux benchmark that I saw had linux anywhere from 15 to 22% faster than windows 10, so if anything, this could be considered an improvement.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=windows-...

>If taking the geometric mean of all 114 benchmark results, Windows 10 May 2020 on the Threadripper 3970X was running at 78% the speed of the fastest Linux distribution (Clear Linux) or 86% the speed of the slowest Linux distribution benchmarked (openSUSE Tumbleweed).

vs the most recent test...

>The geometric mean for all 44 tests showed Linux clearly in front of Windows 11 for this current-generation Intel platform. Ubuntu / Arch / Fedora were about 11% faster overall than Windows 11 Pro on this system. Meanwhile, Clear Linux was about 18% faster than Windows 11 and enjoyed about 5% better performance overall than the other Linux distributions.

Just for the record, 100 is more than a 22% percent increase from 78.

If windows is 78% of Linux speed, then Linux is 28% faster than windows.

Slightly off topic, but it seems like this has been pointed out my whole life and people in general still muddle this up.

Is there ever gonna be a day when that doesn't happen? People should seriously stop sleeping during those mathematics classes

Blame the % symbol that hides the '/100' fraction. If anyone was asked the inverse of 78/100 they'd correctly say 100/78 everytime.

Given the huge number of life changing decisions that involve the '%' symbol, this is great advice.

100/78 still doesn't give me an intuitive feeling that it'll be much different from 22%. I know it is, but I still can't easily say it's 28% based on intuition.

I think a more important thing to do is to use the same baseline to compare to: "Linux vs Windows and Linux vs Windows" not "Linux vs Windows and Windows vs Linux".

We can tell that 100/78 is somewhere between 100/75 and 100/80, which we can do in our heads as somewhere between 1.33 and 1.25.

https://xkcd.com/2501/

Fractions are badly understood by quite a lot of people [1], even for an operation as simple as "inverse", and especially if they had to learn one time that x^-1 = 1/x to pass a quiz.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28935891

We are talking about fractions, not crystaline structures. The problem is that people forget their high school math very quickly when they stop using it. Many of us keep using it everyday.

The recent story about consumers perceiving a 1/3 lb burger to be smaller than a 1/4 lb burger suggests it's a lower level problem than remembering high school math :)

Had to check the calendar for the year because that story is from the 80's and the articles that circulated and were popular were mostly written in 2014-2016 and cycle back around every few years because factoids that let people laugh at how dumb Americans are seem to be popular clickbait. Seems to be making the rounds again because A&W is taking the piss by rebranding their "1/3 burger" to a "3/9 Burger". I also had to double-check that I wasn't reading an article from The Onion.

I think it would be funny in a sad way if people are actually good at reducing fractions but still get confused by 1/3 > 1/4 after they've simplified 3/9. Least it'll make good clickbait in the 2050's.

People aren’t necessarily good at reducing fractions, either, in case that’s of any comfort.

>a 1/4 lb burger

What is a "lb burger"?

lb is a common abbreviation for "pound" (the weight measure, 16 ounces).

Damn, the US measurement system is complicated. In the metric system it's called a Royall :) Ok, I'll see myself out.

The mouseover/title text on that XKCD:

How could anyone consider themselves a well-rounded adult without a basic understanding of silicate geochemistry? Silicates are everywhere! It's hard to throw a rock without throwing one!

Well, if someone starts to increase these people's salary by 10% at the morning, and then decrease their salary by 10% at the evening, on the same day, every day, then all these people are going to figure out the math pretty quickly I'm sure. :)

No, that day will not come.

Enjoy your precision and recognize that there ARE others like you. I choose to be disappointed by the "journalists" who do poorly by comparison.

I know many who have different emotional responses than disappointment.

And it's so easy to word it so you don't have this error.

I don't think it is a fair comparison: the first benchmark was done on a AMD processor. Considering that Threadripper is more similar to a mini cluster than the intel option, it probably favors linux more.

Ironically, Clear Linux is developed by Intel.

It's been so many years since Clear Linux started showing up on benchmarks and beating everybody, I'm extremely disappointed that it's almost 2022 and the other distros still didn't adopt the improvements proposed by Clear. It's not like the things Clear does can't be done by Debian or Fedora or whatever, it's not like Clear is hiding their secrets from the others... Their improvements are, well, quite Clear for the others to copy.

That sound interesting, can you give some/one example?

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu18...

What compiler is used to build Clear Linux? I took some time to find out whether they used the Intel C Compiler or GCC (maybe with the right options) a few months ago but didn't succeed.

Edit: they use gcc.

I don't know, but you could just ask on their IRC channel. My guess would be gcc.

I'm pretty sure that linux kernel has so many gcc-isms that you can't compile it with another compiler without massive changes to it.

There are efforts to get it to build on clang and I would imagine it's mostly done by now, since this started years ago.

But besides the Kernel there's also the whole rest of the distro. The Kernel is the easy part.

>Considering that Threadripper is more similar to a mini cluster than the intel option

Not just Threadripper but all AMD Ryzen parts with more than one chiplet per package, as unlike Intel where the die is monolithic and all cores share the same resource pool equally, AMD's chiplet design means there are core complexes of 8 to 2 cores per chiplet in their Ryzen chips, so if the AMD chip has more than one chiplet, then the OS needs to handle the resource allocation between chiplets very accurately otherwise the performance penalty can be huge.

You know the ~ 10% perf penalty we all recently heard about on AMD processors? That was reputedly because MS worked so closely with intel to optimize windows for their upcoming processors that they didn't fully consider the impacts those optimizations would have on AMD.

TLDR: If anything windows on intel should be more optimized.

I don't even care about those benchmarks. It's more about the user experience and in Windows, it's horrible and user hostile.

Even if it wasn't slower, it's literally worse in every way compared to a modern Linux distribution. We live in the browser these days. The operating system we use should not bother us and control us and treat us like idiots.

There are, in fact, a few things that windows does better straight out of the box than most linux distributions. Multiple monitors, high res monitors, printers, gaming and Bluetooth come to mind.

That's not to say that those things can't work in Linux, or that some distributions don't work better than others. It is also not to say that windows is without its own problems.

However, most users who aren't willing to become technically savvy will have a better time with windows.

> The operating system we use should not bother us and control us and treat us like idiots.

I fully agree, for experienced users. Sadly the majority are still tech illiterate and are (for a lack of experience) "idiots". Windows had a chance to make an extremely easy to use operating system, and blew it by turning it into an ad platform with a slew of unpleasant other sharp edges if you pull the covers back.

Heck, I can be technically-savvy and I prefer the "just works" experience of Windows. It rarely gets in the way. All major software and games work on Windows. I don't even think about hardware compatibility. It just disappears, which is nice.

On Linux you think about hardware compatibility when you buy the hardware, and then in many cases it just works.

I use both systems so I have good comparison, and it is nowhere nearly as clear cut as "On Windows it just works" vs "On Linux you have to invoke unholy incantations to make it work". In some cases it is surprisingly the other way around, where Linux has some standard driver that just works and on Windows you have to install some damned bloatware just to get a fraction of the usability.

This is my experience too. You have to care if hardware works, but when it works - and that is very frequent nowadays - it usually works much better than on windows.

My best example case is a Asus C120 mini projector whose linux driver development I personally helped. When plugged, it shows itself as a mass storage device with a .exe file with the driver for windows 7. The driver doesn't work on recent windows versions, I don't know if you can download a new version. On linux, just plug it and it turns into a monitor. Nothing to do, no command to type. And the best part: I discovered it when I accidently plugged it on an ARM machine. It is very unlikely you could have such a good experience even with supported hardware on windows.

I have screamed at scanners and printers not working in windows, just to plug them into linux and have them work without any interaction from my part.

Unknown hardware is a mixed bag, but for printers i love the feeling that they will never stop working due to incompatible drivers. Linux gave my old lexmark printer a new life when the windows driver didn't work under windows 7. I used that printer today. It is over 20 years old, but hasn't worked in any windows version released after 2009.

Edit: and this shit happens to people all the time. I have set up rpi printer servers for 4 people. Proprietary drivers stink.

hm.. this is really strange, office equipment like printers, fax has always been developed for Windows first and foremost.

Most of the times nowadays you don't really need a driver, if your printer has wifi/ethernet capability. Almost all printers with network capability work with generic drivers over TCP/IP, and windows is pretty good with identifying these.

Now if you use USB, or god forbid LPT from the previous millennium - then yes, you need drivers that work with your combination of Windows version, x86/x64 version, etc, etc

Of course. They HAD drivers. For windows XP. Or maybe even current windows version, but the drivers are nowhere to be found today.

