5 ms·

Windows 11 Outperforming Linux on an Intel Arrow Lake H Laptop

83 points by tuananh 10mo ago

jgtrosh 10mo ago
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?
- vachina 10mo ago
  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.
- michaellarabel 10mo ago
  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.
  - formerly_proven 10mo ago
    Did the 1T benchmarks actually run on P cores?
  - dataflow 10mo ago
    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?
  - vachina 10mo ago
    Can you run a regression against older Windows/Linux builds?
  - jojobas 10mo ago
    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 or - MS wrote some super-optimized BLAS/LAPACK libraries for this exact CPU which were are not (yet) available on Linux or -Intel added management things specifically for Windows.
  - p_ing 10mo ago
    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.?
josteink 10mo ago
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
- throw-qqqqq 10mo ago
  > 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.
- nubinetwork 10mo ago
  I have a 13th gen desktop and laptop, both running Linux. They work just fine.
- cherryteastain 10mo ago
  > 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 https://www.phoronix.com/review/alderlake-windows-linux/9 [2] https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-meteorlake-windows-linux/7 https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-meteorlake-windows-lin...
  - 10mo ago
RicoElectrico 10mo ago
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.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
jezze 10mo ago
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.
- fleroviumna 10mo ago
  [dead]
- lemonish97 10mo ago
  Or maybe it is just better?
  - dijit 10mo ago
    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.
    - richardwhiuk 10mo ago
      It’s easy to be better when you only implement the mainline of the API
      - dijit 10mo ago
        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.
skibidithink 10mo ago
[flagged]
- ramon156 10mo ago
  The stupid answer: it depends Honestly I have no issues on my own AMD laptop but iirc nvidia drivers are still relatively bad at keeping power consumption low. It would be nice if Linux got the same vendor support as windows.
  - aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
    > It would be nice if Linux got the same vendor support as windows. A first step would be if the kernel developers weren't changing the kernel-internal APIs all the time. Since the driver model on Windows rarely changes, hardware vendors don't have to rewrite the drivers all the time. Additionally, it is a well-known secret that Microsoft provides quite some internal tools to hardware vendors to symbolically execute the driver binaries and check them for buffer overflows. Otherwise, the quality of the drivers on Windows would be a disaster. On the other hand, once the drivers pass certification (of which this is a part), it is rather easy for the hardware vendor to make the driver "official" - no discussing on the LKML that the architecture of the driver that the hardware vendor developed does not fit what the subsystem maintainer wants. This all makes Windows a much more "convenient" system for hardware vendors to develop official drivers for.
- cik 10mo ago
  I've been running Linux in laptops, as painful as it can be since the 90s. The answer is that it depends on the laptop.
  - jokoon 10mo ago
    This is sadly why windows will always prevail. You can't expect volunteers to deliver correct drivers, even if they spend a lot of time reverse engineering things. It's 2025 and I would have expected the linux foundation or canonical to at least create a label "linux compatible" or "linux tested", so that brands can license it, and maybe spend money to collaborate with hardware vendors so they can write correct drivers, but that has not happened. I am not saying linux/OSS is at fault here, but I am confused why the situation is still so bad. You can even find several governments ready to use linux, but it's not reliable enough yet, or maybe they're too tech-illiterate. Open source/linux folks are so politicized against capitalism, proprietary software and patents that they excluded themselves from the economy. Only valve and the steam machine might have a chance of changing that situation but it's not even guaranteed.
krautburglar 10mo ago
Wonder if it has something to do with licensed features: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46002989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46002989 (i.e. no license, have to fallback to unaccelerated software-only implementation)
- tuananh 10mo ago
  wow we need license to enable features already supported by hardware. prev i only saw this practice in data center space.
BoredPositron 10mo ago
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.
- michaellarabel 10mo ago
  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.
  - BoredPositron 10mo ago
    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.
RobotToaster 10mo ago
Could windows be using binaries optimised for that specific processor? "Simply" running apt-build world would possibly fix it if that's the case.
user3939382 10mo ago
This isn’t about kernels. Ubuntu. Look at the ps ax list from a default ubuntu it’s like 300 processes it’s ridiculous.
p0w3n3d 10mo ago
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)
- ImPostingOnHN 10mo ago
  "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?
cubefox 10mo ago
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.
- eastbound 10mo ago
  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.
mos87 10mo ago
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.
rowanG077 10mo ago
These differences are so extreme that there must be something going on.
talkingtab 10mo ago
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.
- dartharva 10mo ago
  Why would the "force obsolescence of millions of PCs" be relevant to this article about benchmark results of one specific laptop model?
whalesalad 10mo ago
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.
nickjj 10mo ago
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 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 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.
meatjuice 10mo ago
Lemmy people say that it's because of the outdated drivers ubuntu has. How do you think?
fortranfiend 10mo ago
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.
hugh-avherald 10mo ago
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
final_aeon 10mo ago
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.

