this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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Interesting, considering I haven't noticed... and gaming benchmarks have shown a minimal if any difference in gaming performance between Windows, stripped down Windows, and Linux. You'd have to split hairs to find it.
You notice it on old hardware. On my Latitude e6220 (i3 2nd gen) there is a night and day performance difference between windows 10 and Linux.
As someone with Ivy Bridge hardware that has run Windows 10 and Ubuntu... I haven't.
My 3570k very much enjoyed the switch but it's retired now. I can't imagine how it would have handled win11 based on the before/after of other computers I use.
Having installed Win11 on a PC with a 3570K it ran just fine. I don’t really see a difference in performance between 10 and 11 on desktops. I have an old ThinkPad with an i5 6300U and performance on that isn’t amazing, but I’ve never used 10 on it (bought it from the company I work for last year) so I don’t know if it doesn’t like 11 or that’s just how it is.
Ubuntu is heavy for a Linux distro, because it uses the heaviest DE (GNOME), uses the less optimized Snap packages, and perhaps has other Canonical telemetry or something.
If you want better performance, try something with a lightweight DE. I have a laptop running Lubuntu (essentially Ubuntu with LXQt instead of GNOME), and it's actually quite responsive, at least for basic system functions.
Because if you run anything on the web with a 10 year old CPU, it's gonna suck due to the huge web browsers accompanying the bloated websites. Even on a well optimized website, the browser overhead is significant on bad hardware, especially regarding the launch time of the browser.
I prefer and use Lubuntu, before going for Mint XFCE, and now Bazzite (because gaming). However, regardless of DE, because I absolutely pack my systems with RAM, the bottleneck is not the memory, it's the cpu in cases of old systems.
I use artix Linux with hyprland WM. System uses 384mb of ram on idle.
Edit: Even with extreme debloat you can't get this performance on windows.
I'm sorry but low RAM usage is not good performance, those are not the same.
Also, I've read somewhere that all memory not in use is wasted memory. I find that thought really interesting. If an operating system would be able to always maximize RAM usage by loading every peace of software and information it uses or is about to use without using swap or a pagefile it shoud be more responsive I think.
Yes, you are right. But windows load programs Into ram that I don't even want to use.
In addition to less ram usage thee is also less CPU usage and faster boot time (with HDD).
linux is caching a lot, if there's enough RAM. you can see it in the output of the "free" command.
however, nothing stops you from moving all the stuff you frequently use to a ramdisk. it's just uncomfortable copying it over and refreshing it as updates come in. also you may want to persist some files.
personally i have my shader caches on a ramdisk on some of my boxes. the gains are minimal.
But do it during install or you have to go behind and remove the eclipsed install stuff after.
And don't do it on systemd-afflicted systems as lennart's cancer makes that harder because he couldn't figure out why a /usr directory was useful and he ditched it. Dunning-kruger says what?
/usr was introduced because the original UNIX machine ran out of storage space and they had to mount a second drive.
I just memeory leak and gain infinite performance /s
Windows and Linux both heavily use RAM caching, that is, using Unused RAM as a massive disk cache to improve performance - a lot of Windows processes that are "running" are really idling in RAM and not doing anything unless called on. In a way, they're "cached". Because it is a read cache, it can be dismissed immediately to make room when needed.
Almost every problem with Windows running slow out of the box are one of three things:
1: Not enough RAM (stupid super cheap 4-8GB laptops)
2: Not enough storage (stupid super cheap 32-128GB laptops)
3: Installed on a hard drive (install Windows to an SSD, spinny bois are too slow for 2024)
It is true Windows 11 asks for about 5GB RAM, but what else does? Your web browser. The solution is to not be cheap and have at least 16GB RAM, regardless of your OS. You want to have no more than half your RAM used when you're using your PC. This gives you enough for programs, the disk cache, and room to grow.
Its an old laptop that only has 4 gigs of ram. I think performance is clearly visible when the fan in windows is spinning like crazy playing a YouTube video.
If you don't play game,I see no reason to need more than 8GB of RAM. My computer is running very quickly with 8GB, even if I am photo editing on one screen while watching videos on the second, with a few softwares and even a VM opened in the background.
But I don't use Windows.
I have a tablet with 8GB RAM... it feels constrained even though I'm running Mint Xfce with an idle memory usage of ~550MB. You may have grown used to the performance limitations.