I will never buy a network printer if USB printers are available. They suffer the usual IOT problem. In a couple of years security updates will stop showing up, and the bloody things usually try very hard to connect to the internet. Then I'd much rather roll my own with a raspberry pi running an LTS OS.

you know it is very easy to restrict internet access for printer if you have a wifi router. Go to your router admin page and:

1. Assign static IP to a printer by its MAC address, instead of dynamic IP in DHCP settings.

2. only allow LAN traffic and disable all WAN traffic for that static IP

3. Disable Bluetooth in a printer settings (you can do it by visiting http://192.168.1.{printer's IP addr}

To me that seems like planned obsolescence. Networking a printer using a raspberry pi (or similar) means it will stay up to date, regardless of vendor EOLing it or not.

I have a printer that does wifi, but it is stuck forever at 802.11g, meaning it will degrade my wifi network and add something like a 10ms (best case) latency.

I am just old-fashioned. I understand the comfort of connecting the printer to wifi and being up and running. I will probably never do it if I have the option, since I hate having to replace a printer I like. The only downside of my lexmark is that it is slow compared to modern black and white lasers. But then again it is more than half as old as I am.

Developed first for Windows, but abandoned once they're no longer common.

because they are no longer needed, all printers from this millennium work perfectly fine over wifi/ethernet with generic drivers

Razer Synapse comes to mind which requires a cloud account to make you use the hardware such as mouse. On Linux, a FOSS GUI takes care of it. Not only that, same for software used to update SSD firmware (bundling Chromium, and an old version, too!). On Linux, topgrade takes care of it for me.

Yes, this is the thing I wish more people knew. WIth Linux because most of the drivers are bundled in the kernel, there is nothing to install. It's as plug and play as possible. I haven't had to hunt for drivers in a long, long time on linux, whereas I have to do that frequently on windows (or wait for the windows driver to auto-install after hook-up, which is a also a PITA and makes me nervous every time)

The downside is that it means if there is a regression you have to use an old kernel version to fix it. And likewise if there is a new driver you need a newer kernel.

Here's another thing you can't do with Linux's driver model: install a new video driver without rebooting.

When was the last time you could install anything on Windows without rebooting? I'm exaggerating a bit, but not much.

You can totally do this with video card drivers on Windows. I did it just a day or two ago. The ability to do so was a feature that came with the new WDDM (IIRC) in Vista.

> I don't even think about hardware compatibility. It just disappears, which is nice.

Only partially true. Linux supports almost all devices, but every now and then some companies refuse to release drivers, so the community resorts to reverse engineering of Windows drivers, and here's where the magic happens: the official Windows drivers are closed, while Linux ones are open, so the day that manufacturer decides to stop supporting Windows version X, or product X because they want to sell product Y, then it doesn't work anymore under Windows, but it will continue under Linux. As for now, there's a fairly big number of peripherals that aren't supported by Windows anymore but whose drivers are still actively developed and improved under Linux. Some hardware, given enough time, is being supported better under Linux than Windows; having Open Source device drivers can make a huge difference.

Especially with newer hardware, Linux support lags behind Windows quite a bit or is missing some features.

Regarding old devices, in many cases it just makes more sense to replace it with a newer device, than to spend time figuring out how to make old device work, unless this is a hobby to you (totally valid, but this only applies to a few people.)

What about when windows decides to update the sound driver underneath you and you stop having sound until the next restart?

Because it happened to me on windows, but never did anything like that happen on linux, where if it works once, it will continue to work.

This happened to me, but with a microphone instead of sound output. One day I boot my laptop, join a Teams call, and my microphone is not getting any sound anymore. I had to figure out later that Windows Update automatically installed a new driver, and it didn't work right for some reason. I had to search for the old one online, find the right version, and only then it was fixed.

Driver regressions are not unknown on Linux. Just because it never happened to you personally doesn't mean it never happens.

But they are not arbitrary “runtime” regressions due to an auto-update in the background.

Also, compared to things like NixOS’s boot into previous working config, windows is lightyears away.

I am not so sure about that...maybe you don't run updates in the background but some of the distros do and there are random strange problems until you reboot. Windows is definitely worse at that but Linux is not 100% safe either. Also there is always a chance that your Linux update will cause things to stop working, it happened to me a lot more often than with Windows. If you have a tablet without kb attached Linux is a major PITA as the on screen kb and touchscreen work 90% of the time and then randomly stop. If you think that 90% is good, try it and see for yourself...spoiler: try to unlock your screen when kb is not working...or try to select a menu that keeps closing as soon as you touch it without selecting the item...or try to search for application in Gnome activities with touchscreen. It is so, so close but not quite there yet...and it doesn't seem to be getting any better. NixOS is another great idea with sub-par implementation. Two things that made me wipe it off the computer: 1) compile your own program and now try to run it on NixOS computer...good luck. 2) upstream program is marked as abandoned, I guess you don't need it until someone starts maintaining it again...W.T.F!!!!

Regarding 1) on NixOS: you can install steam-run, which runs your program in a regular ubuntu-like environment by linux mount-magic (it just creates a directory structure with programs placed under /usr and the like). It works well for ordinary programs, and you can also specify specific dependencies.

To be fair, colloquial-Linux-the-operating-system (namely, apt et al) loves doing this (and worse) due to bogus transitive dependencies on things like gcc-10-base, or systemd-shitwared, or nvidia-brick-the-install. The real difference in this regard is that you can effectually force Linux to stop.

apt and traditional dependency managers are not the state-of-the-art, as nix is.

But they are still much better than run this graphical installer that may or may not do what it claims, while littering dynamic libs all around the place.

Maybe it just works fine in terms of hardware compatibility, but there are lots of background stuff like CompatTelRunner and WaasMedic that ruins interactivity by using up all disk IO at most inconvenient times. I haven't observed things like that on Linux.

Perhaps the fundamental difference is that Windows is more compatible because it enables more things by default (that are difficult to turn off), whereas Linux is more efficient because it has less bloat by default (but is difficult to enable what you need).

IME Windows update in 7 and 10 do not "just work"

On both, there have been updates that spin for hours and fail. This has happened on multiple machines in multiple environments and MS "support" is a massive convoluted time suck. Maybe I'd get real support if I or the non-profits I support were Enterprise users.

I've had update issues on Linux as well to the point where I simply reinstall on a major update. That's easy to do on Linux because it is free, but a pain on Windows because it is not.

Every Windows box I support is eventually going to get replaced with a Mac because time is valuable.

I think there were even some Windows Updates that bricked computers.

The only issue I really have with windows is that literally spy on every little things you do and report it back to microsoft and it's quite a chore to turn all that off, and basically impossible to get it 100% unless you never plan on updating windows after your changes.

> I don't even think about hardware compatibility

This is somewhat dated, by I've shopped for hardware for Windows by chipset because some worked great out of the box, while some was finicky.

No it doesn't, you have to install drivers, reboot 30 times and then you have not even begin to install software.

Are we talking about Windows 98?

My experience with a Windows y and a Wifi USB antenna.

1 the hardware had a mini CD but that PC had now orking CD-Drive

2 Google for the name on the box, I found nothing . Many companies buy a chip, put their packaging on top and they sell a new product

3 Test it on Linux, it works great

4 run a Linux command to find the real chip used

5 Google for a driver for that chip

6 the official website of the chipmaker only deals with companies not random individual

7 there are many other websites where I can download a driver that might be compatible, but fuck me, can I trust sites like "driver.com", "software.com" , "xyz.com" this are random names I created , in the end I decided that I used 10 years ago softpedia.com and back then they had no malware so I ricked it

8 after I get the driver files I Google a tutorial on how to install .sys files (or maybe the extension was different, sorry)

So not all hardware just works on Windows and some hardware just works on Linux.

printers come with ton of bullshit stuff, in Linux was plug and play but I had to change a setting, but I don have the GUI for ink levels and the software that will diagnose the errors with a clear message instead of a LED. This is the fault of printer makers not Linux though...

SDI Tool Origin for Windows. Download the torrent and store that on a USB drive. That's the only sane way.

> printers

Printers are a nightmare. They suck on windows and they suck on Linux. I don't often talk about my job when I meet new people, but when I do people ask me for help with their printer…

> and they suck on Linux.

I have to say I can't remember the last time I worried about a printer on Linux. My current one, a network-attached HP, just popped up when I wanted to print something. I never installed it - it was just there.

Not sure how that would qualify as sucking.

