About once a year I try running Windows, but it's still too annoying, ad-ridden, bloated yet limiting and ultimately powerless that I'm willing to stick with the higher performance alternative.
Arrow lake has had quite a messy launch on Windows.
Intel, Microsoft, and motherboard makers have made a few changes to prevent crashes and increase performance and performance consistency, especially with regards to single threaded performance.
I wish phoronix did more to evaluate Arrow lake in that context: Are the problems merely Windows problems? If comparing an old windows 11 copy to one with fixes, and both to Linux, then maybe something interesting happens.
I just get the feeling that Windows is a mess with regards to getting expected performance, lately. Because Zen 5 had surprises with Windows too.
And, in the end for Zen 5, the performance fixes for Windows 11 got it to about the level of performance that Zen 5 had on Windows 10 all along.
Intel's fixes have been for Windows 11, so I don't know if Arrow Lake is good on Windows 10 or not, and what to make of them vs Linux for this CPU.
The 6% is an average over all the benchmarks. Depending on your workload Linux can be anything from 15% faster to 9% slower. So if you need performance for a specific task, make sure you actually check how it performs in your specific case.
I honestly thought Linux would be much better, with a two-digit lead.
One additional advantage of using Linux is that you can trim it down or use a very lightweight distro for very old hardware. I recently installed Linux on an old laptop with a dual-core AMD C-50 and 2GB of RAM because the Windows 8 it was using had become unusable. Of course, one of the BSDs might be even better for this use-case.
The fact that Linux is still around 4% of the desktop market share is the example I use to illustrate that technical superiority doesn't always means commercial success.
Because normal people don't even really understand what an OS is. For a layman, it is esoteric, arcane knowledge.
My wife is not a technical person. She wouldn't know what Linux was or even that it existed if I never told her. Much less how to install it, what benefits it has in relation to Windows, etc.
For her, if her computer is slow, it is because it is old or broken, not because the OS is a pile of crap.
Beyond that, switching OS can be a major endeavor. I wanted to switch to Linux years before I took the plunge 3 years ago, but many things (including inertia) held me back.
It was when I was going to do one of my yearly fresh windows installs that I decided to "let me give Linux a shot, if it doesn't work I do the fresh Windows install later". Linux worked well, and now I am here.
Same with my family. Sometimes people don't realize that our amazing techie community is a minuscle percentage of the world. People out there don't usually share our interests and passions. With no offense intended, the average person is a lot more concerned with looking good at church or their city's football team's performance... NOT with their operating system's thread switching overhead.
The desktop PC market is dominated by three factors: MS Office, other large proprietary software (like CAD), and games.
The games segment is being slowly chipped away by things like the Steam console, with the Wine / Proton layer also runnable under normal desktop Linux.
The rest is very likely stuck "forever". Maybe the CAD software, and other third-party software, will run adequately under Wine one day; MSO likely never will, at least not legally.
The fact that people cite "desktop market share" as a measure of "commercial success" is even more surprising. The world is all phones and data centers now, and Linux dominates both.
"Desktops" are a weird thing corporate types have to use to get paid, when they aren't glued to TikTok or Insta or whatever on their phones.
For some strange reason, when people speak about Linux adoption, they mean GNU/Linux but never say it. Then comments like yours appear. Android has almost nothing to do with actual Linux. You can't run Linux-specific software or drivers. Case in point: Librem 5 runs GNU/Linux, and it's not very popular.
The proper name would be then Android/Linux, I.e. Linux kernel with a non-gnu userspace.
Either way, Linux the kernel has won everywhere but the desktop: server space, handheld, embedded, etc.
In my house there is not a single device without a Linux kernel. This includes my NAS, the fridge, both washing machines, all routers, our tv, a gaming console, all mobile devices, my kids PC, my wife's laptop, and mine as well.
It wasn't even a religious choice or something. Out of 20+ devices only 5 required some kind of choice: buying 2 Samsung phones instead of whatever apple sells, 2 dell laptops with Linux preinstalled and a steam deck.
