Windows 11 Outperforming Linux on an Intel Arrow Lake H Laptop | Hacker News Reader

Windows 11 Outperforming Linux on an Intel Arrow Lake H Laptop

phoronix.com

83 pointstuananh72 comments

If Linux previously always outperformed Windows the result should be similar this time around as well. It could possibly be some missing feature or a bug in the linux drivers but it sounds unlikely to me. I mean the architecture isn't fundamentally different. Maybe windows ignores some thermal throttling? Something smells fishy here for sure.

Or maybe it is just better?

I doubt it.

There’s three possibilities.

1) Intel is optimising for common cases inside the most dominant desktop operating system.. this is like apple having really good floating point in their cpu’s that makes javascript not suck for performance… and is why macbooks feel snappy with electron.

2) Intel and microsoft worked together when designing the CPU, so Windows is able to take advantage of some features that Linux is only just learning how to handle (or learning the exact way it works).

3) The way the operating systems schedule tasks is better in this generation for Windows over Linux, by accident.

“it’s better” doesn’t really factor, Windows has been shown repeatedly over the last half-decade to be so inferior as to be beaten by Linux when Linux is emulating Windows APIs. It’s difficult to be so slow that you’re slower than someone emulating your platform.

It’s easy to be better when you only implement the mainline of the API

Glib, and not true.

Otherwise Windows could make WSL (1) faster than Linux, but they can’t because they don’t have the similar enough underlying operating system paradigms.

I could give examples, but I think just comparing native python performance on both platforms is the easiest case I can make without going into details.

WSL 1 was faster and better than WSL 2, but they abandoned it for its technical complexity and switched to containers / virtual machines, which create a slew of Other Problems.

yes, but was it faster than Linux?

I have no clue, I just know it was faster than Windows.

"Intel is optimising for common cases inside the most dominant desktop operating system."

- literally the history of Intel for more than 30 years and likely why we see this benefit now. gaming the compiler and hoping they wont get caught bought them a decade against AMD.

"Intel and microsoft worked together when designing the CPU"

- I guess the bitterness of Itanium doesnt last forever.

Neither of your three possibilities refute the parent hypothesis:

> Or maybe it is just better?

No, but if you continue reading the comment, you’ll read why I believe that’s not the case..

Well that too isn't exactly correct; Windows isn't getting beaten by Wine/Proton on Linux by any significant (nontrivial) margin; at best they're at par, and most of Linux's advantage comes from not having to bear the load of a thousand background processes (unlike Windows) when it's running a Windows app. I perfectly understand the appeal of desktop Linux being an avid user myself, but let's be real here, it's not very likely to run a Windows-native app or game much better than a debloated/LTSC Windows setup.

LTSC narrows it, sure. But 2025 benches prove Proton/Linux beats stock/debloated Win still. [0][1]

Handhelds crush: Bazzite/SteamOS +20-36% FPS on ROG Ally X/Legion Go. Cyberpunk 39FPS@20W Linux vs less Win; Returnal 33 vs 18. [2][3]

AMD desktop: CachyOS +15-80FPS (Cyberpunk/CS2) on RX5700XT vs Win11. Smoother 1% lows too. [2]

NVIDIA par/mixed, tweaks needed.

Vulkan+NTSync > DX overhead. 90% Steam games? Linux wins now.

Anti-cheat blocks the rest.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1pxtcv3/rx_57...

[1]: https://gamersnexus.net/gpus/rip-windows-linux-gpu-gaming-be...

[2]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/06/games-run-faster-on-s...

[3]: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-ROG-Xbox-Ally-with-Bazzit...

I don't see a comparison in [1]

The first video

I'd wonder about the performance impact of windows defender and the like.

I'd really wonder if one took a game that was on both xbox and linux. constructed a linux box to have basically as close to specs as on the xbox and then benchmarked the games against each othe, what would would see.

I'm not saying that linux is better than windows or that windows is better than linux, just that I think its very hard to make an apples to apples benchmark comparison and there are constant services on windows that run that one doesn't generally have running on a linux system that can cause problems.

I agree, but it sort of doesnt change anything.

