18 ms·

Ubuntu squeezes more performance than Windows 11 on new AMD Zen 4 Threadripper

351 points by marcodiego 3y ago

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Not surprised though, with AMD being able to patch the Linux kernel and scheduler to its liking in order to squeeze out the maximum performance for it's architecture, versus depending on Microsoft to have the good will to figure it out on their own dime. I'd be curious if the businesses buying these $20k+, 96-core, HEDT workstations actually do run Windows on them in order for this to be that big of a problem for Microsoft worth addressing, or if it's Linux all the way anyway for them so Windows isn't even on the radar. Anyone here in the know? Also, obligatory: "But can it run Crysis?" (in software render)
- kelsolaar 3y ago
  Epic Games runs mostly Windows Threadrippers for Unreal Engine development. Compiling Unreal faster, or anything really, even Windows itself is a compelling argument.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  The portion running a hypervisor would also be interesting to know. That’s one hell of a processor.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  One of the major markets for these would be visual art studios. They aren't generally Linux shops.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    Funny you mention this because a lot of big visual arts studios use Mac for the artwork in the Adobe ecosystem, and heavily invested in Linux for the 3D rendering pipelines as they moved away from SGI/BSD with Windows almost nowhere on the radar. I'd estimate the number of big-name shops running Windows is a minority with only smaller indie studios like Corridor Digital being all-in on Windows because it's a jack of all trades can-run-anything OS, and managing that one ecosystem without sys-admins and an internal IT department is a lot cheaper easier for small businesses of amateur-professionals.
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      "a lot" is nowhere near "all"
      - worthless-trash 3y ago
        And none is nowhere near "a lot".
        wiz21c 3y ago
        None is nowhere, a lot is somewhere and all is everywhere. sort of.
        throwatacoatme 3y ago
        [dead]
    - bryanlarsen 3y ago
      My experience is exclusively with small studios, which were Windows shops.
    - gamblor956 3y ago
      The majority of professional movie and television VFX work is now done on Windows and Linux computers, with Linux especially being used for the rendering portion of the process. Mac was the dominant platform for a long time, but Windows caught up and zoomed past Mac about a decade ago. Same or better performance, cheaper hardware, cheaper software, easier to upgrade/repair, and more choice for all of the above. There's a reason that Apple has to pay big bucks to Olivia Rodrigo and others to use Apple products to film and edit their music videos: it's because Apple fell out of favor with creatives and Apple is trying to buy its way back in.
      - steve1977 3y ago
        I think Apple lost a lot of goodwill in the market with the desaster that was the initial release of Final Cut Pro X (and rightly so probably). And now I see quite a few people moving away from Premiere to Resolve, which seems to take a pretty platform-agnostic stance.
  - scheeseman486 3y ago
    The improvements coming for Wayland's HDR/color management are likely to help with that, as the features they're aiming for appears to beat Window's more slapdash implementation with per-window color management, where window contents are accurately tonemapped and composited within the widest color space the monitor supports. Adobe would need to be incentivized to port their suite over for it to be taken seriously, but maybe Wine could bridge that gap at first. Ah, the mythical Linux Desktop. One day...
    - jwells89 3y ago
      Will Wayland be able to render mixed HDR and SDR content correctly, with e.g. an HDR video on YouTube rendering with extended range while the rest of the screen renders as normal? Currently only macOS can do that. With Windows you have to choose between SDR and HDR display modes which affects everything on screen regardless of type, which makes SDR content look dingy in HDR mode.
      - kstrauser 3y ago
        On that subject, anyone know why shifting to HDR dims everything that way? My mental model of it is that SDR brightness goes from 0 to 100, and HDR brightness goes from -100 to 100, and that turning on HDR moves everything not HDR-aware down to the bottom of the brightness space. I could look this up, but never think about it outside of conversations like this and figure it might be more fun to talk about it.
        wmf 3y ago
        It's more like SDR goes from 0 to 255 and HDR goes from 0 to 1024. In SDR mode, 255 = (say) 500 nits while in HDR mode 1024 = 1000 nits and thus 255 = 250 nits so SDR content looks dimmer.
        dagmx 3y ago
        Consider that your display can only do 0-100 brightness (not really but for sake of argument) In SDR, you map the full SDR range (also 0-100) to that 0-100. When you add HDR, you’re now adding levels above 100 (let’s say 0-200). If your display can only do upto 100, you now need to put all the 0-100 stuff in 0-50. Or you get a display that can also display 0-200. Very few computer displays can do over a standard SDR range of 500 nits.
  - jamesfmilne 3y ago
    We sell systems based on these high-end workstations and yes they do run Linux, Rocky Linux 8 at the moment. Still stuck on Xorg because reasons, but for HDR monitoring you're usually using a display interface card with SDI or HDMI outputs anyway.
- jackmott42 3y ago
  Pretty sure Microsoft is very cooperative on working with AMD and others on this stuff, it may just take a little longer in this case.
  - dboreham 3y ago
    > versus depending on Microsoft to have the good will to figure it out on their own dime. Cutler stated in a recent interview that he had a 96-core machine as one of his two daily drivers. I wondered at the time if he pre-announced that CPU since the press about it seemed to reach me a few days later.
    - vluft 3y ago
      Epyc has had 96-core cpus out for a bit over a year now, so probably that.
- chaosbutters314 3y ago
  ive worked at companies where we buy these types of workstations for fea/cfd/ML if the company has a overbearing IT, we run windows for "security". at places where we move fast and break things, we run ubuntu and IT says for us to manage it ourselves. for anyone wondering why we done use the cloud or a server, we do too. but model setup, licensing, and small jobs are easier and quicker to do locally.
- ThrowawayB7 3y ago
  > "...depending on Microsoft to have the good will to figure it out on their own dime." They don't have to figure it out on their own; everybody maintains close contact. For example, Intel has a field office literally one block away from Microsoft's main campus. One would assume AMD also has a field office similarly near by. (EDIT: they do, a couple of blocks further.)
atoav 3y ago
Back in the day I used Linux for rendering my Blender animations because my tests had shown it was 10% faster than the same machine running Windows 10. With render times of more than 8 days this quickly paid off.
- okl 3y ago
  I noticed that AMD/Xilinx Vivado synthesis runs 20% faster on WSL2 than on Windows. After seeing such differences using it on plain Windows becomes unpleasant.
  - stephen_g 3y ago
    Yeah, when I was doing more of that sort of thing I'd generally use ISE or Vivado on a big Ubuntu server and VNC or X-forward it to my machine (the X forwarding could be a bit janky with Vivado but it was OK for getting things going in a pinch).
JVIDEL 3y ago
Win11 its such a dumpster fire they had to stop selling Win10 licenses to force people to upgrade. Add to that porting copilot to Win10 because there aren't enough Win11 users around.
- pavlov 3y ago
  We’ve heard this for every version of Windows for the past twenty years or more. When XP was new, there were people refusing to upgrade from Win2000 to “Fischer-Price Windows”. Well, all versions except Vista — everybody seemed happy to upgrade to Windows 7. (Of course the lesson Microsoft drew from that smooth upgrade was to blow up everything for the next version. “They want tablet interactions, they just don’t know it!”)
  - Sesse__ 3y ago