Like most of us on HN, our use cases are not even remotely similar to the majority of users out there who end up using junky, inexpensive USB Ink Jet printers bought at retail outlets like BestBuy or Walmart, which use proprietary bloatware to up-sell them subscriptions to ink replacement and photo printing services. At best, you might be able to find a very basic driver on Linux that speaks compatible Postscript in order to print b&w PDFs.

Or they're in a corporate environment with a much more "enterprise" printer. And again, the IT staff will want to image the same proprietary printer software that hooks into Active Directory on all the clients.

Maybe a small percentage of Linux-savvy admins out there would be able to figure out the correct set of drivers and packages to install that would allow a standard RHEL or Ubuntu laptop to print and scan basic PDFs, but unless the company has a lot of users all using the same Linux distro and version, good luck as it will be a game of whack-a-mole to keep separate distros working every time there's a Kernel upgrade.

I'm a single user on a Mac using a well-researched and highly rated Dell Laser printer. It does work on Linux (and Mac) and has great Postscript support, even over the network.

But 50% of my use is to scan PDFs with optical recognition (I believe that allows the PDFs to be text-searchable instead of just scanning a pixel-image of the documents). And I doubt that function works on Linux, as it requires proprietary Dell software to do the enhanced OCR scanning vs just image scan.

These junk printers usually must support mac os. It is becoming increasingly cheaper for vendor to support standards that work everywhere, including linux.

Printers which simply do not work are very rare nowadays. Sometimes you still have to google for a package or another to install and things instantly work.

I've seen a cheap epson network printer which advertises no linux support to work beautifully after "apt get install printer-driver-escpr". Its scanner function never needed any special setting.

Mine is as far from the top-end of the spectrum as it was available on the store. We got it soon after we moved to Ireland and we needed to scan and print some stuff for government forms. Literally the cheapest printer we could get had wifi network support.

The scanner part is flaky on Linux, but works flawlessly on a Mac.

It doesn't even show up on the Windows box. I won't bother to fix it.

> junky, inexpensive USB Ink Jet printers bought at retail outlets

So the problem is not in Linux, is it?

You must have never done desktop support. It doesn't matter who or what is really at fault, the Normal User Chain Of Responsibility starts with the person who set it up if there is one, then "the computer." If something breaks on Linux, it's the fault of whoever told/helped them to switch.

It's nice to think it doesn't matter, but the competition is the OS everyone writes a driver for and has a support line to fix when it breaks. The problem isn't Linux in a triage sense, but it is in the end user placing blame sense.

The problem is the printer. Q.E.D.

I use to be of the opinion that business/enterprise grade network printers were the way to go. You'd assign an IP and forget about it, when you set them up you'd plug in the IP and magic.

However once you introduce power saving, wifi, and self discovery via Bonjour or whatever voodoo Windows uses, they're not much better.

It doesn't help that every printer manufacturer these days wants their driver to be a full blown App with a custom UI and taskbar icon so they can push their consumables on you.

Hehe, as a former Windows admin, I came to hate printers passionately. My experience with printers on Linux and macOS was a lot better.

However, I do not do much printing in my personal life, so that does not necessarily say a lot.

I used to think that. But I bought a wireless Canon Pixma nearly a decade ago, and haven't had any issues with it yet on any of my Windows machines. Just get on my network and print to your heart's content. No fuss.

Now... previously, I've had printers with multiple hundred megabyte driver downloads... that stopped working when a new version of Windows came out, and they ended up in a landfill. Ugh. But over the past decade, printing doesn't seem to require drivers. It just works.

> Multiple monitors, high res monitors, printers, gaming and Bluetooth come to mind.

With respect to gaming, the parent was referring to work done in the browser, so probably not including gaming. We use consoles for all the gaming in our house, so at least for us that's a non-issue.

I have to disagree on printers. My experience with getting printers to work on Ubuntu is that you have to follow these steps:

Plug it in

Start printing

That's never really been the case for Windows. We used to have to mess with driver installation and then reboot. Sometimes we'd have to do more than that based on visiting a website. When Vista was first released, a lot of older printers were not supported, and that included one of ours. The only solution was to use Linux.

Just a few days ago, my (Windows-using) aunt was visiting and told me her printer stopped working. She has no idea how to get it to work and now she'll have to pay someone to figure it out for her. My mother has had similar issues. I don't much care about Linux vs Windows but I don't think printer support is a highlight of Windows.

I have personally had the opposite experience, but printers are a minefield, so it isn't a huge surprise.

> Multiple monitors, high res monitors, printers, gaming and Bluetooth come to mind.

But this is not true on laptops though. Right now, my sister is restarting her studies (or rather starting, after working 5 years as a chef), and had to pick up a laptop. I lent my old one, with windows by default, and dual boot to linux. She was only using it for internet, matlab (or scilab, i'm not sure) and dropbox. My brother advised hare to take Joplin for notetaking, tried it on both limux and windows and now, two month after my initial loan, she bought a computer with linux.

Because while on desktop, you might have compatibility issues, on a good laptop you won't.

Updating to newer kernels than 5.8 (first ubuntu 20.04 hwe) ruins my almost 5 year old laptop's ability to connect a monitor through USB-C. 4 years of using Linux on it it couldn't detect that my laptop has bluetooth after restart, only from cold boot (was fixed with ubuntu 20.04's first HWE).

and it's top of the line dell xps 15 2017 (13-inch version of this laptop even comes with ubuntu pre-installed and officially supported).

on desktops you can choose specific parts you know will work with linux. on laptop you're stuck with a laptop either working or not. newer versions of linux can bring you more issues on both tho.

Edit preamble: I am referring to the last 4 laptops I have owned; havent had a desktop in a decade.

This hasn't been my experience. Multi-monitor and hidpi only worked out of the box on one distro (pop_os!) and printing to an old brother laser printer only ever worked from Windows.

That said, if I was doing scientific computing via matlab or what not, I would probably grab pop_os over windows too. I still do most of my development work on linux, and video / gaming / home office from the windows partition.

I have never touched a hidpi display, but using multiple monitors has worked quite well for me, both on desktop machines and laptops. Including attaching a display on a running desktop session.

Yeah, matlab might be the reason, i did not really use Linux when i was a math student so i did not really feel the pain at the time.

Brother printer usually supports linux. Sometimed you have to run their installer or copy their printer files in a cups folder.

My experience is the reverse. I've set up a few (custom built) desktops with Linux and they worked great, but recently wanted to repurpose an older laptop and it's been a mess with a few different distros (doesn't boot with hdmi plugged in, the touchscreen doesn't shut down with the lid down, the keyboard backlight doesn't turn on, etc.).

Unfortunately ended right back at Windows 10 since I did want to make use of that device and not keep futzing around with distros and various out of date configuration files and settings.

> Multiple monitors, high res monitors

My experience with vanilla Gnome and Fedora has been excellent regarding these two points. Haven’t had printer issues, either, but I rarely use a printer.

Gaming with Steam and Proton is good enough for me, but still a little more friction than on Windows.

I switched to Windows on my desktop primarily because of the support of the modern games (like upcoming Battlefield 2042) and generally higher performance.

To gain back the linux dev environment, I got a decent laptop (used), and installed linux, but I use the VSCode remoteSSH capability on windows, which works super well.

I dabbled in trying to set up passthrough to a VM, however from research, the chance of getting banned by anti cheat on some games was not worth the risk.

To take another of your points, printers suck on Windows, and are perfectly ok on Linux.

On Windows you will get the manufacturer driver with all the crapware that comes with it. Linux certainly has an inbuilt driver that supports all of it.

About Bluetooth, I never managed to get it working on any Windows computer. Granted that I didn't try very hard before formating them, but the largest difficulty on Linux is discovering that it's already working with everything installed, you just have to stop searching the web on how to set and use it.

I've got a brother laser printer that has yet to successfully print from linux, and a Bluetooth headset that would only half work on a modern linux distro. Both work perfectly fine on Windows.

YMMV.

When I finally gave up and brought a Bluetooth headset I simply couldn't find any Linux instructions because they were lost at the sea of "no, the Windows driver won't allow you to use this headset on that application" issues. But yeah, I imagine headsets that simply work on Windows exist, you probably just have to avoid the famous brands.

(Anyway, I got it to work by searching "bluetooth" on the desktop menu and launching the bluetooth management application.)

Which model? I'm not above reverse-engineering a driver and building my own. I have an HL-2270DW, but I've never needed to print from Linux.

> Multiple monitors, high res monitors, printers, gaming and Bluetooth come to mind

Multiple monitors: nope, wayland does it better. The amount of flickering, determining dpi etc is objectively worse than what you get with modern Wayland. The rest may be true, but other than printers, they are quite similar nowadays. Pipewire does close the gap with regards to bluetooth.