You buy Windows as a product, and those subsystems are so spidered in that turning them off is not possible, and if it even was possible it would have some impact.

You buy Windows for games, thats been the consensus for years, the NT kernel could in theory run games 10x better, but it doesn’t mean anything because you only get it, with Windows.

So, an Apples to Apples comparison is Bazzite. The general purpose operating system you install and play games on. No need to apologise for Microsofts choices.

On only one laptop?

> On only one laptop?

That's how a good benchmark looks like. From ancient wisdom (Linux Benchmarking Howto): " 5.3 Proprietary hardware/software

A well-known processor manufacturer once published results of benchmarks produced by a special, customized version of gcc. Ethical considerations apart, those results were meaningless, since 100% of the Linux community would go on using the standard version of gcc. The same goes for proprietary hardware. Benchmarking is much more useful when it deals with off-the-shelf hardware and free (in the GNU/GPL sense) software. "

The oddity is that Windows is slower everywhere but on this one specific kind of laptop, as far as I understand. If it's not a quirk of the laptop, windows would be better everywhere.

I appreciate the fact that they waited two months to check their results before sharing them publicly. However, this feels like there should be a hypothesis for explaining the difference other than “this fits expectations”, especially after the author extensively claims this does not fit their own expectations. Did I miss something?

Unfortunately, I don't have any added insight/hypothesis besides maybe something power managemen beyond what was detailed in the article... Lenovo and Intel believe it's inline with expectations and they used various internal tools and what not but hadn't provided me with any detailed data on everything they checked or any own internal numbers. SO I don't really have anything else to add there.

But it doesn't align with the last 12~20 laptops I've tested between Ubuntu Linux and Windows out-of-the-box where if loading up say V-RAY, IndigoBench, Blender, etc, and using the official binaries on each platform, Linux has typically always dominated in said workloads for both AMD and Intel laptops. So something isn't aligning quite right there with this ThinkPad versus all the other hardware I have tested with Windows vs. Linux.

Did the 1T benchmarks actually run on P cores?

I don't follow your publications so sorry if this is a dumb question, but do you modify/normalize or at least inspect the hidden power settings at all before running benchmarks? Like "processor performance autonomous mode" or the various efficiency-class-related settings, say? Or the various firmware settings, like cool-and-quiet or whatever they are?

Also, have you tried Windows 10?

Can you run a regression against older Windows/Linux builds?

A real explanation would have been something along the lines of

- Intel optimized something MS asked for, so now X and Y syscalls are faster

- MS wrote some super-optimized BLAS/LAPACK libraries for this exact CPU which were are not (yet) available on Linux

-Intel added management things specifically for Windows.

Do you have your test harness published somewhere to replicate, i.e. what settings you use for thermals at the UEFI layer as well as OS layer, any scheduler changes you might make, driver versions installed, etc.?

They could’ve ran a regression against older Windows/Linux builds, to see if this abnormality is specific to this hardware or caused by the software.

If there is a measurable performance differential, then such a big gap is actually a good sign. There is probably one thing massively broken, and not a systems design problem that needs a man-year to resolve if FOSS folks ever agree how to fix it.

I recently learned that my device won't display UHD movies in Linux on my projector because HDMI is vendor-locked to Windows... Maybe this is something similar (a driver that was not done right)

"your device" being a regular computer? And are you referring to HDCP applied to spinny-discs, or any 4k/UHD-resolution streams or video files you open while plugged into the projector?

Wonder if it has something to do with licensed features:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46002989

(i.e. no license, have to fallback to unaccelerated software-only implementation)

wow we need license to enable features already supported by hardware.

prev i only saw this practice in data center space.

I ran the Stockfish 17.1 speedtest on my dual-boot computer and got:

  Windows: 60,354,829 Nodes/second
  Pop!_OS: 68,402,540

This looks less like “windows is outperforming” and more like “Linux in this config is severely handicapped by <issue> and is running at 50% of potential”

As a scientist myself I would do my best to figure out why before publishing something like this.