    Win8 (and Win8.1) also had the same reception. People were, of course, more than happy to move to Win10, which contained most of the under-the-hood improvements from Win8 and had a more traditional UI. (Also, with Vista → 7, it didn't hurt that machines had gotten more powerful in the meantime, so the extra RAM usage didn't really matter much anymore.)
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Yes, we were. But have we been fundamentaly wrong?
  - avtolik 3y ago
    O no. I absolutely agree with the GP. I was fine with every windows after and including XP. Until I received a company laptop with win 11. I have a big fat list of things that are super annoying or bugs.
  - patentatt 3y ago
    Anecdotal, but I went 2000 -> 7 -> 10, skipping XP, Vista, and 8. Given that cadence, will hopefully be skipping 11 as well and waiting for whatever is next.
- withinboredom 3y ago
buggythebug 3y ago
performance means nothing if the software you require doesn't run on it
- nicolaslem 3y ago
  We are at a stage where games built for Windows actually run better on Linux so this argument will probably not be relevant for too long anymore.
  - Novosell 3y ago
    If they run at all, that is. The latest update to League of Legends seems to have broken it for all Linux users.
    - tyfon 3y ago
      WoW also crashes randomly every 30 minutes using lutris after the latest update, it's quite annoying. This happens on both my wife and my computer. She has an AMD gpu and I have a nvidia. Otherwise it has been running really well.
    - deleted 3y ago
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  - uxp8u61q 3y ago
    You mean some games built for Windows run better on Linux (and I'd be curious to know which ones actually run better). Some games barely run on Linux, some just don't work, some get broken by new versions, etc. And computers aren't just for gaming. Some people actually work with their computers. Let me know when photoshop or autocad run smoothly on Linux.
    - heyoni 3y ago
      Cyberpunk runs exactly 3fps lower on NixOS than on windows during benchmarks on ultra, with dlss and ray tracing. Totally negligible performance difference but being on Linux is not.
whalesalad 3y ago
I have two rigs here at home. A 12700k gaming box with a high end Nvme disk. Also, a 13900k workstation with Nvme disks as well. The gaming box runs Windows 11, and it feels generally snappy until I’m navigating the filesystem or dealing with compression. On the flip side the other box is running Debian 12 and feels significantly faster. Could be 12th gen vs 13th gen but I don’t think that’s the case.
- codeflo 3y ago
  I have a Zen 2 Threadripper box that I dual boot (it's a workstation for coding that I sometimes play games on), and I can confirm. I don't know what the exact technical reason is or why nobody in Redmond is embarrassed. But anything relating to the filesystem is simply dog-slow on Windows, and the more high-end your system is, the more this becomes the major bottleneck.
  - juujian 3y ago
    The day I realized I could find files by file extension just like that in less than seconds from the terminal or nautilus changed my life.
  - dboreham 3y ago
    It's because the NT filesystem is optimized for a different workload. This is why WSL2 (which you should be using) uses ext4 (that's the default with an Ubuntu distro, at least).
    - whalesalad 3y ago
      > the NT filesystem is optimized for a different workload a different workload than browsing files in explorer?
      - formerly_proven 3y ago
        TWUP (Transactional Windows Update Processing)
fredgrott 3y ago
I just did a mind meld of what one needed to do to get a M3 performance wise through using NVIDIA and Intel chips... Take away a 13900 or 14000 intel CPU and an NVIDIA 4090 will give m3 performance...cheap ipower tower at best buy for $1800...see https://fredgrott.substack.com/p/beating-m3-in-a-flutter-dev-machine https://fredgrott.substack.com/p/beating-m3-in-a-flutter-dev... Had to figure out which way to go with the assumption that production app builds was through cloud...currently thread ripper cannot beat intel 13900 and 14000. Given the different boost setups not sure why the difference.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  > a 13900 or 14000 intel CPU and an NVIDIA 4090 will give m3 performance ??? These are not comparable CPUs with similar core counts or clock speeds. Apple doesn't even sell a GPU that you can compare to the 4090 in benchmarks.
- whalesalad 3y ago
  The latest AMD HEDT processors just dropped. They smoke the top end Intel chips (14900K) but they cost 3-5k a piece lol. https://www.phoronix.com/review/threadripper-7970x-7980x-linux https://www.phoronix.com/review/threadripper-7970x-7980x-lin... Assuming money is no object: If you want fast cores, get an Intel. If you want lots of cores, get AMD. I was with you until you said 4090... of course that is going to smoke an M3 it's a $2000 GPU. When you consider the M3 is a CPU and GPU combined, it is a pretty compelling offering.
- blackoil 3y ago
  Apple will not be value for money for desktops, especially if you need large RAM, disk. Top of the line Max won't beat mid range 40xx. For laptop though build quality, battery life screen etc. matter. I was looking for a personal desktop 6 months back, building an Intel based was no brainer. And now I can upgrade SSD/RAM and graphics as my need budget evolve.
criddell 3y ago
I hope the community really gets behind Snap or Flatpak or one of the other systems for bringing a modern permissions and privileges system to the Linux desktop. It would help me be a lot more comfortable recommending Linux to non-technical people. What distro would you recommend to somebody like me who wants to be asked before an application gets access to my location, microphone, camera, network, etc...?
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  [deleted]
  - bmicraft 3y ago
    It's a well known fact that firefox startup time when packaged as snap is significantly worse. This should be less noticeable for actual use. > On Firefox 119 I thought I was losing my mental faculties (even more) since I kept losing track of the cursor for a whole day. Turns out that it’s a Windows “feature” where you hide the cursor when you start typing into some input box. Maybe this is a Firefox-wide regression on Linux though. Difficult to find other examples of it on Linux via Google. Firefox hides the cursor while typing, but it should unhide as soon as it's moved (at least it does for me) > - More fun than a problem: `firefox --version` spews a warning: `update.go:85: cannot change mount namespace according to change mount ...` > - My dear XCompose wasn’t respected because of course you have to copy it to inside some dang `/home/me/snap/common/utensils/computer-applicances/apps/Firefox` tree Those should both be snap specific. > - The keyboard just does not work sometimes. No other apps seem to have this problem. So it’s apparently not some idiotic “applications that use X work but under Wayland it doesn’t” (or vice versa). Does a restart help? No. Seemingly only a computer reboot. I don't know about that one. Could be Ubuntu or snap, but it does not happen on Arch. Out of curiosity, are you running firefox through xwayland or native wayland? (It says so on the about:support page under "Window Protocol")
    - deleted 3y ago
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underseacables 3y ago
I've been playing around with Ubuntu training myself for the day that I have to give up windows 10. My only complaints are that Linux can be tedious, everything is just 43 commands away; it requires greater understanding of not just what the system is doing, but how it is doing it; and the documentation is written like a Wikipedia article on advanced nuclear theory. Windows and OSX have, for the most part, just worked, and it was easier for me to understand what was going on, and how to engage tasks, fix problems, and use the system. With Linux it can feel like I'm fighting with the system at times. I'm enjoying the experience but it has not been without frustration. Perhaps I should have chosen another flavor?
- noir_lord 3y ago
  > Perhaps I should have chosen another flavor? That'll ignite a holy war. The trick with linux isn't to learn the flavour, it's to learn linux - once you get an overview of how all the bits work then switching distro is (much) more straightforward. Ubuntu is an excellent first choice because it's one of the major distro's so you'll be able to google stuff more easily. My personal recommendation would be Fedora (and if you want a familiar windows 10 at least in approach GUI) Cinnamon which is excellent.