Linux success is so massive, I couldn't even imagine it 25 years ago.
Except the whole driver, storage, security and network stack, which people spend whole careers working on. Look if the kernel doesn't interest you, that's fine. But it's (by far) the biggest component of the system and to some of us it's kinda notable that it's taken over the world. You can semantically define us out of existence but it doesn't make the software go away. You're just not paying attention to it.
You are. Look, I'll just repeat. I think it's notable and important the extent to which the Linux has come to dominate computing at virtually every scale. Pretty much every application that is not user-facing code running on a Windows or Apple device is Linux. Period. And that's the majority of all software running anywhere!
Now, sure, you can define that as unimportant. But you can't define it as unsuccessful, which was the criterion I responded to upthread.
Honestly, keep it that way. Desktop linux is designed for nerds, power users, and developers mostly. You start pulling in the plebs and unwashed masses of computer users and it will start to suck quickly especially once some mega corp embraces selling to consumers and ruins the entire ecosystem.
tl;dr 6% faster on Linux. Basically, once a year I try to run Linux instead of Windows and I've been doing that since 1999 (seriously). It still has enough annoyances that it isn't worth 6% or extra freedom for me.
I don't get this one. I don't see ads, Cortana hasn't been a thing for like 2 years. My work pays for my license. Security seems fine in 2024. My time is very valuable.
Same that's why I don't use Windows in a professional setting. Programming in it is slower and doing office work in it is 'fun' when things change for the sake of it.
I don't use VSCode, that'd be slower too.
I just use emacs and tmux.
But one category of things that's faster is any linux utility that needs to interact with files.
NTFS stores metadata differently making things like "stat" much more expensive on windows than on linux. Naively ported programs used to doing I/O that is cheap on linux will be slower on Windows. git is an exception where they coded around this problem.
If you use nodejs for example, you'll find that the thousands of files and folders under node_modules results in way slower builds and searches on windows than linux. It's comical that a linux VM running within windows on a virtual disk on an NTFS partition will still be faster than windows itself at this because the I/O will be, from the windows perspective, one big file.
- Booting my PC until login takes approx 10s for Linux and 60-120s for Windows. Logging in takes another 1s for Linux (i3wm) or 60-120s for Windows.
In Windows, I often need to manually connect to my local wifi after logging in.
- Accessing a local file (as in git status, or opening a file in emacs) while having VPN turned off takes <1s in Linux and somewhere between 10-30s in Windows.
- Windows forces me to stop using all Office products during Office updates
- After approx 50% of all Windows updates, Windows gives me nag messages until I restart my computer
I use emacs as editor in both scenarios. Compilation and running programs is subjectively similarly fast.
The ability to actually use all of the hardware I buy.
Also using an external monitor without scaling issues is nice.
Also not having to spend days on figuring out whether I want Linux or Unix and then which distro, window manager, audio driver, package manager, etc to use is quite nice.
Being able to configure all of my hardware (including mouse scrollewheel) without resorting to writing scripts and hacks is nice.
100 percent worth dealing with extremely terrible Microsoft Windows, because the alternative is even worse in terms of usability.
Without wanting to discredit your experience, I am surprised any of this is a problem.
I switched to Mint around 3 years ago, and I never looked back. It was a surprisingly smooth sailing, everything worked out of the box. Nothing needed any hacks (including having an external monitor without any scaling issues, audio and video working out of the box, mouse and keyboard functining properly, etc and so forth).
I had no anxiety picking distros or desktop environments, just stuck with Cinnamon and I love it ever since.
What I can say, ia that my computer works as well, or maybe even better than when I did a fresh install 3 years ago. Unlike my experience with Windows where yearly fresh installs were a thing, as the computer would feel slow and sluggish over time, as if Windows deteriorated with every passing day.
The only thing I needed to hack a little with on Linux was the fingerprint sensor thing. I could make it work, but it was unreliable, so I ended up disabling it. A very small price to pay.
Literally all of the issues you've mentioned in terms of compatibility is fixed if you buy hardware that aims to have Linux compatibility out of the box.