Things open instantly when I click, it can't get snappier. And I use GNOME, which isn't the lighter solution.
Just install win95 !
Or 3.1 😅
oof an i3 though. modern winOS doesnt like i3's
i3 is just a class the generation matters a lot a current gen i3 is very fast.
Those were borderline even when new. I warned people that if you wanted hardware that lasted, i3s aren't going to cut it.
That's why it's considered, you know, old?
How is this relevant? If an OS performs better on old hardware, it's still an indication that it is more optimized.
If the requirement calls for it, don't run it on under-specced hardware and expect proper responsiveness.
All of this is still irrelevant. If given the same hardware, one OS performs better than another, then one OS is obviously more optimized...
You're saying a lot of words but it all just boils down to "throw more hardware at the problem".
Idk man. I have a brand new laptop my work got me and I notice it. Windows is just plain bad now. It’s like I go to save a file and the file browser window opens and I’m stuck sitting there waiting for minutes. It’s like I’m suddenly 10 again when you’d turn on your pc, go make breakfast, come back and hope your PC finished booting. Does it both on my work laptop running 11 and my PC at home running 10.
Your work laptop may have company spyware on it. That will drag down the performance of the system, especially if it is monitoring absolutely everything.
It doesn’t. I bought it with a company credit card and I don’t let IT touch it. I gotta do a lot of stuff in the field so I don’t have time to call IT every time I need to install a software update update.
The File Explorer behavior is something I’ve been noticing lately. I do have a number of cloud accounts connected for work, 2 One Drive, 1 dropbox, with a shit ton of files and folders (most not sync’d locally) and I wonder if File Explorer is looking through those when it opens.
Probably the cloud syncing then. That's always something that hurts performance. It would take investigating to find out what exactly is doing it.
Note: I've used OneDrive, Dropbox, and Nextcloud, and historically, all these services take up a good chunk of resources... Windows, Mac, Linux, you name it. I've tried it on them all.
Absolutely something related to Cloud drives and it trying to load something on slow bandwidth connections.
If my network drive at home is not connected windows becomes a slow behemoth. Connect the drive back and dayum it's fast.
That is not even remotely normal.
Normal enough I deal with it on 2 separate machines. One new and store bought, unmolested by IT lockdown bs, and the other I built and use really just for gaming. Idk man. I just feel like Windows has gotten worse and worse and I’m thinking of hopping back to Linux now that gaming is more accessible on it thanks to Proton, but I can’t completely get away from windows.
From my experience with the Steam Deck, gaming on Linux is more feasible than ever, but still far worse than on Windows, especially any time a game refuses to work. Don't get me wrong, it's a neat, even great device, but the OS is by far its biggest weakness, despite Valve's efforts to hide it as much from the user as possible and address its issues.
The OS is the biggest strength of the steam deck, and it's a big part of why it's by far the best gaming handheld.
That happens for me only if my network drives are not properly connected. Windows will absolutely take you on that until it's connected or times out.
Your only way out is to crash explorer.exe
Yeah, I'm currently upgrading our fleet of Windows 10 PCs at work to 11. I haven't noticed a significant difference either. Nor at home on my desktop or laptop. I think this guy might be affected by a driver bug or something.
The only time I've ever noticed a substantial difference is when enabling Windows' Virtualization-based security on hardware without support for things like MBEC/GMET.
It's the UI he's complaining about.
I disagree - Linux actually tanks GPU performance if you're VRAM limited. It's extremely unfortunate, as many games now have atrocious VRAM usage for no particular reason.
If you're not limited though, you're absolutely right, the difference is minimal and generally within margin of error. Some CPU bound games are better on Linux though, in a measurable way, specially if you're running bleeding edge distros.
EDIT: guys I use and love Linux, but we don't have to downvote me to pretend it's perfect, how about a DXVK developer confirming what I said.
A good number of games run better on Linux, I bet it will find it obvious on lower specced machines too. I just saw this video today and on Linux, it shows a 10 fps boost for most of the games demonstrated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3b50Stm8gu4
Yeah so pretty hard to generalize based on testing one setup. Ask most people with an Nvidia GPU how they like Linux gaming...
I think as long as it isn't the newest nvidia gpu, I've heard they're generally alright if you use the proprietary and non-free drivers.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=3b50Stm8gu4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
You could have read what the article was about, though.
It was pretty bad in the beginning. I suppose they have improved it.