  - xattt 3y ago
    Any comment on Arch one you get going? I find the documentation quite thorough for the niggly bits, and have used it to troubleshoot Ubuntu (taking into account differences between the distros).
    - II2II 3y ago
      I am an Arch enthusiast since I like building my system up and learning how things are put together, but it is not a terribly good platform for learning how to use or manage a Linux system. One of the issues is that you end up with a system is tailored to your own needs. While that sounds great, you have to make an effort to generalize those skills since no one else will have a setup quite like yours.
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jerf 3y ago
If Microsoft backs off core Windows development, which it certainly seems like they are, this is what we'd expect to see... not a big bang where it suddenly stops working, but every year it'll just sort of fall a bit more behind Linux, until in 4 or 5 years the difference consensus will slowly just creep over to Windows being noticeably worse than Linux without any big bang switchover... and it'll sneak up on Microsoft as much as it sneaks up on everyone else. To be honest, Linux as a desktop environment is already more usable than many people realize. People kept expecting a Big Bang where someone would put out The Release That Solves Everything, but what happened instead is that it just kept creeping up and creeping up. A similar thing happened to Linux gaming; Valve never put out a big Here's Linux For Games release, it just crept up and crept up to the point that it basically runs my entire library, and single-player gaming is now to the point that anything that doesn't run in Linux is the exception, not the rule. And Microsoft's problem is that if they let this happen, they're going to be in a world of hurt when they decide to get in gear and fix it, because of their reverse compatibility support. Fixing all that up and trying to make everything go fast is going to be hard with all these systems interacting with each other. While we Linux users may piss and moan about systemd transitions or all the audio transitions, in the Linux world, as new subsystems come in, the old ones actually go away, and it isn't dragging anywhere near as much reverse compatibility baggage around. Helps that there aren't any project managers to demand Windows LDAP for COM Apartments Over Embraced And Extended USB to be jammed in to be supported 10 years later because one big client uses it and that mean the rest of us get to be running a WLCAEEUSB service on our computers for the next 15 years, causing occasional mysterious crashes when it spuriously grabs a USB device. It seems to me Microsoft is in grave danger of walking itself into an MBA trap, where investement in Windows doesn't pay off this quarter so they don't, repeat for 15 or 20 quarters, and then waking up one day and realizing that one quarter at a time they threw away one of the most useful business positions in the history of the world.
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  Microsoft should invest in Proton, make Windows apps work seamless on linux, and then just make a "Windows" replacement for Wayland that runs on Kernel... Then, and only then, will we have "The year of the linux desktop"
hospitalJail 3y ago
I noticed a performance increase over windows 11 on my setup as well. I thought it was just a fresh install thing, but its been months and still flies. Highly recommending Fedora Cinnamon.
the8472 3y ago
Doesn't windows have some limitation where a process will only see up to 64 threads by default and it'll have to opt into some new APIs to use more? Maybe some of the results are an artifact of that.
- dblohm7 3y ago
  No
twoodfin 3y ago
Why wouldn’t the first assumption be that the bulk of these differences arise from compiler and runtime library (memcpy, etc.) efficiency distinctions rather than the OS? I appreciate that to the end user it doesn’t matter which parts of the stack are better tuned, but framing this as “Windows vs. Linux” seems unjustified without more evidence.
- deleted 3y ago
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- gmueckl 3y ago
  I can't find any mention of the compilers, compiler settings or whether any prebuilt binaries were used. That makes it even harder to distinguish between compiler and runtime performance impacts.
nerdjon 3y ago
This alone isn't surprising, but what I really want to know is if this hit is something fundamentally wrong with Windows or is it the overhead of all of the stuff that Windows runs that doesn't need to run, since it mentions "out of the box" windows. Is the performance difference as large on a LTSC version of Windows 10? If it needs something in Windows 11, would it be as big of a difference on the LTSC version of Windows 11 when that comes out (I know we can't answer this at the moment)? I would never use Windows on a server, but I am very curious about where the difference really is. Part of why I am really curious is that on my Steam Deck I run the LTSC version of Windows 10 and got better performance on my games on Windows 10 vs SteamOS. That is just gaming, but it has made me more curious about what the reality is.
doublerabbit 3y ago
Ubuntu is such a turn-off experience for servers. The cloud-init feature is atrocious. You download a "server-live" iso. 2GB. However this uses the cloud-init to download the required files. Why did I download a 2GB file if your going to download it from the net anyway? There is no option to not install from the net without removing network adapter. Boggles me why am I being asked to upgrade my installer while installing, what's the point in that? "There is a new version on GitHub" ... If your shipping an installer it should install. Not ask me to download a newer version. Why is there a new version, is the bundled version security ridden? It decided to just pluck a DHCP IPv6 and use that, without any confirmation. I setup a 50G Luks Encrypted LVM crypt yet discovered that it only allocates 25G leaving the other half to float. You need to know YAML to configure networking. Resolv.conf is taken hostage by systemd-resolvd which doesn't work! The whole process was infuriating. This was an install for an email server yesterday.
- ryankrage77 3y ago
  My first experience with the 'live' ISO forced me to find how to get the traditional non-live ISO instead. I was trying to set up a software RAID, and it would just crash no matter how I tried to configure it. Tried the same thing in the non-live version and it worked perfectly first time. Sadly now the live installer is the only option. I recently set up a machine to run folding@home, and it took me four attempts before the installer didn't crash and I could get a working machine. The trick was to run with all defaults and not change anything. Insanity. How the support forums aren't flooded with complaints is beyond me.
calamari4065 3y ago
I ran an experiment a while ago. My windows work machine takes a good 3 minutes to compile one of my C++ projects, but a Linux VM on that same machine builds the same project in 45 seconds. That's really all I need to know about Windows
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  On a work machine, that's more likely to be due to excessive background services installed by the company, particularly antivirus (which is known to kill disk performance, which means it's particularly awful for compiles). Don't get me wrong, I despise windows on its own merits, but I don't think that particular case is a fair comparison; there's a good chance that a completely clean windows VM in the same circumstances would also be faster. (Now, that might still be slower than linux, at which point we would have a fair comparison)
  - john61 3y ago
    On Windows antivirus is a necessity, not so on linux. So it OP made a fair practical real live comparison not a synthetic benchmark.
    - calamari4065 3y ago
      It's not even that, windows forces you to use Defender. It's always on, and you can only disable it temporarily. Even when it's disabled, the process still seems to be active and consuming resources. It's Norton all over again, except now the malware is an integral part of the operating system and it's harder to remove than any real virus.
  - calamari4065 3y ago
    Nope. This is a totally vanilla Windows install. The general consensus I've found while researching this problem is that Windows Defender inserts itself into the compiler process to monitor it for malware.