And then the other side: for development, windows is strictly inferior. Debugs are exceptionally slow for c++, git bash is cancer with no sane terminal emulator, and for java it is seriously slower for some reason.

> git bash is cancer with no sane terminal emulator

Does anyone even use git bash? Powershell Core + standard Git SCM for Windows works perfectly fine for me.

Unfortunately the project at work depends on a minor posix shell script (for whatever reason), that has to run inside git bash..

Sounds odd. What does it do? No way to convert it to run inside Powershell instead perhaps (Powershell Core is now open-source and cross-platform and can run on Linux too!)?

Hibernate is my linux pet peeve.

Linux dev here, I worked on and fixed lots of Hibernate-related bugs. Abandon all hope: Hibernation (S4 suspend) is absolutely horrible to debug and test, you can't easily put this in a CI system without delaying your testing by 100000%, and hibernating is generally a bad idea since booting is so fast and S3 suspend is also so good these days. Just change your workflow, avoid the pain.

I had some trouble for a few weeks this year with some AMD graphics firmware (crashing graphics under load after an suspend period), but an update corrected it the day after I began being annoyed enough to begin looking seriously for a solution.

It just works. It just worked (but for these few weeks) since I've been using a Linux laptop daily, which is since 2007 or 2008.

Can somebody explain what the purpose of hibernate is in modern day?

I get how it was useful in 1995 when ACPI didn't exist. But now it's significantly slower to resume from than S3 suspend, which uses <1 watt, and it wears out your SSD. What is it good for?

The purpose for me is to pause my system and resume without draining any battery juice. I have a portable small dev laptop and when I close the lid it suspends nicely. However, a day or two later when I want to do some work the battery is 80% drained. A few times it even drained completely so when I booted my wifi drivers were corrupted. Had to spend nearly an hour fixing it up. Still loving linux though, it still feels like I'm in control of my machine but as I get older I tend to not want to keep on fixing things all the time, just want it to work.

Dual booting is my usecase.

Just buy hardware designed for Linux. Everything work fine for me.

Are you saying that hibernate works fine with hardware designed for linux?? If so I'd look into it.

But the beauty of Linux is that you can take an old machine that barely performs with windows and give it life again under linux

Yes, hibernate, suspend, external display etc. work fine on my Librem 15.

I heard such fantastic things about Dell xps and Linux, and that may have been my most-regretted computer purchase of the last 8 years.

AFAIK Dell still comes with Windows by default, it's not designed for Linux. Consider System76, Purism or similar.

The xps line had linux as an option I think, and people raved about it and Linux. I'll never understand why after using it.

As much as I would love to support system76, this was for a business that needed a physical storefront that could do fast turnaround on warranty services. There aren't a ton of good options at that point, but of those that do, they don't sell system76 laptops.

> However, most users who aren't willing to become technically savvy will have a better time with windows.

Yes, but they'd have an even better time with a Mac, and a better time still with a tablet or phone. The days of "windows is easier for end users" are largely at an end. In the modern world, these are *both* enthusiast/professional systems intended for special purpose deployment.

Than Mac? I don’t know if that’s true. The average user knows almost nothing about how to use their Mac from my anecdotes of running a virtual coworking community and trouble shooting people’s stuff.

I have found this to be true for my parents, only because they have an iPhone and iPad. If they weren't already in the apple ecosystem, it'd be a bit of a wash I think.

> Yes, but they'd have an even better time with a Mac

Not if they wanted to game or interact with the windows app ecosystem.

> There are, in fact, a few things that windows does better straight out of the box than most linux distributions. Multiple monitors, high res monitors, printers, gaming and Bluetooth come to mind.

This hasn't been my experience. Printers and gaming are the only two on this list that I think Windows does better out-of-the-box. There is one thing missing from this list that I think Windows does better, and that's power management (suspend/resume) for laptops.

Other than printers, I would say Linux generally performs worse on these things because the companies making the printers, games, and laptops don't support Linux. Printer manufacturers don't support Linux that well, but I also think printer handling on Linux is not as good even when it is supported.

Since connected standby, Windows certainly does not do suspend better than Linux. I’m not sure it’s even capable of suspending any more. See for example this recent report of Dell advising that customers should not expect their laptops to suspend [1].

I’ve owned a laptop with this feature and replacing Windows with Linux allowed me to actually use S3 sleep again, safely put the laptop in a bag without worrying about it turning itself on, and it improved the battery life when sleeping by a factor of like 5-10.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28639952

> However, most users who aren't willing to become technically savvy will have a better time with windows.

Here's what I've observed on this one.

If you put a Linux machine in front of, say, a 15 year old, they immediately figure it out.

If you put one in front of an adult who has been using Windows for 30 years, they get mad at you. Because they already know how to do Z thing in Windows and for Linux they have to figure it out or look it up. Which as a general rule isn't any harder to do on Linux than it is on Windows -- it's often easier -- but they already did it on Windows 30 years ago and don't want to do it again.

That lasts for all of a few hours of use before they've figured out how to do the things they commonly do, if they don't give up.

> If you put a Linux machine in front of, say, a 15 year old, they immediately figure it out.

Until they need to do anything off the beaten track, which can be something as simple as changing the mouse speed (I'm not making this up) and you google it and it's telling you to run terminal commands and update your Xorg.conf file.

On my Ubuntu 20.04 machine: pressed super (windows key), typed "mouse"; it showed me mouse setting which I clicked; there was a slider named "touchpad speed". It is nowhere near complicated and you don't have to run terminal commands or update your Xorg.conf file.

That's touchpad speed though, not mouse speed.

And this was on Linux Mint, which is meant to be a beginner's Linux distro.

Sorry, I bit it. Plugged a mouse just to test it: the procedure is EXACTLY the same. And Ubuntu is not a hard for beginners distro.

You're parroting outdated false comments.

I think I was on KDE and tried to change my mouse speed and couldn't find a slider to save my life.

It was just one example though.

I tried to install a NVIDIA driver for example on Linux Mint and it wouldn't work until I edited some file to use a different kernel module that would start earlier. Spent ages trying to debug it. On Windows the driver gets installed automatically and if I want to update it I just launch the Geforce Experience and hit one button.

> It was just one example though.

One bad example. The problem with examples like this is that some people will believe and repeat them. Some problems are fixed and people don't even check before spreading the word. You can even find in this thread people talking about how Ubuntu included amazon ads.

> I tried to install a NVIDIA driver for example on Linux Mint and it wouldn't work until I edited some file to use a different kernel module that would start earlier. Spent ages trying to debug it. On Windows the driver gets installed automatically and if I want to update it I just launch the Geforce Experience and hit one button.

Good luck trying to use mint. But AFAIK, Ubuntu comes with NVIDIA drivers by default. There's no need to "launch the Geforce Experience and hit one button" to update it.

It feels like you searching for a complicated way to do things and then complain about it.

> But AFAIK, Ubuntu comes with NVIDIA drivers by default

It comes with the open-source 'Nouveau' drivers which are, in the nicest words possible, unsatisfactory.

It's definitely easier to install them on Ubuntu though through the drivers GUI.

Ah yes, Geforce Experience. You mean the bloatware Nvidia makes you create an account for just to install their drivers?

On Linux I simply type pacman -S nvidia to install the drivers on my system. Reboot and it's done.

There is even a GUI to install packages, since that seems like it's important for you.

You're talking about Arch Linux there though which definitely isn't for the average user, and again you're needing to use the terminal.

I'm very competent at using the terminal myself and have installed Arch Linux from the base image before but it's not exactly user friendly.

As I mentioned before though, Windows does install some quite recent NVIDIA drivers automatically via Windows Update. And if you don't want to use GFE, you can just go to the NVIDIA website and install the latest drivers that way.

OK, replace a single terminal command in Linux with opening the software app, searching for Nvidia, and clicking install. This would be the user friendly process on pretty much any mainstream distribution for getting the latest drivers.

Having to navigate through Nvidia's website, create an account, and download a bunch of bloatware that takes forever to install is barbaric. Calling Windows user friendly is a meme at this point.

Solus OS. Go to the driver assistant, it will show up that Nvidia propietary drivers are missing. Click on it, wait to download and install, done.

Windows is a joke in comparison.

I installed nvidia drivers just by opening "Driver Manager" and installing it. No terminal needed.

Mint isn't really a beginner's distro, but instead a striped down distro. It's for the people who pine for the early 2000s Linux experience.

Claims from Linux Mint's website - https://linuxmint.com/:

"The latest version of the friendly operating system is here. Install it on your computer today!"

