Could this suggest that modern Windows is, dare I say it, MORE resource efficient than modern macOS?! That feels like a ludicrous statement to type, but the results seem to suggest as much.
Would explain why Windows runs faster.
The battery life argument was relevant, but where one sits on the issue is going to depend on the poison one picked.
Yawn. Ever heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family ?
Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genode ?
(Wenn man keine Ahnung hat...)
Keep your rude attitude to yourself.
Otherwise don't be offended when people are offended by regurgitated and meanwhile disproven non-sense.
kthxbye
If you machines have more RAM, you can use a more RAM intensive solution to speed many things up, or deliver a more computationally intensive but higher quality solution, or simply add a new previous challenging feature.
What would be interesting, is how fast to old but high spec'd models slow down. What slow downs are from optimizing for newer architectures, vs. optimizing with expectation of higher resources.
I will say the problem was a lot worse before the core explosion. It was easy for a single process to bring the entire system to a drag. These days the computer is a lot better at adapting to variable loads.
I love my macs, and I'm about 10x as productive as on a windows machine after decades of daily usage (and probably a good 2x compared to linux). Performance, however, is not a good reason to use macos—it's the fact that the keybindings make sense and are coherent across an entire OS. You can use readline (emacs) bindings in any text field across the OS. And generally speaking, problems have a single solution that's relatively easy to google for. Bad-behaved apps aside (looking at you zoom and adobe) administering a mac is straightforward to reason about, and for the most part it's easy to ignore the app store, download apps, and run them by double clicking.
I love linux, but I will absolutely pay to not have to deal with X11 or Wayland for my day-to-day work. I also expect my employer to pay for this or manage my machine for me. I tried linux full-time for a year on a thinkpad and never want to go back. The only time that worked for me was working at google when someone else broadly managed my OS. macs the only unix I've ever used that felt designed around making my life easier and allowing me to focus on the work I want to do. Linux has made great strides in the last two decades but the two major changes, systemd and wayland, both indicate that the community is solving different problems than will get me to use it as a desktop. Which is fine; I prefer the mac-style to the ibm pc-style they're successfully replacing. Like KDE is very nice and usable, but it models the computer and documents and apps in a completely different way than I am used to or want to use.
100% true, but I love Linux as a daily driver for development. It is the same os+architecture as the servers I am deploying to! I have had to carefully select hardware to ensure things like WiFi work and that the screen resolution does not require fractional scaling. Mac is definitely superior hardware but I enjoy being able to perf test the app on its native OS and skip things like running VMs for docker.
I'm not sure I understand the whole tinkering thing. Whenever I tinker with my Linux, it's because I decided to try something tinkery, and usually mostly because I wanted to tinker.
Like trying out that fancy new tiling Wayland WM I heard about last week...
1. You're trying to run it on hardware that isn't well-supported. This is a bummer, but you can't just expect any random machine (especially a laptop) to run Linux well. If you're buying a new computer and expect to run Linux on it, do your research beforehand and make sure all the hardware in it is supported.
2. You've picked a distro that isn't boring. I run Debian testing, and then Debian stable for the first six months or so after testing is promoted to stable. (Testing is pretty stable on its own, but then once the current testing release turns into the current stable release, testing gets flooded with lots of package updates that might not be so stable, so I wait.) For people who want something even more boring, they can stick with Debian stable. If you really need a brand-new version of something that stable doesn't have, it might be in backports, or available as a Snap or Flatpak (I'm not a fan of either of these, but they're options).
3. You use a desktop environment that isn't boring. I'm super super biased here[0], but Xfce is boring and doesn't change all that much. I've been using it for more than 20 years and it still looks and behaves very similarly today as it did when I first started using it.
If you use well-supported hardware, and run a distro and desktop environment that's boring, you will generally have very few issues with Linux and rarely (if ever) have to tinker with it.
[0] Full disclosure: I maintain a couple Xfce core components.
Two kinds of linux tinkering often get aliased and cause confusion in conversations.
The first kind is the enthusiast changing their init system bootloader and package manager and "neofetch/fastfetch" and WM and... every few weeks.
The second kind is the guy who uses xfce with a hidpi display who has to google and try various combinations of xrandr(augmented with xfwm zoom feature), GDK_SCALE, QT_SCALE_FACTOR, theme that supports hidpi in the titlebar, few icons in the status tray not scaling up(wpa_gui), do all that and find out that apps that draw directly with OpenGL don't respect these settings, dealing with multiple monitors, plugging in hdmi and then unplugging messing up the audio profile and randomly muting chromium browsers, deciding whether to use xf86-* Or modesetting or whatever the fix is to get rid of screen tearing. Bluetooth/wifi. On my laptop for example I had to disable usb autosuspend lest the right hand side USB-A port stop working.
If our threshold for qualifying well-supported hardware is "not even a little tinkering required" then we are left with vanishingly few laptops. For the vast vast majority of laptops, atleast the things I mentioned above are required. All in all, it amounted to couple of kernel parameters, a pipewire config file to stop random static noise in the bluetooth sink and then a few xfce setting menu tweaks (WM window scaling and display scaling). So not that dramatic, but it is still annoying to deal with.
The 2nd kind of tinkering is annoying, and is required regardless of distro/de/wm choice since it's a function of the layers below the de/wm, mostly the kernel itself.
I have been using XFCE for more than 10 years almost exclusively with multiple HiDPI monitors.
After Linux installation I never had to do anything else except of going to XFCE/Settings/Appearance and set a suitably high value for "Custom DPI Setting".
Besides that essential setting (which scales the fonts of all applications, except for a few Java programs written by morons), it may be desirable to set a more appropriate value in "Desktop/Icons/Icon size". Also in "Panel preferences" you may want to change the size of the taskbar and the size of its icons.
You may have to also choose a suitable desktop theme, but that is a thing that you may want to do after any installation, regardless of having HiDPI monitors.