potato 3y ago
The “HP Tuned“ version of Windows may be the issue. Would expect that to have a ton of bloatware.
synergy20 3y ago
What about Debian or other linux flavors, is this some Ubuntu proprietary thing or open source stuff? I would love Debian to have this the same as Ubuntu.
jklinger410 3y ago
Tangent I have this suspicion that Windows has basically a layer of analytics tracking over the top of the DE that slows the system for most desktop uses, and that they essentially "tunnel" through that layer when a program actually needs the performance. Like gaming or exporting a video project. This is why Windows is able to benchmark high for specific tasks, but for overall usage it feels very slow compared to every linux desktop. Am I crazy or is there a nugget of truth there?
- whalesalad 3y ago
  Brother we have known this for years.
  - jklinger410 3y ago
    That's good to know! Is there any formal proof of said theory? Like what is this analytics layer called, and is the tunneling something that devs are aware of? Just interested in putting some names to this theory so I don't sound like a loon when I try and describe it.
    - whalesalad 3y ago
      Oh it's definitely still a theory - but we've collectively proven it through our anecdotal experiences over the last 20+ years of using Windows.
      - _Algernon_ 3y ago
        That is not how it works lol
        whalesalad 3y ago
        It doesn’t actually work that way, but the net result is the same. Windows is a Trojan horse that manifests itself as an OS but is really just a delivery mechanism for crap from Microsoft. One drive. Cortana. Edge. It’s all so invasive.
unsungNovelty 3y ago
Is it OK to just mention a common misconception which is still prelevant about Linux? Rolling releases provides STABLE verions of software/packages. It is NOT "bleeding edge" since it is NOT a development branch. It is the latest stable version provided by the upstream (developer/cretors of the software). Point release comes from a time where we didn't have continous development. We didn't have these faster updates. We should be using rolling release distros like Arch/Void/OpenSUSE more cos Linux ecosystem is far more stable than you think these days. I find more breaks in point releases than in rolling releases. Use stable software. Not old software which gets software patches from the latest stable version after which each distro has to backport the fix. Then maintain that which leads to more bugs. Just use latest stable versions. Use rolling releases. :) You don't call iOS 17 as bleeding edge. Firefox 119 which is the latest version of Firefox as bleeding edge right? It is a stable software version. ALSO HARDWARE: Using Linux compatible hardware will make the entire experience pleasant. There is this notion that Linux works on anything. It does. BUT NOT 100%. You'll loose bluetooth, wifi or some other things. If you want good experience, don't go for vendors like Razer laptops and complain that Linux is not working properly. Use supported hardware. There are so many these days.
- planede 3y ago
  I find Debian unstable to be a perfectly stable rolling release distro. Unfortunate naming.
  - unsungNovelty 3y ago
    Yes. But unstable is Debian's repo. Unstable repo contains software packages which is tested against Debian. It doesn't mean instability of the software. But unstable against Debian. There is a huge misconception and misunderstanding regarding what these Stable/Testing/Unstable repos means. Unfortunate indeed.
- renegat0x0 3y ago
  Had arch Linux 3 times. Each time was ended with some update problem. This is not definition of stable. This has not happened on debian yet.
vondur 3y ago
I think this was the case with the last generation of Threadrippers too. I wonder if they could get more performance with a more recent kernel?
alentred 3y ago
In the context of Linux adoption on the desktop it is not big news, unfortunately. To my mind, overall end-user experience is already better in Linux compared to Windows where similar tasks are more complicated, even before the raw performance starts to matter. Better performance would be a prerequisite indeed - no one wants to move a slower OS - but then there must be other convincing reasons to drive the desktop user adoption. And no roadblocks. Edit: sorry, rephrased a lot, but the core idea is hopefully the same.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  20% extra performance matters a lot to anybody buying a $5000 Threadripper machine. If they didn't care about performance, they could have saved a lot of money...
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > And yet, users don't convert to Linux. So there must be other reasons, and performance benefits don't seem to work so far. For enterprise desktop purposes: One central reason is that there is no Excel for GNU/Linux. Accept it or not: the workflows of lots of departments are deeply intertwined with Excel (and it would take an insane amount of work to replace Excel by some other spreadsheet application). Another important reason is that GNU/Linux is not some singular operating system, but a proliferation of various different distributions - this is not something that enterprise customers like.
  - OPA100 3y ago
    We run thousands of Linux desktop workstations from low-end workstations for developers to dual-socket machines with >1TB of memory at work. That's primarily because productivity for our use cases is so much higher with a Linux/Unix environment than Windows that it's not even remotely funny. However, almost all users still have either the standard corporate-issue Windows laptop, or a Windows VM on their workstation. Practically exclusively for Desktop Excel-based administrative tasks. Generally speaking, the vast majority of our userbase likes their Linux workstations far better than their Windows machines, and that's after experiencing the significant downgrade to Gnome desktops due to Red Hat removing KDE.
stratigos 3y ago
Interesting, as a user of Ubuntu for over a decade, I had nearly forgotten that Windows exists. I diddnt know anyone besides gamers used Windows these days.
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
And 50% less battery unfortunatly :(
the__alchemist 3y ago
I hope for a future where we are not trapped between Windows, MacOS, and Linux. They are all very complicated, and have much state. They're great for general-purpose computing, but it would be cool if you could use the same hardware in these GP computers with lightweight firmware that doesn't get in the way, and can be tuned to a specific task better. Simple, responsive GUI, could run your specialty software etc with direct hardware interaction.
- ikmckenz 3y ago
  Do you mean something like MirageOS? https://mirage.io/ https://mirage.io/
- allo37 3y ago
  Sounds a bit like what UIO tries to do in Linux? https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.12/driver-api/uio-howto.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.12/driver-api/uio-howto.h...
- tester756 3y ago
  That's what I've been thinking about. Modern runtimes try to do a lot of OS' job(s) - memory management like gc, threads management, etc, etc. What if we stopped using OSes and their perf. penalties and run our software (with its runtimes like clr/jvm/wasmish) directly on the hardware
  - KeplerBoy 3y ago
    Is there really performance to gain? I doubt a well configured OS is slowing the CPU down. The alternative could be GPU like devices: A PCI-E card with sockets for the chip and some RAM running it's own firmware. Intel tried that with it's Xeon Phi line and they opted to run Linux (called uOS) on the accelerator board, so apparently that was never an issue.
- caskstrength 3y ago
  > Simple, responsive GUI, could run your specialty software etc with direct hardware interaction. Are "simple and responsive" network protocols stack and file system, for example, also included in the FW? There is a reason why systems that used to work like that (game consoles) started to ship with general purpose OS to handle such things some time ago.
deleted 3y ago
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optimusPrimal 3y ago
Pardon my ignorance, but can we then infer that upstream, Debian will have similar or better results? What distinguishes Ubuntu in this case from, let's say, less bloated distros? Just a better PR department, or are there any technical reasons to single it out?