"It is designed to work 'out of the box'"

"Most of our users come from Windows and they never look back."

"It's very easy to use. It features an intuitive desktop and adopts KISS principles. Anyone can rapidly feel at home and use Linux Mint. User experience, workflow and comfort is key."

Sounds like a beginner's distro to me. I always thought they were trying to go after a more beginner audience also as they pre-install all the proprietary codecs and a large collection of software that you'd most likely want to use out of the box as a beginner (not stripped down like you say).

Good luck if you want to use Google with autocomplete as your default search engine on the preinstalled Firefox though.

I can see how you'd take that from that marketing literature, but when they talk about KISS principles and what have you, they're talking about config files rather than GUIs for power user configuration. They don't really have the resources for anything else.

A more mainstream distro is what you're looking for if you want a consistent, modern experience.

Mint ranks in the top 5 for the past 12 months on DistroWatch.com, even above Ubuntu.

If Mint isn't mainstream, what is? Probably just Ubuntu, and maybe PopOS?

The distrowatch ranking is heavily gamed to the point of being useless. That's why MX Linux is the top now.

Top distros actually being used are Ubuntu, Fedora, and Suse on the desktop, Debian and CentOS (or RHEL if you pay for it) on the server.

If we're talking 'average user could probably get on with this' then the only one there you mentioned really is Ubuntu.

Fedora is close but in the end is really just a staging platform for RHEL. If you want to use any proprietary software /drivers you're likely going to need to enable RPMFusion etc.

OpenSUSE I haven't used in a long time so can't really make a comment but I know it's well established in the Linux space.

Debian is really more suited to the server environment & CentOS/RHEL actually are server distros. If the average user tried to install Debian if they managed to install it they'd likely end up with a system with lots of 'stable' (synonym: outdated) software & struggle to get anything proprietary installed (or OSS - does it even have a software store by default now?)

Here's a forum thread I've found for example, from 2019. One of the top results on Google.

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=294777

The thread's mental. Why does OP need to figure out the device ID of their mouse and run terminal commands to change the speed of their mouse?

I stand with my position. My laptop has Ubuntu 20.04 installed. I plugged a mouse. To set its speed, I simply press super and type "mouse", click on the mouse settings that appears; there is a slider to set its speed.

Considering this is from GNOME I don't believe the procedure is different in most popular linux distros.

And here is the TOP google result I search "linux how to set mouse speed": https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/mouse-sensitivity...

That’s just demonstratively false (with eg. Gnome, it is just settings and start searching for it, or click the mouse icon), and I hardly believe someone would have an easier time doing that with Windows, with the 3 separate settings menu, all looking different.

On Windows 11 I just search for 'Mouse' in the start menu and one settings menu (the new settings UI) showed up with a nice slider. Even lets you swap the primary mouse button from left->right if you're wanting to do that.

That was just one example though. I'd argue like 90% of searches for Linux help have an answer which contains 'run this in a terminal'.

On Ubuntu 20.04 I just search for 'Mouse' in the activities screen and one settings menu showed up with a nice slider. Even lets you swap the primary mouse button from left->right if you're wanting to do that.

That was just one example though. I'd argue like 90% of searches for Linux help have an answer which are easier to apply and fix the problem better than when the same happens on windows.

That’s just not true though. Configurations that still require terminal commands on Linux are on par with stuff you’d have to use regedit for on Windows. And I’d take a config file over the windows registry any day.

And on GNOME 40 I can search mouse, and go directly to gnome-control-center with a nice slider for mouse speed. It also even lets me swap the primary mouse button to the left or right button.

> I'd argue like 90% of searches for Linux help have an answer which contains 'run this in a terminal'.

Why is this even bad if 'run this in a terminal' actually fixes the problem?

Because it's not user friendly in the slightest, and for the average user they perhaps wouldn't know if the command is malicious or not. I remember when I was younger (like 5/6 years old!) and would accidentally reboot Windows 98 into DOS mode and almost start crying thinking that I'd broken the computer and would have to ask my dad who would reboot the machine.

I work in development teams (.NET mainly so most are GUI-centric) where full-blown developers get uneasy with PowerShell/CMD.

User friendly seems to be a euphemism for enabling users to persist in ingorance.

I mean you're not wrong, but they often say ignorance is bliss.

> On Windows 11 I just search for 'Mouse' in the start menu

Same here on XFCE, it will give you the link to mouse configuration.

> I'm not making this up

Yes you are. Here is THE top google result I search "linux how to set mouse speed": https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/mouse-sensitivity...

Following your link takes me to an Ubuntu page. The first step is to open the 'Activities' overview and start typing 'Mouse & Touchpad.' What's 'Activities'? So I click on 'Activities' and it takes me to a Gnome page. What if I'm not using Gnome? What if I'm not using Ubuntu? Is it the same in KDE or Cinnamon? How about different Linux distributions?

Linux has become ridiculous in this regard, and that's the reason Linux will never be more than a geek operating system. A place where the tech savvy can praise it's features and crap all over Windows, which is only for the unwashed masses who aren't smart enough to see the obvious inferiority of Windows and the great evil empire that is Microsoft.

Yes, the desktop revolution is here! Finally we are free of Windows. Please... Windows is easier and more user friendly than Linux. Full stop.

> Following your link takes me to an Ubuntu page. The first step is to open the 'Activities' overview and start typing 'Mouse & Touchpad.' What's 'Activities'?

It is the screen that shows when you click the top left corner. It is very obvious: there's 'Activities' written right there.

> So I click on 'Activities' and it takes me to a Gnome page. What if I'm not using Gnome?

Most popular linux distros nowadays default to GNOME. If you're not using it, you're probably tech savvy enough to search for yourself and not need this kind of help.

> What if I'm not using Ubuntu?

Read above.

> Is it the same in KDE or Cinnamon? How about different Linux distributions?

Read Above.

> Linux has become ridiculous in this regard, and that's the reason Linux will never be more than a geek operating system.

Linux is no longer a geek operating system.

> A place where the tech savvy can praise it's features and crap all over Windows, which is only for the unwashed masses who aren't smart enough to see the obvious inferiority of Windows and the great evil empire that is Microsoft.

Yes... I think I have to admit that I bashed windows and (indirectly) microsoft in this thread... That was uncalled for and is more emotion and feelings than reason. Sorry for that.

Thinking a little better... I don't regret it. They deserve!

> Yes, the desktop revolution is here! Finally we are free of Windows. Please... Windows is easier and more user friendly than Linux. Full stop.

This one I can't disagree. Haven't been using much windows for a long time.

What's so wrong with running shell commands and editing config files? Why must users never learn anything? Why must everything be dumbed until it can be operated only with point-and-grunt?

I guess you could make a configuration GUI that purports to let people click to set every option in the system, because they must never type for some reason, but how easy do you think that is to go actually use? There's always something off "the beaten track".

Yeah, you're completely right, in fact, GUIs were just a total mistake. Let's just all go back to command-line all the time /s.

When it comes down to it, computers are a means to an end, so why make the means harder than it has to be, especially for someone who doesn't work in an IT related space?

> Why must everything be dumbed until it can be operated only with point-and-grunt

Why do you think products like the iPad and iPhone are so successful? They work with no configuration and pretty much anyone can use them without too many issues.

And if there ever was anything you might have an opinion on or need for and want to configure chances are those products will tell you to go jump in a lake.

When you make the whole of the world a GUI suddenly only features for which convenient GUIs can be made cheaply and pretty enough are worth supporting.

The only issue I ran into woth Ubuntu so far is WiFi printing. Everything else works at least as good as Windows. And Linux is so mich cleaner.

For professional use, read commercial usw of Office programs, I think Windows is easier, so. I never tried Linux in such an environment so.

The multiple monitor experience on Windows depends hugely on the exact hardware used and can range from "ok" to "absolute shitcan trashfire", but with modern stuff it's mostly tending towards the latter.

> Multiple monitors, high res monitors, printers, gaming and Bluetooth come to mind.

I'm running Ubuntu with two 4k monitors, an HP printer, and a bluetooth mouse. All of this works perfectly without any fiddling. I've also played quite a few games on this machine thanks to Steam and Proton.

I've personally had a much easier time getting Bluetooth and printers to work on Linux. It's been 100% plug and play on Linux but on Windows I have to use a mess of driver installs, configurations, changing the Bluetooth stack, messing in device manager to reset stuff

This has not been true for at least a decade - time to update your ken on Linux.

I've been using linux daily for over a decade. Pop_os! is the only distro that almost entirely works 100% straight out of the box for most things. This has been the case across 4 high end laptops (dell xps, surface book 2, and something something lenovo, I forget which).