Before you say "ah, but I didn't even need to think about it, I just bought some parts and assembled a computer."
So the companies that have done it, did for you, made it "work well on Windows", think about it. But as this is the norm you think that Linux compatibility is bad, rather, it's the reverse. Those companies didn't care about Linux and that's why its compatibility is bad.
There are now plenty of companies that have a real focus on providing great computers that works well in Linux, you could go for that option if you don't like to run scripts (which mostly isn't true as you have many applications to configure exactly what you complained about). And your external monitors will work well, I'm sure.
Nowadays with so many PC and Laptop product lines that are great in Linux, if you aren't gaming or using applications that just doesn't exist or work in Windows or want to use the battery advantage that Mac laptops have, Windows is not a necessity.
To me, it's a okay comment if you would say "I use Windows because that's what I'm comfortable using", rather than complaining about things that Linux can do well Today.
Usability-wise Linux nowadays have many distros that are better, don't have all the adware or useless fluff.
I use a Windows 11 at home for gaming and it's a terrible OS. I seriously can't wait until more and more games runs well on Linux so I can completely ditch it.
What hardware do you have issues with nowadays? I agree it used to be problematic, though lately the only remaining thing I'm struggling with is (some) printers. Then again, thankfully I haven't had to set them up on Windows either.
Ultimately people care only about what they see, not what they cannot see. An OS is useless if it can’t run Microsoft Office or the thousands of other Windows-only printer drivers. Not to mention the “where’s my start button” crowd.
That hasn't been a thing for me since the mid 2000's, thanks to CUPS. From the app side every printer is PostScript (and some even gained features the native driver doesn't have under Windows).
I'd imagine non-CMYK printers might present issues if CUPS doesn't support them, but Apple is one of the maintainers of CUPS and I'd be surprised if that were the case.
Bullshit. Linux uses almost always the same printer drivers as Mac meaning printer support is amazing. Maybe if you if you run something really obscure like a printing press but otherwise everything is supported.
There is hardware Linux struggles with but printers have not been an issue for the last 20 years.
Running games was the only thing holding me back. I was surprised how far Linux has come. 95% of my work is done in a browser, so I can't comment on any software dependencies.
Modern games work for me in steam on archlinux with nvidia drivers, like cyberpunk, satisfactory, rdr2, ... I do play single player games mostly though (so I don't know if any anticheat mechanisms may break). Then again the recent age of mythology and age of empires remakes work in multiplayer
The problem is little to no funding. Programmers generally have to be paid to do the not fun parts of programming like fixing issue #74738547 “settings app labels have the last letter cut off when running on a high DPI display on a Tuesday when it is raining in Delhi, India but only on an even numbered year.”
UI development is an endless procession of nit picky long tail aesthetic and usability bugs.
When I worked for Canonical, they made it a point not to have a reference corporate laptop precisely for that - we all ran different brands with different configurations (one of my colleagues had a late MIPS sub-laptop as his travel companion). The Japanese laptops were by far the most interesting and unique.
I picked an unimaginative Dell (my house was burglarized right before I started and I lost my then daily driver) because it had the shortest delivery time.
Sounds about right. I'm working on a web UI for internal use right now and people will complain about some alignment being off by one pixel, clickable zones not being large enough, the interface being to compress/broken on a special Android phone with a tall display (this isn't even made for mobile).
The thing is that these issues are 100% real, I just don't really care to spend two days figuring out two labels don't align correctly, it's good enough.
Scaling this up to a desktop, then those small issues start to stack up. If you're then a Windows power user, then I can easily see Linux being a hard sell. I've seen plenty of people navigate Windows and Microsoft applications like they're some sort of wizard. I haven't tried KDE in a long time, nor have I given Cosmic a go, but if you don't just click around at a leisurely pace, then I have no trouble seeing that you could feel limited, compared to Windows.
Obviously I can see it opposite being true as well. I can't use Windows, something about the UI makes my hand cramp up (literally, there's something in the Windows UI that hurts my hand and wrist, it does not happen in macOS or anything Linux desktop I've used).