83 points by tuananh 10mo ago

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?

vachina 10mo ago
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.
michaellarabel 10mo ago
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.
- formerly_proven 10mo ago
  Did the 1T benchmarks actually run on P cores?
- dataflow 10mo ago
  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?
- vachina 10mo ago
  Can you run a regression against older Windows/Linux builds?
- jojobas 10mo ago
  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 or - MS wrote some super-optimized BLAS/LAPACK libraries for this exact CPU which were are not (yet) available on Linux or -Intel added management things specifically for Windows.
- p_ing 10mo ago
  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.?

josteink 10mo ago

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

throw-qqqqq 10mo ago
> 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.
nubinetwork 10mo ago
I have a 13th gen desktop and laptop, both running Linux. They work just fine.
cherryteastain 10mo ago
> 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 https://www.phoronix.com/review/alderlake-windows-linux/9 [2] https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-meteorlake-windows-linux/7 https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-meteorlake-windows-lin...
- 10mo ago

RicoElectrico 10mo ago

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.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

jezze 10mo ago

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.

fleroviumna 10mo ago
[dead]
lemonish97 10mo ago
Or maybe it is just better?
- dijit 10mo ago
  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.
  - richardwhiuk 10mo ago
    It’s easy to be better when you only implement the mainline of the API
    - dijit 10mo ago
      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.

skibidithink 10mo ago

[flagged]

ramon156 10mo ago
The stupid answer: it depends Honestly I have no issues on my own AMD laptop but iirc nvidia drivers are still relatively bad at keeping power consumption low. It would be nice if Linux got the same vendor support as windows.
- aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
  > It would be nice if Linux got the same vendor support as windows. A first step would be if the kernel developers weren't changing the kernel-internal APIs all the time. Since the driver model on Windows rarely changes, hardware vendors don't have to rewrite the drivers all the time. Additionally, it is a well-known secret that Microsoft provides quite some internal tools to hardware vendors to symbolically execute the driver binaries and check them for buffer overflows. Otherwise, the quality of the drivers on Windows would be a disaster. On the other hand, once the drivers pass certification (of which this is a part), it is rather easy for the hardware vendor to make the driver "official" - no discussing on the LKML that the architecture of the driver that the hardware vendor developed does not fit what the subsystem maintainer wants. This all makes Windows a much more "convenient" system for hardware vendors to develop official drivers for.
cik 10mo ago
I've been running Linux in laptops, as painful as it can be since the 90s. The answer is that it depends on the laptop.
- jokoon 10mo ago
  This is sadly why windows will always prevail. You can't expect volunteers to deliver correct drivers, even if they spend a lot of time reverse engineering things. It's 2025 and I would have expected the linux foundation or canonical to at least create a label "linux compatible" or "linux tested", so that brands can license it, and maybe spend money to collaborate with hardware vendors so they can write correct drivers, but that has not happened. I am not saying linux/OSS is at fault here, but I am confused why the situation is still so bad. You can even find several governments ready to use linux, but it's not reliable enough yet, or maybe they're too tech-illiterate. Open source/linux folks are so politicized against capitalism, proprietary software and patents that they excluded themselves from the economy. Only valve and the steam machine might have a chance of changing that situation but it's not even guaranteed.

krautburglar 10mo ago

Wonder if it has something to do with licensed features: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46002989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46002989 (i.e. no license, have to fallback to unaccelerated software-only implementation)

tuananh 10mo ago
wow we need license to enable features already supported by hardware. prev i only saw this practice in data center space.

BoredPositron 10mo ago

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.

michaellarabel 10mo ago
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.
- BoredPositron 10mo ago
  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.

RobotToaster 10mo ago

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

user3939382 10mo ago

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

p0w3n3d 10mo ago

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)

ImPostingOnHN 10mo ago
"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?

cubefox 10mo ago

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.

eastbound 10mo ago
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.

mos87 10mo ago

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.

rowanG077 10mo ago

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

talkingtab 10mo ago

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.

dartharva 10mo ago
Why would the "force obsolescence of millions of PCs" be relevant to this article about benchmark results of one specific laptop model?

whalesalad 10mo ago

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.

nickjj 10mo ago

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 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 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.

meatjuice 10mo ago

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

fortranfiend 10mo ago

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.

hugh-avherald 10mo ago

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

final_aeon 10mo ago

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.