Manjaro, vanilla arch, deviant and Ubuntu all had some difficulty or other, though my objections to Ubuntu are more related to software decisions rather than hardware support. In that case, it was roughly on par, perhaps slightly behind pop_os in terms of out of the box experience.

the last time that I try on Windows , I find the multi monitor experience subpar compared against Linux with KDE.

> It's more about the user experience and in Windows, it's horrible and user hostile.

How so?

From where i'm sat every application i want works and i can do all my business / leisure tasks with relative ease.

I actually don't know what i'd even want or need to improve my user experience with WIN10

1. Taskbar inability to show Date and Time when using small buttons. Is designed around vertical layout and does not allow for horizontal layout. 2. Show all applications reorders the listing by which application was last used versus Gnome tries to retain the a constant display allowing for muscle memory interaction. 3. Windows and be dragged and show off the viewable area making them hidden and having to move the application onto the screen using arrow keys. Some Linux DE prevent hiding applications off screen area. 4. Taskbar still does not work properly when placed at the top of the screen. Some applications will open up and display the title bar in the area, hiding it behind the taskbar. 5. File System; MFT cannot handle resizing and just keeps growing even when files are deleted. 6. File System; Does not allow for modifying file names or managing files while they are open. Want to rename that PDF files that was downloaded to the title showing in the file? Must type in notepad first or write down then rename while in Linux just read and rename while the PDF is open. 7. Volume display will stay on screen while mouse is over the area which so happens to be a common area for application interaction. Pointless delay of interaction while using another means to raise or lower the volume. 8. Windows updates often requires reboots while reboot is only needed on core features. Often restarting the service or DE refreshes to the newer version without a restart. 9. System registry corruption solution a complete reinstall; files versus central binary repository. 10. Linux allows for a complete move from hardware to hardware using as system rsync with run-time directory and file exclusion and retention of permissions. Windows cannot do this requires a long install time with the inability to have a 100% equal environment to the previous system right away without spending hours re-configuring it.

> Taskbar inability to show Date and Time when using small buttons. Is designed around vertical layout and does not allow for horizontal layout

I am confused. Also you can add an extra line break so the formatting of your comment is better with each bullet on its own line.

https://thundercloud.net/infoave/images/2021/time-date-on1.p...

https://www.thundercloud.net/infoave/new/show-or-hide-the-da...

Or use 3rd party app for time formatting. It got yanked on W11 though. I sorely miss it.

https://github.com/White-Tiger/T-Clock/releases

I keep a windows VM (Aws lightsail, 2 cores) in case my my app fails to build on it. It was usable but only when disabled Windows Defender. I joked about it to my wife who uses MS suits that Windows is made for running Windows defender. She has smooth ride on her 8 cores laptop.

I was also frustrated how much downloading I had to do to compile a simple c program. Chocolaty is what makes me not give up. Poweshell is good too.

I am kind of surprised that its that close to Linux performance!!

For the average developer, yes. As for someone who troubleshoots all of my families tech hardware / software, I don't let anyone under 60 get a pc, they are limited to iPad only. I tried to get two of my younger cousins on Linux. One worked for a while replacing a virus ridden pc, but when he upgraded, he went back to windows. It's not that windows is better, its the liability of their expectations that something will go wrong. I still get windows issues on my locked down pc computer, but when they get a small bug on linux, it confirms their biases.

And the minor point that a not-insignificant percentage of games are Windows only still (steam is tryign!). As phones get better and better, PCs are for like typing papers and playing games... a word processor crossed with a nintendo..

> We live in the browser these days.

Someone should tell that to the hundreds of people at my company that use mostly native apps with no browser alternative.

A counterpoint to this argument can be found in the "Main Linux Problems on desktop" that was posted a couple of days ago:

https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...

I wouldn't call an article prefaced with

> I want to make one thing crystal clear - Windows, in some regards, is even worse than Linux and it has its own share of critical problems. Off the top of my head I want to name the following quite devastating issues with Windows: <long list of issues>

"a complete debunk". Both OSs have their issues. For many people, the Windows issues are worse than the issues they have with Linux.

That's fair. Edited my post.

That perspective sounds like its from someone who never watched an average user or office worker use a computer.

When I use a laptop I certainly don't live in the browser. It's just one application among many.

I wonder how long it will take for Microsoft to drive away even the most committed Windows users.

I wonder how much of these results were actually due to compiler/benchmark implementation rather than operating system mechanisms.

I expect file system related (not I/O) benchmarks would differ significantly in Linux' favor as we'd observed with WSL1 vs WSL2; but the rest? Are we to believe that DirectX 12, the API that’s supported by hardware vendors themselves, optimized to no end for first-class gaming, is actually slower than whatever's on Linux? (Not downplaying the significant achievements of Linux in graphics, but meagerly pointing out the fact that Windows is way ahead in graphics performance because of politics)

For example, Windows 11 loses in all Java benchmarks. Coincidentally, Oracle has great investment in Linux as a platform. Is this really a fair operating system comparison?

Similarly, GCC is optimized primarily for Linux. Windows is a second-class citizen there. It could be the same case with clang as well, I don't know. How are we supposed to be sure that compilers treat two OS's the same? Do benchmark apps get compiled with MSVC on Windows?

I think OS performance can only be compared fairly with benchmarks specifically designed to measure OS performance, not performance of a specific application per se, simply because the developers have varying priorities for optimizing their apps for a platform.

An OS benchmark could measure context switch latency, I/O latency, raw I/O throughput, certain responsiveness metrics etc, compiled with the preferred compiler of the platform.

What exactly is “OS performance”, if not running applications? Micro benchmarks can be compared to premature optimization. Which we all know is the root of all evil.

There are lots of realistic workloads where some benchmark gives completely opposite and counter intuitive results, often due to caching and scheduling tricks.

I thought I already explained this. OS isn't the sole, maybe not even the main arbiter of performance when compiler and developer biases can cause a greater difference.

I already explained that some scenarios (like FS) would have significant variance due to the differences in design philosophies. That doesn't have to mean that one OS is objectively worse than the other, but it could mean that they prioritize different scenarios.

I don't think we have any way to tell if an OS is objectively "faster" without resorting to micro benchmarks which you're right about them not being so meaningful.

DirectX 12 is not appreciably faster than Vulkan, correct. The two APIs are low-level enough that the optimization is largely in common between both. This is evidenced both by DXVK and by games that support both DX12 and Vulkan.

Linux with the Windows emulation layer Drawbridge Library OS from the Linux port of Microsoft SQL server may possibly run Windows faster than native Windows.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

Not quite the same thing, but the performance hit when running Windows software in Wine is frighteningly low. Even harder to run games like Overwatch[0] still stand toe-to-toe with their Windows counterparts, which is really surprising considering how many people tried (and failed) to run it at a playable framerate in a VM.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voXc1nCD4IA

Games are usually CPU-bound. When the graphics additional layers are thin, and DXVK is indeed very thin, there's no reason it will take a huge performance hit.

I don't know what games you're playing but mine are usually GPU bound.

Hmmm... makes sense. Even a thin translation layer has a measurable impact then. Maybe the reasonable performance is probably recovered by other parts of the stack.

Compatibility quirks aside, it really does feel like magic when you get a game running properly!

Im super confused how they benchmarked that. How do you play the same game across two different OS?

Overwatch lets you save recordings of gameplay a-la Quake 2, and then you can re-play the match at will, even on different systems so long as they're compatible. Looks like they played a match, saved the results and recorded the playback on both systems. It's not exactly the same as playing online (for example, your CPU isn't negotiating networking bandwidth all the time), but it's definitely a level playing field for measuring graphics performance.

Given that most software on this benchmark are basically open source linux citizens, I would say windows 11, which is basically way more functional and has way more features than linux did pretty well, given that we can expect that most of those software packages have probably more optimization work for linux than for windows. Not bad at all.

Not sure which features you mean, but Linux seems to have more of the features that I need myself, like having the ability to choose in what way taskbar buttons are grouped, or the ability to not get regular "system notifications" that are not related to something I'm doing or interested in, and the ability to choose when you update it

I have to say that I agree with this. The primary purpose of an operating system now that I passed my *rties is to get out of the way. And Linux does that really well, while Windows is doing it less and less.

I'm happy that we have at least 3-4 popular operating systems still, and that this should help drive innovation. But at the same time, I feel like Linux gets all the free innovation because of its openness. And if you add all the benefits of Linux being very user-friendly (as in not spamming me with ads), then it's just going to be a better choice.