351 points by marcodiego 3y ago

Not surprised though, with AMD being able to patch the Linux kernel and scheduler to its liking in order to squeeze out the maximum performance for it's architecture, versus depending on Microsoft to have the good will to figure it out on their own dime. I'd be curious if the businesses buying these $20k+, 96-core, HEDT workstations actually do run Windows on them in order for this to be that big of a problem for Microsoft worth addressing, or if it's Linux all the way anyway for them so Windows isn't even on the radar. Anyone here in the know? Also, obligatory: "But can it run Crysis?" (in software render)

kelsolaar 3y ago
Epic Games runs mostly Windows Threadrippers for Unreal Engine development. Compiling Unreal faster, or anything really, even Windows itself is a compelling argument.
lostlogin 3y ago
The portion running a hypervisor would also be interesting to know. That’s one hell of a processor.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
One of the major markets for these would be visual art studios. They aren't generally Linux shops.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Funny you mention this because a lot of big visual arts studios use Mac for the artwork in the Adobe ecosystem, and heavily invested in Linux for the 3D rendering pipelines as they moved away from SGI/BSD with Windows almost nowhere on the radar. I'd estimate the number of big-name shops running Windows is a minority with only smaller indie studios like Corridor Digital being all-in on Windows because it's a jack of all trades can-run-anything OS, and managing that one ecosystem without sys-admins and an internal IT department is a lot cheaper easier for small businesses of amateur-professionals.
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    "a lot" is nowhere near "all"
    - worthless-trash 3y ago
      And none is nowhere near "a lot".
      - wiz21c 3y ago
        None is nowhere, a lot is somewhere and all is everywhere. sort of.
        throwatacoatme 3y ago
        [dead]
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    My experience is exclusively with small studios, which were Windows shops.
  - gamblor956 3y ago
    The majority of professional movie and television VFX work is now done on Windows and Linux computers, with Linux especially being used for the rendering portion of the process. Mac was the dominant platform for a long time, but Windows caught up and zoomed past Mac about a decade ago. Same or better performance, cheaper hardware, cheaper software, easier to upgrade/repair, and more choice for all of the above. There's a reason that Apple has to pay big bucks to Olivia Rodrigo and others to use Apple products to film and edit their music videos: it's because Apple fell out of favor with creatives and Apple is trying to buy its way back in.
    - steve1977 3y ago
      I think Apple lost a lot of goodwill in the market with the desaster that was the initial release of Final Cut Pro X (and rightly so probably). And now I see quite a few people moving away from Premiere to Resolve, which seems to take a pretty platform-agnostic stance.
- scheeseman486 3y ago
  The improvements coming for Wayland's HDR/color management are likely to help with that, as the features they're aiming for appears to beat Window's more slapdash implementation with per-window color management, where window contents are accurately tonemapped and composited within the widest color space the monitor supports. Adobe would need to be incentivized to port their suite over for it to be taken seriously, but maybe Wine could bridge that gap at first. Ah, the mythical Linux Desktop. One day...
  - jwells89 3y ago
    Will Wayland be able to render mixed HDR and SDR content correctly, with e.g. an HDR video on YouTube rendering with extended range while the rest of the screen renders as normal? Currently only macOS can do that. With Windows you have to choose between SDR and HDR display modes which affects everything on screen regardless of type, which makes SDR content look dingy in HDR mode.
    - kstrauser 3y ago
      On that subject, anyone know why shifting to HDR dims everything that way? My mental model of it is that SDR brightness goes from 0 to 100, and HDR brightness goes from -100 to 100, and that turning on HDR moves everything not HDR-aware down to the bottom of the brightness space. I could look this up, but never think about it outside of conversations like this and figure it might be more fun to talk about it.
      - wmf 3y ago
        It's more like SDR goes from 0 to 255 and HDR goes from 0 to 1024. In SDR mode, 255 = (say) 500 nits while in HDR mode 1024 = 1000 nits and thus 255 = 250 nits so SDR content looks dimmer.
      - dagmx 3y ago
        Consider that your display can only do 0-100 brightness (not really but for sake of argument) In SDR, you map the full SDR range (also 0-100) to that 0-100. When you add HDR, you’re now adding levels above 100 (let’s say 0-200). If your display can only do upto 100, you now need to put all the 0-100 stuff in 0-50. Or you get a display that can also display 0-200. Very few computer displays can do over a standard SDR range of 500 nits.
- jamesfmilne 3y ago
  We sell systems based on these high-end workstations and yes they do run Linux, Rocky Linux 8 at the moment. Still stuck on Xorg because reasons, but for HDR monitoring you're usually using a display interface card with SDI or HDMI outputs anyway.
jackmott42 3y ago
Pretty sure Microsoft is very cooperative on working with AMD and others on this stuff, it may just take a little longer in this case.
- dboreham 3y ago
  > versus depending on Microsoft to have the good will to figure it out on their own dime. Cutler stated in a recent interview that he had a 96-core machine as one of his two daily drivers. I wondered at the time if he pre-announced that CPU since the press about it seemed to reach me a few days later.
  - vluft 3y ago
    Epyc has had 96-core cpus out for a bit over a year now, so probably that.
chaosbutters314 3y ago
ive worked at companies where we buy these types of workstations for fea/cfd/ML if the company has a overbearing IT, we run windows for "security". at places where we move fast and break things, we run ubuntu and IT says for us to manage it ourselves. for anyone wondering why we done use the cloud or a server, we do too. but model setup, licensing, and small jobs are easier and quicker to do locally.
ThrowawayB7 3y ago
> "...depending on Microsoft to have the good will to figure it out on their own dime." They don't have to figure it out on their own; everybody maintains close contact. For example, Intel has a field office literally one block away from Microsoft's main campus. One would assume AMD also has a field office similarly near by. (EDIT: they do, a couple of blocks further.)

atoav 3y ago

Back in the day I used Linux for rendering my Blender animations because my tests had shown it was 10% faster than the same machine running Windows 10. With render times of more than 8 days this quickly paid off.

okl 3y ago
I noticed that AMD/Xilinx Vivado synthesis runs 20% faster on WSL2 than on Windows. After seeing such differences using it on plain Windows becomes unpleasant.
- stephen_g 3y ago
  Yeah, when I was doing more of that sort of thing I'd generally use ISE or Vivado on a big Ubuntu server and VNC or X-forward it to my machine (the X forwarding could be a bit janky with Vivado but it was OK for getting things going in a pinch).

