Real TL;DR: I compared a computer without an SSD, but with an Intel Core i7 clocked at 2 GHZ (quad-core, 8 threads) with a unix-like OS often cited as comparabl

Real TL;DR: I compared a computer without an SSD, but with an Intel Core i7 clocked at 2 GHZ (quad-core, 8 threads) with a unix-like OS often cited as comparable to Linux to a 7 year old Core2Duo (2 threads) machine with 7 year old RAM and an SSD running Ubuntu (an OS not known as efficient). The older machine with the slower CPU was faster. It wasn't about the comparison, actually. It was about my surprise at how slow such an impressively spec'd machine can be -- and my regret that I didn't get the XPS 13.