Have some oe on something similar, we created two laptops that ran Linux to mimic something in our plant, the issue with them though was drivers, we got the bleeding edge and components like the network card and graphics card just didn't work for a month or two until new drivers came out. It was red hat from maybe 2020 time frame.

It could be that they chose something bleeding edge and the hardware drivers were built for windows but might be a couple revisions behind for the Linux equivalents. It could be the development cycle for windows vs that of Linux and how they integrate with new hardware. Just a hypothesis.

Could windows be using binaries optimised for that specific processor? "Simply" running apt-build world would possibly fix it if that's the case.

Could this be due to how Windows vs Linux does process scheduling on CPUs with P- and E-cores?

To my knowledge Linux isn’t that capable on BIG.little architectures, and Linux power-management (as this intersects with) has always left a little to be desired - when comparing battery life to Windows.

Disclaimer: pure speculation. Possibly misinformed :-D

> Could this be due to how Windows vs Linux does process scheduling on CPUs with P- and E-cores?

Had the same thought: I would also expect this to be an artifact of suboptimal scheduling on Linux or some otherwise unidentified issue.

Linux is usually outperforming Windows by a good margin on the same hardware.

Also, in my experience, Windows 11 does not improve performance compared to Windows 10 (I have to use both versions at my dayjob).

I would be very surprised if this isn’t an issue with drivers or scheduling.

I have a 13th gen desktop and laptop, both running Linux. They work just fine.

> To my knowledge Linux isn’t that capable on BIG.little

Android uses Linux as it kernel and runs on billions of devices with heterogeneous cores. Linux had this capability for way longer than Windows did; Windows for the most part did not run on devices with heterogeneous cores until the Intel Alder Lake (12th gen) CPUs.

Win11 outperformed Linux at Alder Lake release too [1] but eventually this changed and Linux was better on Meteor Lake [2]. Probably Arrow Lake has some microarchitectural changes which do not mesh well with Linux's core scheduling logic which Intel will need to fix, at which point Linux will probably close the gap again.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/review/alderlake-windows-linux/9 [2] https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-meteorlake-windows-lin...

> Android uses Linux as it kernel and runs on billions of devices with heterogeneous cores. Linux had this capability for way longer than Windows did; Windows for the most part did not run on devices with heterogeneous cores until the Intel Alder Lake (12th gen) CPUs.

The extra capabilities of Android come from custom patches from Qualcomm kernels. They are so far diverged from the mainline, it is really really hard to merge it back. They not only add drivers but patch the kernel itself. Windows NT can have hints for thread scheduling from the userspace since they control Win32. Now the question becomes is there a way to patch Glibc and all other system libraries on Linux to give equal information to Linux kernel. Of course Linux kernel can guess but it is a lossy information channel.

Yep I suspect this too from the benchmarks. The linux kernel doesn't send the instructions to the right cores and likely sees them all as the same and not 'high power' vs 'low power' cores

When Intel released their P/E architecture, Windows took a long time to adapt the scheduler to them. Linux destroyed it in every benchmark for months.

I'm surprised the choice of operating system can have such a large impact on performance. I would have expected the performance was more dependent on the application, not the OS.

In parallel to your tested application, CPU and memory are also clogged by running the ads for the Start menu, telemetry, disk encryption… and, concerning Windows, its architecture is famously too encapsulate recursively every previous version of Windows so that legacy programs can run seamlessly, which explains the disk size and may have impact on the daemons.

This is a strange test to care about. As if people choose linux vs. windows based off of performance on one specific benchmark on one specific hardware platform.

Normally phoronix does the work but I am irritated that he just used Ubuntu to test the machine instead of verifying it with a different distro.

Because Ubuntu is where I typically test against given its marketshare and enterprise use/support. And what I typically test against for my Windows vs. (Ubuntu) Linux comparisons. If going for CachyOS or Arch Linux because it's "faster" would conceal the fact that Ubuntu Linux is typically faster than Windows 11 but on this system at least is not.

Yes but the headline should reflect that. Generally saying Linux performs worse is a bit of a exaggeration if you only tested one distro. Next time throw in fedora, I wouldn't care about caschy or arch benchmarks because of the reasons you stated but it would give your headline more merit. Especially if the headline is as generalized as it stays at the moment. To be honest it's what I would expect if you see an outlier like we see now.