Aren’t most Linux UIs largely copying or being strongly influenced by Windows? Not saying Windows has done anything special in a while. I don’t know what innovations Linux has done in the past decade either though.

Do you have concrete examples in mind of improved UI and UX in Windows and Mac in the past 20 years? I'm genuinely curious because comparing my memories of Windows XP and Windows 7 I can't think of any great innovations.

Windows 10's innovations were so bad I left the OS entirely with extensive telemetry, an abusive and confusing cloud account system, ads on your desktop. The only UX improvement I saw was being able to enter your session with a pin that doesn't require you to press the enter-key, but they even botched that by not letting you type letters and not showing any warnings: Something we learned was necessary 20 years ago with the caps-lock warning. Can't speak to Macs as I only recently began checking them out.

I've been studying Desktop Environments for a FOSS project, I have over a dozen VMs setup with different distros and operating systems using different DEs, and they're all basically the same. It strikes me as unfair to say Linux is copying either Windows or MacOS. I see a lot of innovation in open-source, there are a lot of innovative desktop components, settings and paradigms (Compiz comes to mind, have you seen such a customizable compositor in MacOS or Windows?) but it's natural that distributions end up choosing a common visual language by default, simply because it's what people know and expect.

Ah okay I was using innovation more in the way it’s used to describe a distinct big impactful change. I didn’t know the meaning of the word is simply change.

I included “either” at the end to point out I don’t see any of the three desktop OSes having done much of anything for a long time.

20 years for Mac is a long time though. OS X was just coming out then. I think just based off the fresh OS and simpler/cleaner user interface Mac was doing initially were decently big changes. You could say that only goes up to ~10.4 before there aren't many impactful positive changes besides security changes every one has been doing. 10.4 came out in like 2005.

Isn't the Windows 11 UI basically a total ripoff of Plasma?

KDE for example can trace it's heritage from CDE, which is based on Motif, which predates Windows.

> Aren’t most Linux UIs largely copying or being strongly influenced by Windows?

No.

Whenever I fire up a Linux distro, I can never shake the feeling that the UI is just a subpar ripoff of Windows and MacOS. I can't really pinpoint anything, but it just doesn't feel as polished. And that even includes the mainstream distros like Ubuntu.

i3, sway and pop shell aren't a subpar ripoff of anything. they are plain superior to what you can get on other platforms.

Pop is the only one of those three that I'm familiar with, but I'd very much call it a subpar MacOS ripoff.

Try cinnamon. It's better than the current generation of Windows UIs.

That’s funny because windows 11 is such a Gnome 40 copy that it hurts.

If that is true, it’s like saying iPhone has done some copying of Android and is too funny.

Still, Android dropped their entire Blackberry inspired/copied design and copied iPhone instead in 2007/2008.

It's not just true, but blatantly obvious. Compare the design language of Big Sur with GTK 3.38 which predated it, and as the other anon mentioned, Windows 11 is effectively just GNOME with Dash-to-dock enabled. Whether or not Microsoft knowingly copied it is a different argument, but I find it hard to believe that their designers weren't at least inspired by the touch-friendly, reactive desktop UIs built with GTK.

So does that not make what I said even stronger? It isn’t really that amusing for the original (iPhone, windows) to copy aspects of the original inspiring copiers.

>Not sure which features you mean

One of them is probably mmap(). Windows has something similar, but I wouldn't be surprised at some of the open source products just falling back to something slow instead of exploring options that would work well.

On Linux, I can even move my taskbar to the top of the screen or to the side and drag & drop things to the taskbar. So now I can't have my normal screen brightness shortcut on my taskbar nor is there a way I know of to use hotkeys to launch it via command other than 3rd party like Autohotkey. I tried Windows 11 and I can't forgive MS for taking away these simple and essential features.

Depends on what desktop you install I guess. There are some that have taskbar at top of screen by default, like Gnome afaik. I'm more of a taskbar at the bottom person myself and use cinnamon.

What features does Windows have that Linux doesn't?

The only one I can think of off the top of my head is HDR support, but that wouldn't affect these benchmark results.

Ads delivered via OS components, for one!

Windows 11 has things like core isolation and "memory integrity" on by default now and that, so I've heard, can lower benchmarks by 10%-20%. Not to mention Defender running in the background constantly scanning all processes, which unfortunately can't easily be disabled.

I wish I could downvote. On what basis do you state this: "which is basically way more functional and has way more features than linux did pretty well" ?

I've been on HN for 13+ years now.

I can assure you that there's a better way to get the right to downvote than pretending you don't understand at all why someone would say Windows is more usable than Linux, and not posting anything other than a quote and a wish you can downvote.

I suppose today's that day: I wasn't pretending, since I use all platforms.

> basically way more functional and has way more features than linux

Uh, I don't think it works that way. If your features get in the way of your performance, you're doing it wrong.

In addition, Fedora is not optimized for a particular CPU microarchitecture.

It does work that way.

Otherwise, we’d all be running a stripped down Clear Linux kernel, BusyBox, and a few tool chains.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. If performance was strictly dependent on features, as you say, then we would be running an extremely stripped down OS.

But it's otherwise, and no one does it, even those who care about performance (removing excessive services notwithstanding).

The point is people take trade-offs for performance vs. features. Features take up some measurable amount of performance.

It's a sliding scale, but everyone sits on that scale nonetheless.

Absolutely correct. There's a reason that Linux servers (and even some versions of Windows servers now) don't run a GUI, for example.

You got it in reverse then.

Last time I checked, performance was one of the benefits of the GNU environment over BusyBox.

Also, a lot of the features on the Linux kernel are there specifically to improve performance.

Plenty of features get in the way of performance. Or are you suggesting we should ditch animation, modern font rendering, file metadata, all permissions checks, most low level security features (ASLR, stack protection etc.), Spectre protection, high resolution displays, USB, frequency stepping, etc. etc. etc.

Windows has the tracking and telemetry requirement that Linux doesn't have to deal with. It must be tough spying on everything that the user does and keep the interface responsive enough :)

Only 11% slower is quite an achievement for Windows. I expected much slower.

Good job for Microsoft.

No, this is not sarcastic.

I unironically agree.

For those that don't, have you never put slackware on an ancient laptop and marvelled at the functional computer you've effortlessly created?

What about this though?:

'Windows 11 WSL2 Performance Is Quite Competitive Against Ubuntu 20.04 LTS / Ubuntu 21.10'

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=windows1...

At some point in the future, we'll see a blog post: "Run Your Windows Programs through WINE on WSL for Better Performance!"

It means: linux is fast even with windows disturbing it.

Windows 10 was supposed to be the last Windows and I'm sticking with it forever.

Hopefully you're joking. The day will come when none of your software will be updated on Windows 10, and it will become increasingly unusable. That day is still pretty far off, but it's going to come.

We're still using commercial software on W10 that was compiled for XP and shipped on CDROMS. The backwards compat on Windows is unreal and continues to be the major reason why I tend to stick my neck out for MS to the extent that I do. The OS is solid too, so hundreds of days of uptime on my desktop certainly doesn't hurt :D

If Windows continues in the direction it is headed, I will likely have given up on personal computing entirely by that point.

2025 is the cutoff year on Win 10 support.

:sadface:

I said that about XP, and then 7…

This is about how Microsoft marketed it.

One developer said it in an interview, and Microsoft never issued a correction. Microsoft never actually marketed it that way, and honestly I'm not sure why anyone even believed that developer at the time.

That being said, Windows 11 is a free upgrade. So aside from just not liking the changes (I personally like most of them) there's not much room to complain about Windows 10 not actually being the last version of Windows.

> Windows 11 is a free upgrade.

If your computer is new-ish.

Well, yeah. And I think that's ultimately why they bumped it up to 11, because they wanted to drop support for older hardware. Even if Windows 10 was going to be the "last version" of Windows, it would be insane to believe that it would continue to support all hardware forever.

That being said, the cutoff line for Windows 11 CPU support does seem to be a bit higher than necessary. But I don't know all of the reasoning behind why they chose the point that they did.

Vendor lock-in powered by SecureBoot.

And even if they did market it like that, why would anyone believe that at face value? When has that ever happened in software?

Like anything, you gotta dig a little deeper if you want know what something actually is.

it has an EOL in 2025. So no updates then anymore.

The switch to linux is much easier than expected. Try it?e.g. Regolith is great

I wouldn't outright recommend dropping Windows to switch to Regolith, but goddamn is Regolith a good OS. It really doesn't get enough love, I'm hoping that development doesn't taper off over the next few years...