JVIDEL 3y ago

Win11 its such a dumpster fire they had to stop selling Win10 licenses to force people to upgrade. Add to that porting copilot to Win10 because there aren't enough Win11 users around.

pavlov 3y ago
We’ve heard this for every version of Windows for the past twenty years or more. When XP was new, there were people refusing to upgrade from Win2000 to “Fischer-Price Windows”. Well, all versions except Vista — everybody seemed happy to upgrade to Windows 7. (Of course the lesson Microsoft drew from that smooth upgrade was to blow up everything for the next version. “They want tablet interactions, they just don’t know it!”)
- Sesse__ 3y ago
  Win8 (and Win8.1) also had the same reception. People were, of course, more than happy to move to Win10, which contained most of the under-the-hood improvements from Win8 and had a more traditional UI. (Also, with Vista → 7, it didn't hurt that machines had gotten more powerful in the meantime, so the extra RAM usage didn't really matter much anymore.)
- hef19898 3y ago
  Yes, we were. But have we been fundamentaly wrong?
- avtolik 3y ago
  O no. I absolutely agree with the GP. I was fine with every windows after and including XP. Until I received a company laptop with win 11. I have a big fat list of things that are super annoying or bugs.
- patentatt 3y ago
  Anecdotal, but I went 2000 -> 7 -> 10, skipping XP, Vista, and 8. Given that cadence, will hopefully be skipping 11 as well and waiting for whatever is next.
withinboredom 3y ago

buggythebug 3y ago

performance means nothing if the software you require doesn't run on it

nicolaslem 3y ago
We are at a stage where games built for Windows actually run better on Linux so this argument will probably not be relevant for too long anymore.
- Novosell 3y ago
  If they run at all, that is. The latest update to League of Legends seems to have broken it for all Linux users.
  - tyfon 3y ago
    WoW also crashes randomly every 30 minutes using lutris after the latest update, it's quite annoying. This happens on both my wife and my computer. She has an AMD gpu and I have a nvidia. Otherwise it has been running really well.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- uxp8u61q 3y ago
  You mean some games built for Windows run better on Linux (and I'd be curious to know which ones actually run better). Some games barely run on Linux, some just don't work, some get broken by new versions, etc. And computers aren't just for gaming. Some people actually work with their computers. Let me know when photoshop or autocad run smoothly on Linux.
  - heyoni 3y ago
    Cyberpunk runs exactly 3fps lower on NixOS than on windows during benchmarks on ultra, with dlss and ray tracing. Totally negligible performance difference but being on Linux is not.

whalesalad 3y ago

I have two rigs here at home. A 12700k gaming box with a high end Nvme disk. Also, a 13900k workstation with Nvme disks as well. The gaming box runs Windows 11, and it feels generally snappy until I’m navigating the filesystem or dealing with compression. On the flip side the other box is running Debian 12 and feels significantly faster. Could be 12th gen vs 13th gen but I don’t think that’s the case.

codeflo 3y ago
I have a Zen 2 Threadripper box that I dual boot (it's a workstation for coding that I sometimes play games on), and I can confirm. I don't know what the exact technical reason is or why nobody in Redmond is embarrassed. But anything relating to the filesystem is simply dog-slow on Windows, and the more high-end your system is, the more this becomes the major bottleneck.
- juujian 3y ago
  The day I realized I could find files by file extension just like that in less than seconds from the terminal or nautilus changed my life.
- dboreham 3y ago
  It's because the NT filesystem is optimized for a different workload. This is why WSL2 (which you should be using) uses ext4 (that's the default with an Ubuntu distro, at least).
  - whalesalad 3y ago
    > the NT filesystem is optimized for a different workload a different workload than browsing files in explorer?
    - formerly_proven 3y ago
      TWUP (Transactional Windows Update Processing)

fredgrott 3y ago

I just did a mind meld of what one needed to do to get a M3 performance wise through using NVIDIA and Intel chips... Take away a 13900 or 14000 intel CPU and an NVIDIA 4090 will give m3 performance...cheap ipower tower at best buy for $1800...see https://fredgrott.substack.com/p/beating-m3-in-a-flutter-dev-machine https://fredgrott.substack.com/p/beating-m3-in-a-flutter-dev... Had to figure out which way to go with the assumption that production app builds was through cloud...currently thread ripper cannot beat intel 13900 and 14000. Given the different boost setups not sure why the difference.

smoldesu 3y ago
> a 13900 or 14000 intel CPU and an NVIDIA 4090 will give m3 performance ??? These are not comparable CPUs with similar core counts or clock speeds. Apple doesn't even sell a GPU that you can compare to the 4090 in benchmarks.
whalesalad 3y ago
The latest AMD HEDT processors just dropped. They smoke the top end Intel chips (14900K) but they cost 3-5k a piece lol. https://www.phoronix.com/review/threadripper-7970x-7980x-linux https://www.phoronix.com/review/threadripper-7970x-7980x-lin... Assuming money is no object: If you want fast cores, get an Intel. If you want lots of cores, get AMD. I was with you until you said 4090... of course that is going to smoke an M3 it's a $2000 GPU. When you consider the M3 is a CPU and GPU combined, it is a pretty compelling offering.
blackoil 3y ago
Apple will not be value for money for desktops, especially if you need large RAM, disk. Top of the line Max won't beat mid range 40xx. For laptop though build quality, battery life screen etc. matter. I was looking for a personal desktop 6 months back, building an Intel based was no brainer. And now I can upgrade SSD/RAM and graphics as my need budget evolve.

criddell 3y ago

I hope the community really gets behind Snap or Flatpak or one of the other systems for bringing a modern permissions and privileges system to the Linux desktop. It would help me be a lot more comfortable recommending Linux to non-technical people. What distro would you recommend to somebody like me who wants to be asked before an application gets access to my location, microphone, camera, network, etc...?

avgcorrection 3y ago
[deleted]
- bmicraft 3y ago
  It's a well known fact that firefox startup time when packaged as snap is significantly worse. This should be less noticeable for actual use. > On Firefox 119 I thought I was losing my mental faculties (even more) since I kept losing track of the cursor for a whole day. Turns out that it’s a Windows “feature” where you hide the cursor when you start typing into some input box. Maybe this is a Firefox-wide regression on Linux though. Difficult to find other examples of it on Linux via Google. Firefox hides the cursor while typing, but it should unhide as soon as it's moved (at least it does for me) > - More fun than a problem: `firefox --version` spews a warning: `update.go:85: cannot change mount namespace according to change mount ...` > - My dear XCompose wasn’t respected because of course you have to copy it to inside some dang `/home/me/snap/common/utensils/computer-applicances/apps/Firefox` tree Those should both be snap specific. > - The keyboard just does not work sometimes. No other apps seem to have this problem. So it’s apparently not some idiotic “applications that use X work but under Wayland it doesn’t” (or vice versa). Does a restart help? No. Seemingly only a computer reboot. I don't know about that one. Could be Ubuntu or snap, but it does not happen on Arch. Out of curiosity, are you running firefox through xwayland or native wayland? (It says so on the about:support page under "Window Protocol")
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- 3y ago

underseacables 3y ago

I've been playing around with Ubuntu training myself for the day that I have to give up windows 10. My only complaints are that Linux can be tedious, everything is just 43 commands away; it requires greater understanding of not just what the system is doing, but how it is doing it; and the documentation is written like a Wikipedia article on advanced nuclear theory. Windows and OSX have, for the most part, just worked, and it was easier for me to understand what was going on, and how to engage tasks, fix problems, and use the system. With Linux it can feel like I'm fighting with the system at times. I'm enjoying the experience but it has not been without frustration. Perhaps I should have chosen another flavor?