Lemmy people say that it's because of the outdated drivers ubuntu has. How do you think?

These differences are so extreme that there must be something going on.

Sometimes speed isn't everything too.

As much as I want to use Linux on the desktop I've had terrible cases of instability:

My hardware on Windows 10 works perfectly well. Literally 11 years of being super stable, running assorted workloads (WSL 2, Docker based development, browsers, heavy terminal based workflows with Neovim, tmux, etc., video recording and editing, image editing, gaming, etc.). There's no lag, jittering or instability. My system never crashes or has weird issues requiring a reboot on Windows 10.

1 day into using Arch Linux, as soon as my GPU's memory gets close to 75% full then apps crash, my Wayland based window compositor (niri) starts to fail in unpredictable ways and I have to reboot basically every 3 hours because of GPU memory usage.

It's not stable or very usable IMO.

All I did was open 3 Firefox windows and 2 Ghostty terminals. Both apps are hardware accelerated so they use GPU memory.

Windows seems like it does something magical with how it offloads GPU requested memory to system memory in a transparent way if GPU memory is full but Linux, at least with the official proprietary 580 series DKMS NVIDIA drivers doesn't seem to do this with my GTX 750 Ti. Instead, I get kernel errors from the NVIDIA drivers when it fails to allocate memory, such as:

    kernel: [drm:nv_drm_gem_alloc_nvkms_memory_ioctl [nvidia_drm]] *ERROR* [nvidia-drm] [GPU ID 0x00000100] Failed to allocate NVKMS memory for GEM object

It's wild that my system can be using 2 GB out of 16 GB of system memory at 5% CPU load with no disk I/O happening but I can't run a few apps in parallel, it's especially bad when trying to record 1080p videos with OBS. I recorded literally over 1,000 videos on Windows without a single hiccup.

I wrote a lot more details about this Linux issue in an Ask HN but it didn't gain traction https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46436245.

I have to hand it to Windows with how it manages system memory and "just works", especially with older hardware.

Also as an aside, Ghostty on this Linux machine is very slow compared to the Windows Terminal. Opening half a dozen Neovim splits on my 4k monitor completely tanks its performance to where there's a lot of input lag and jitters. The screen redraws are very slow. The Microsoft Terminal had no issues with the same Neovim version and configs running in Arch Linux within WSL 2, it was buttery smooth. I opened a discussion about this on Ghostty with more information https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/10114.

In 2019 I tried switching to native Linux and it failed with my Scarlett 2i2 USB audio interface. I got endless crackles and pops and after 5 days of debugging and trying everything I gave up and went back to Windows.

In Dec 2025 I tried switching to native Linux with the same hardware and the audio problems are solved but now there's this GPU memory problem. I spent another few days debugging as much as I could but it's looking like it's back to Windows.

I think the GPU issues probably won't be solved in 7 years because NVIDIA said they are going to end of life the 580 series drivers in August 2026 and the 590+ series don't support my card. The open source drivers produced a worse experience, it wouldn't let me use my 4k monitor and hard locked my machine a few times.

> 1 day into using Arch Linux (latest kernel)

Arch, btw, is notoriously unstable. Back in 2012 I caught them enabling experimental kernel memory paging modules. Soon after my system got bricked. Maybe you want fedora or rocky.

That was anectodotal and thirteen years ago. Arch is just as stable as other distros (very)

Google arch bricked.

Laptop manufacturers aren't bribed to care about anything other than WIndoze??? Colour me shocked.

The consumer loses out but that's not something new either.

This isn’t about kernels. Ubuntu. Look at the ps ax list from a default ubuntu it’s like 300 processes it’s ridiculous.

There is no context here for most obvious and important differences between Windows and Linux. Nor does this article note the furor over the forced obsolesce of millions of PC's because of (drum roll) Windows 11.

Responsible articles and journals note these things.

Why would the "force obsolescence of millions of PCs" be relevant to this article about benchmark results of one specific laptop model?

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