True! Would be even greater with rolling released based distros... Is there smth similar based on arch or similar maybe? :D still looking for the optimal work distro

lol

I remember when Debian + Wine used to run Warcraft 3 faster and smoother than Windows. Might still be the case.

Once at a LAN party, every Windows machine had their Warcraft 3 playing on the same match crash simultaneously, but mine under Wine didn't. I had a good laugh.

>Windows 11 Pro: about 11% slower than Linux on Intel Core i9 11900K

I play a lot of games (Windows 10) and haven't found any that runs noticeably better under "Linux" (I usually tried Ubuntu and Manjaro). Best it's on par but sometimes even worse. And the old article with Windows 10 was actually even worse for Windows (15-20%) slower [1]. So this a good article, Windows is improving (or "Linux" getting worse)

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=windows-...

Gaming performance usually comes down to graphics drivers.

Also, some games are not native. The few which are, were ported with no care to make good use of the better linux features or syscalls. They were not optimized and it is a great feat of the kernel to still run them at good performance.

This is why you always have to benchmark YOUR software, your usecase. If Linux works better for your use of "dav1d" or whatever else is on this list, then it may be what you should be using. I use nothing on this list of benchmarks other than git, and I think I'm good on the trade offs here to move to desktop Linux. I personally love Windows 11 and typing this on it, with my 11900K. I won't be switching.

These benchmarks are quite general and good measurement of how high performant apps behave when running on different kernels. This advantage probably translates to other workloads as well.

At the least, these results show that software vendors could improve the performance of their applications by porting to linux.

You need to actually prove that for each piece of software being ported, otherwise it's an assumption for potentially a million dollar investment for what would be a very poor business decision. It always depends on who is paying, you?

If it were an outright win, we'd all be on desktop Linux ages ago. It's a trade off, and you lose a lot. Including customers, by wasting money on a desktop Linux port when you can deliver value where 95% of your customers are. The other 5% is macOS.

Your competition is most likely focused on Windows. Other than server usage that is, Linux is a fine server. For my money, if I did find a performance loss on Windows, I'd start by working on either improving my implementation, or if it is a kernel issue to collaborate with Microsoft to equalize that. Rather than kick off years of support, and potentially millions of dollars on what is comparatively a barren wasteland.

Not defending Phoronix' benchmarks, but do you ever play YouTube videos? If so, you're most likely using dav1d.

the only benchmark is care about is: how fast my project will compile

from my experience, linux compiles my code about 5-10x faster than on windows

This. I maintain a project that has to build about 28,000 object files. It takes less than a minute on Linux. Even though our binaries run on Windows, we willfully choose not to support building them on Windows. I tell people, trust me, it'll compile so much faster if you just create a Linux VM on your Windows computer and then run make there. But they never believe me until they see it with their own eyes. vfork() is a thing. It also helps to not have to fsync() on close() due to shortcomings with win32.

What about cross compiling Windows binaries from Linux with MinGW or the like?

I use something better than MinGW which lets the Linux binaries I build, run not only on Windows, but also Apple, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and boot from BIOS too. It's sort of like what Java promised to be with the whole saying, "build once run anywhere" except it actually is and it doesn't need an interpreter either.

Why are you compiling on your local machine? Do you live in a remote village without high-speed internet?

Am I supposed to be writing my code in the cloud?

Uploading a diff, compiling, and downloading the resulting artifact is usually extremely fast on modern internet connections.

> from my experience, linux compiles my code about 5-10x faster than on windows

If this is C++, you must be running GCC? And I'm guessing it might not be the MinGW version? Try Clang. Something GCC does makes its performance die on Windows. Not entirely sure what it is but you won't see this kind of a difference with Clang (or I think the MinGW version of GCC).

Well either that, or you're compiling a language that's so fast to compile that most of the time is spent just opening and closing files.

Linux is a pleasure to use with the terminal and your favorite UI. GCC, Neovim or whatever you use are easily usable. And yes - it is always compiling faster.

But I would say, honestly twice as fast ;)

In real world scenarios Windows will be probably even slower, to to installed secondary and tertiary Antivirus and bloatware on top and unmaintained drivers. While on Linux you better choose your hardware wisely before buying, than it will run smooth. Intel and AMD are always fine.

Yeah this lines up. Anything storage related on Windows is an order of magnitude slower. The way Linux has architected NVMe storage IO path vs Windows makes a huge difference.

Just too many layers of abstraction for the storage stack on Windows. It worked great when we had spinning HDDs and IO was much much slower than memory. Now with super fast IO all those layers are creating bottlenecks.

You’ll get faster speeds on Windows with WSL + ext3/4 than native Win + NTFS.

That's incredible!

Can you give us some more details outlining how you made the comparison, including what hardware, and what kind of code you were compiling?

It's not incredible. Many operations such as creating a new process and accessing a file, which are done thousands or millions of times when you compile an application, are much, much slower on Windows than on Linux. That time adds up.

> That's incredible!

That is not incredible. I've seen windows machines take minutes to compile project from arduino-ide that compiled in a few seconds on same class machines on linux with a few students.

I think it has to do with windows defender. It probably has to check binaries which are created or executed. I saw a student got a good improvement in compile times after disabling it. I didn't measure it, but I can say it was significant.

Kind of irrelevant if you need to run Photoshop, for example.

Would be interesting some Unity Editor benchmarks as well.

Soon... https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/photoshop-web-faq.ht...

In other news: Hammer cuts wood 23% slower than saw.

* Mjöllnir has entered the chat

I don't see any mention of Virtualization Based Security. Is that enabled for these tests? Because that makes a large difference in performance. With it disabled, 11 shouldn't run much different from 10.

That was the first thing I wanted to check. It seems the author isn't aware of the existing fuss surrounding this: https://hothardware.com/news/vbs-kills-win11-gaming-perf

Strange that windows 10 isn’t in the charts

TLDR: Benchmarks used:

  - ParaView
  - DaCapo Benchmark
  - Renaissance
  - TSCP
  - LuxCoreRender
  - dav1d
  - SVT-AV1
  - Stockfish
  - libavif avifenc
  - FLAC audio encoding
  - IndigoBench
  - Blender
  - Appleseed
  - WavPack Audio Encoding
  - Git
  - Chaos Group V-RAY

Clear linux is about 18% faster, other distros (Arch, Ubuntu 20.04, 20.10, Fedora Workstation 35) are 11% faster.

This feels like damning Linux with faint praise. You mean everyone who told me "Windows is way slower than Linux" were way off-base, and the reality is only 11%? It's almost an argument for switching to Linux not being worth not only configuration hassles, but not even the time investment to initially switch.

What an useless comparison...

That's Phoronix benchmarks in a nutshell.

Might be disturbing, but comparing those two OSs is a stupid thing at the first place because these 2 OSS have vast difference in background and functionalities.

Not surprising. I haven't used Windows 11 but both MacOS and Windows 10 feel more sluggish to me than Ubuntu.

What does Clear Linux do differently? Different config of frequencies or thermal throttling or something?

One of the problems with Phoronix benchmarks is that they don’t even try to build software properly, making sure it’s not using suboptimal flags and doesn’t artificially prefer one particular environment. One needs to take those results with a grain of salt.

I bet it's also 20% slower than Windows 10.

But how much faster is Windows 11 than Windows XP?

> Clear Linux performs well due to agressive compiler flags

Did they compare software built with different flags for different platforms?

Windows 11 contains ∞% more Win32 and directx on the other hand.

What do I care if another OS is faster if it can’t do what I want? Surely DOS on modern hardware is Lightning fast.

Wine is probably more conformant to Win32 than Windows 11. But the good news is that you can get it through WSL.

Linux has win32/directx API via wine project.

Is that any % slower or faster than using Windows directly?

It's usually faster. CreateProcess*() on windows is such a dog under windows. Many such cases.

Oh, indeed. I had the pleasure of installing MS DOS 6.22 on two machines a couple of years ago. Booting, after the BIOS had done its thing, was nearly instantaneous.

The installation procedure itself was also very fast (no surprise there), it took maybe five to ten minutes per machine, and I suspect it could have been faster if reading from floppy disks wasn't the bottle neck.

why would you need Win32 or DX?

IO? Networking? Win32 APIs are bad and slower

I'm pretty sure majority of people don't care about DX 12, as vulkan seems to get the lead, even on windows (DX 11 still probably is more popular, but also older)

Not to mention, sometimes you even see a performance increase when running DX code through Vulkan translation (DXVK).

If workloads are optimized for linux, run them in linux.

None of these benchmarks are really user experiences anyway and the differences are so low it doesn't matter.

Dumb title.

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