noir_lord 3y ago
> Perhaps I should have chosen another flavor? That'll ignite a holy war. The trick with linux isn't to learn the flavour, it's to learn linux - once you get an overview of how all the bits work then switching distro is (much) more straightforward. Ubuntu is an excellent first choice because it's one of the major distro's so you'll be able to google stuff more easily. My personal recommendation would be Fedora (and if you want a familiar windows 10 at least in approach GUI) Cinnamon which is excellent.
- xattt 3y ago
  Any comment on Arch one you get going? I find the documentation quite thorough for the niggly bits, and have used it to troubleshoot Ubuntu (taking into account differences between the distros).
  - II2II 3y ago
    I am an Arch enthusiast since I like building my system up and learning how things are put together, but it is not a terribly good platform for learning how to use or manage a Linux system. One of the issues is that you end up with a system is tailored to your own needs. While that sounds great, you have to make an effort to generalize those skills since no one else will have a setup quite like yours.
- 3y ago

jerf 3y ago

If Microsoft backs off core Windows development, which it certainly seems like they are, this is what we'd expect to see... not a big bang where it suddenly stops working, but every year it'll just sort of fall a bit more behind Linux, until in 4 or 5 years the difference consensus will slowly just creep over to Windows being noticeably worse than Linux without any big bang switchover... and it'll sneak up on Microsoft as much as it sneaks up on everyone else. To be honest, Linux as a desktop environment is already more usable than many people realize. People kept expecting a Big Bang where someone would put out The Release That Solves Everything, but what happened instead is that it just kept creeping up and creeping up. A similar thing happened to Linux gaming; Valve never put out a big Here's Linux For Games release, it just crept up and crept up to the point that it basically runs my entire library, and single-player gaming is now to the point that anything that doesn't run in Linux is the exception, not the rule. And Microsoft's problem is that if they let this happen, they're going to be in a world of hurt when they decide to get in gear and fix it, because of their reverse compatibility support. Fixing all that up and trying to make everything go fast is going to be hard with all these systems interacting with each other. While we Linux users may piss and moan about systemd transitions or all the audio transitions, in the Linux world, as new subsystems come in, the old ones actually go away, and it isn't dragging anywhere near as much reverse compatibility baggage around. Helps that there aren't any project managers to demand Windows LDAP for COM Apartments Over Embraced And Extended USB to be jammed in to be supported 10 years later because one big client uses it and that mean the rest of us get to be running a WLCAEEUSB service on our computers for the next 15 years, causing occasional mysterious crashes when it spuriously grabs a USB device. It seems to me Microsoft is in grave danger of walking itself into an MBA trap, where investement in Windows doesn't pay off this quarter so they don't, repeat for 15 or 20 quarters, and then waking up one day and realizing that one quarter at a time they threw away one of the most useful business positions in the history of the world.

phpisthebest 3y ago
Microsoft should invest in Proton, make Windows apps work seamless on linux, and then just make a "Windows" replacement for Wayland that runs on Kernel... Then, and only then, will we have "The year of the linux desktop"

hospitalJail 3y ago

I noticed a performance increase over windows 11 on my setup as well. I thought it was just a fresh install thing, but its been months and still flies. Highly recommending Fedora Cinnamon.

the8472 3y ago

Doesn't windows have some limitation where a process will only see up to 64 threads by default and it'll have to opt into some new APIs to use more? Maybe some of the results are an artifact of that.

dblohm7 3y ago
No

twoodfin 3y ago

Why wouldn’t the first assumption be that the bulk of these differences arise from compiler and runtime library (memcpy, etc.) efficiency distinctions rather than the OS? I appreciate that to the end user it doesn’t matter which parts of the stack are better tuned, but framing this as “Windows vs. Linux” seems unjustified without more evidence.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gmueckl 3y ago
I can't find any mention of the compilers, compiler settings or whether any prebuilt binaries were used. That makes it even harder to distinguish between compiler and runtime performance impacts.

nerdjon 3y ago

This alone isn't surprising, but what I really want to know is if this hit is something fundamentally wrong with Windows or is it the overhead of all of the stuff that Windows runs that doesn't need to run, since it mentions "out of the box" windows. Is the performance difference as large on a LTSC version of Windows 10? If it needs something in Windows 11, would it be as big of a difference on the LTSC version of Windows 11 when that comes out (I know we can't answer this at the moment)? I would never use Windows on a server, but I am very curious about where the difference really is. Part of why I am really curious is that on my Steam Deck I run the LTSC version of Windows 10 and got better performance on my games on Windows 10 vs SteamOS. That is just gaming, but it has made me more curious about what the reality is.

doublerabbit 3y ago

Ubuntu is such a turn-off experience for servers. The cloud-init feature is atrocious. You download a "server-live" iso. 2GB. However this uses the cloud-init to download the required files. Why did I download a 2GB file if your going to download it from the net anyway? There is no option to not install from the net without removing network adapter. Boggles me why am I being asked to upgrade my installer while installing, what's the point in that? "There is a new version on GitHub" ... If your shipping an installer it should install. Not ask me to download a newer version. Why is there a new version, is the bundled version security ridden? It decided to just pluck a DHCP IPv6 and use that, without any confirmation. I setup a 50G Luks Encrypted LVM crypt yet discovered that it only allocates 25G leaving the other half to float. You need to know YAML to configure networking. Resolv.conf is taken hostage by systemd-resolvd which doesn't work! The whole process was infuriating. This was an install for an email server yesterday.

ryankrage77 3y ago
My first experience with the 'live' ISO forced me to find how to get the traditional non-live ISO instead. I was trying to set up a software RAID, and it would just crash no matter how I tried to configure it. Tried the same thing in the non-live version and it worked perfectly first time. Sadly now the live installer is the only option. I recently set up a machine to run folding@home, and it took me four attempts before the installer didn't crash and I could get a working machine. The trick was to run with all defaults and not change anything. Insanity. How the support forums aren't flooded with complaints is beyond me.

calamari4065 3y ago

I ran an experiment a while ago. My windows work machine takes a good 3 minutes to compile one of my C++ projects, but a Linux VM on that same machine builds the same project in 45 seconds. That's really all I need to know about Windows

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
On a work machine, that's more likely to be due to excessive background services installed by the company, particularly antivirus (which is known to kill disk performance, which means it's particularly awful for compiles). Don't get me wrong, I despise windows on its own merits, but I don't think that particular case is a fair comparison; there's a good chance that a completely clean windows VM in the same circumstances would also be faster. (Now, that might still be slower than linux, at which point we would have a fair comparison)
- john61 3y ago
  On Windows antivirus is a necessity, not so on linux. So it OP made a fair practical real live comparison not a synthetic benchmark.
  - calamari4065 3y ago
    It's not even that, windows forces you to use Defender. It's always on, and you can only disable it temporarily. Even when it's disabled, the process still seems to be active and consuming resources. It's Norton all over again, except now the malware is an integral part of the operating system and it's harder to remove than any real virus.
- calamari4065 3y ago
  Nope. This is a totally vanilla Windows install. The general consensus I've found while researching this problem is that Windows Defender inserts itself into the compiler process to monitor it for malware.

potato 3y ago

The “HP Tuned“ version of Windows may be the issue. Would expect that to have a ton of bloatware.

synergy20 3y ago

What about Debian or other linux flavors, is this some Ubuntu proprietary thing or open source stuff? I would love Debian to have this the same as Ubuntu.

jklinger410 3y ago

Tangent I have this suspicion that Windows has basically a layer of analytics tracking over the top of the DE that slows the system for most desktop uses, and that they essentially "tunnel" through that layer when a program actually needs the performance. Like gaming or exporting a video project. This is why Windows is able to benchmark high for specific tasks, but for overall usage it feels very slow compared to every linux desktop. Am I crazy or is there a nugget of truth there?

whalesalad 3y ago
Brother we have known this for years.
- jklinger410 3y ago
  That's good to know! Is there any formal proof of said theory? Like what is this analytics layer called, and is the tunneling something that devs are aware of? Just interested in putting some names to this theory so I don't sound like a loon when I try and describe it.
  - whalesalad 3y ago
    Oh it's definitely still a theory - but we've collectively proven it through our anecdotal experiences over the last 20+ years of using Windows.
    - _Algernon_ 3y ago
      That is not how it works lol
      - whalesalad 3y ago
        It doesn’t actually work that way, but the net result is the same. Windows is a Trojan horse that manifests itself as an OS but is really just a delivery mechanism for crap from Microsoft. One drive. Cortana. Edge. It’s all so invasive.

unsungNovelty 3y ago

Is it OK to just mention a common misconception which is still prelevant about Linux? Rolling releases provides STABLE verions of software/packages. It is NOT "bleeding edge" since it is NOT a development branch. It is the latest stable version provided by the upstream (developer/cretors of the software). Point release comes from a time where we didn't have continous development. We didn't have these faster updates. We should be using rolling release distros like Arch/Void/OpenSUSE more cos Linux ecosystem is far more stable than you think these days. I find more breaks in point releases than in rolling releases. Use stable software. Not old software which gets software patches from the latest stable version after which each distro has to backport the fix. Then maintain that which leads to more bugs. Just use latest stable versions. Use rolling releases. :) You don't call iOS 17 as bleeding edge. Firefox 119 which is the latest version of Firefox as bleeding edge right? It is a stable software version. ALSO HARDWARE: Using Linux compatible hardware will make the entire experience pleasant. There is this notion that Linux works on anything. It does. BUT NOT 100%. You'll loose bluetooth, wifi or some other things. If you want good experience, don't go for vendors like Razer laptops and complain that Linux is not working properly. Use supported hardware. There are so many these days.

planede 3y ago
I find Debian unstable to be a perfectly stable rolling release distro. Unfortunate naming.
- unsungNovelty 3y ago
  Yes. But unstable is Debian's repo. Unstable repo contains software packages which is tested against Debian. It doesn't mean instability of the software. But unstable against Debian. There is a huge misconception and misunderstanding regarding what these Stable/Testing/Unstable repos means. Unfortunate indeed.
renegat0x0 3y ago
Had arch Linux 3 times. Each time was ended with some update problem. This is not definition of stable. This has not happened on debian yet.

vondur 3y ago

I think this was the case with the last generation of Threadrippers too. I wonder if they could get more performance with a more recent kernel?

alentred 3y ago

In the context of Linux adoption on the desktop it is not big news, unfortunately. To my mind, overall end-user experience is already better in Linux compared to Windows where similar tasks are more complicated, even before the raw performance starts to matter. Better performance would be a prerequisite indeed - no one wants to move a slower OS - but then there must be other convincing reasons to drive the desktop user adoption. And no roadblocks. Edit: sorry, rephrased a lot, but the core idea is hopefully the same.

bryanlarsen 3y ago
20% extra performance matters a lot to anybody buying a $5000 Threadripper machine. If they didn't care about performance, they could have saved a lot of money...
aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> And yet, users don't convert to Linux. So there must be other reasons, and performance benefits don't seem to work so far. For enterprise desktop purposes: One central reason is that there is no Excel for GNU/Linux. Accept it or not: the workflows of lots of departments are deeply intertwined with Excel (and it would take an insane amount of work to replace Excel by some other spreadsheet application). Another important reason is that GNU/Linux is not some singular operating system, but a proliferation of various different distributions - this is not something that enterprise customers like.
- OPA100 3y ago
  We run thousands of Linux desktop workstations from low-end workstations for developers to dual-socket machines with >1TB of memory at work. That's primarily because productivity for our use cases is so much higher with a Linux/Unix environment than Windows that it's not even remotely funny. However, almost all users still have either the standard corporate-issue Windows laptop, or a Windows VM on their workstation. Practically exclusively for Desktop Excel-based administrative tasks. Generally speaking, the vast majority of our userbase likes their Linux workstations far better than their Windows machines, and that's after experiencing the significant downgrade to Gnome desktops due to Red Hat removing KDE.

stratigos 3y ago

Interesting, as a user of Ubuntu for over a decade, I had nearly forgotten that Windows exists. I diddnt know anyone besides gamers used Windows these days.

BiteCode_dev 3y ago

And 50% less battery unfortunatly :(

the__alchemist 3y ago

I hope for a future where we are not trapped between Windows, MacOS, and Linux. They are all very complicated, and have much state. They're great for general-purpose computing, but it would be cool if you could use the same hardware in these GP computers with lightweight firmware that doesn't get in the way, and can be tuned to a specific task better. Simple, responsive GUI, could run your specialty software etc with direct hardware interaction.

ikmckenz 3y ago
Do you mean something like MirageOS? https://mirage.io/ https://mirage.io/
allo37 3y ago
Sounds a bit like what UIO tries to do in Linux? https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.12/driver-api/uio-howto.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.12/driver-api/uio-howto.h...
tester756 3y ago
That's what I've been thinking about. Modern runtimes try to do a lot of OS' job(s) - memory management like gc, threads management, etc, etc. What if we stopped using OSes and their perf. penalties and run our software (with its runtimes like clr/jvm/wasmish) directly on the hardware
- KeplerBoy 3y ago
  Is there really performance to gain? I doubt a well configured OS is slowing the CPU down. The alternative could be GPU like devices: A PCI-E card with sockets for the chip and some RAM running it's own firmware. Intel tried that with it's Xeon Phi line and they opted to run Linux (called uOS) on the accelerator board, so apparently that was never an issue.
caskstrength 3y ago
> Simple, responsive GUI, could run your specialty software etc with direct hardware interaction. Are "simple and responsive" network protocols stack and file system, for example, also included in the FW? There is a reason why systems that used to work like that (game consoles) started to ship with general purpose OS to handle such things some time ago.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

optimusPrimal 3y ago

Pardon my ignorance, but can we then infer that upstream, Debian will have similar or better results? What distinguishes Ubuntu in this case from, let's say, less bloated distros? Just a better PR department, or are there any technical reasons to single it out?