I honestly don't believe that to be the case. There's a big difference between commercial products like MacOS or Windows and Linux. That difference isn't so much funding (remember that Linux is backed by all major companies), but the fact that Linux itself is really just the kernel, whereas Windows and MacOS aim to be the whole package (with varying degrees of success).
There is simply no such thing as "Linux, the OS including desktop and UI". It's dozens of projects with different philosophies and goals. KDE differs from Gnome, Mate, or XFCE and those have a different approach to the desktop UI metaphor than say i3 or xmonad.
A standardized Linux Desktop experience would help with bundling resources as well as polish and fixing the "boring" stuff. But this would fly in the face of the "make-it-your-own"-approach that desktop Linux tends to take.
The constant dance between stability/maturity and bleeding edge is another big factor. The former allows for little annoyances to be ironed out, while the latter attracts more developers because that's the fun stuff to work on.
As a user you do have the choice to go for a stable, more conservative distro or play with the latest toys on rolling release distros. Specialized distros like SteamOS do quite well in their respective niche, though.
In summary, the Linux eco system is simply too diverse to point at a single issue like funding as the main reason for its perceived shortcomings on the Desktop side of things. The comment above pretty much nailed it - it's developed by Linux guys and their goal simply isn't to emulate Windows.
My take is the issue is really human-driven. In the Linux community, there’s this tendency to say, “This thing should be better,” and instead of working with others to resolve the issue, they just start a new project instead. The result? Time and attention are split across countless forks and alternatives, when they could have been collaborating to make something truly exceptional.
Think about how many man-years have been wasted trying to "fix" the same problems—whether it's the KDE vs. GNOME divide, the battle between package managers (RPM, DEB, Flatpak, Snap...), or the scattered efforts to create a mobile Linux OS. Imagine the impact if even half of that energy had been pooled into a single, shared vision.
It’s great to have choices, but at what point does “choice” turn into unnecessary fragmentation?
In my case I tried to work on Windows with some ThinkPad 5ish years ago when I got annoyed of unrealiable docking behaviour on Linux. It turned out it was flaky hardware of firmware on the Lenovo dock and it didn't work appreciably better on Windows.
Geniunely curious, what are these annoyances? I only started using Linux (Ubuntu) around 2013 so I might miss most of these issues. Tho I'm still dual-booting Windows cuz of an old game with anti-cheat that refuses to run on Wine.
Two things: 1) missing apps. Recent examples are 1password having a browser extension but no desktop client and I use several browser profiles, which results in me having to enter my 1password over and over again. Claude and OpenAI desktop apps missing. There are other more esoteric/personal ones of course, but those were the most annoying.
2) installing stuff is still a disaster. I most recently used PopOS and a mainstream app like Slack suggested Snap install, and I didn't have the Snap store. So I installed that and Slack installed but didn't work. Ended up installing the rpm instead which worked, but then the Snap Slack instance started working. So now I have two Slacks running and no idea which is which.
Yes, I'm a "noob" but like I said I have been doing this for 20 years. Have been a fulltime CTO for most of those years. Do server side linux admin fairly regularly as well.
Just converted a month ago from windows 10 to kbuntu 24lts The first thing is really weird bugs when dealing with multi-monitors in plasma/sddm (getting into UI locked states or xrandr settings not sticking for whatever reason). The second annoyance is not having first party support for peripherals like my mouse and webcam (looking at you Logitech) or generally thick client software that has windows/macos candidates but not Linux. Third is publishers with anticheat DRM being extremely hostile to VFIO gaming. EA announced Apex losing Linux support and recently they just blocked all their EAAC protected games from running on VM.
And even despite all that and more I am so happy to be rid of windows as a daily driver.
Same here. The only thing I do to avoid trouble is to stick to the average business laptop setting for laptops and tower servers for my desktops. I've been trouble free since the early 2000's.
For me, it is lack of business critical applications. For example I use Microsoft Teams to attend meetings multiples times a day. And there is no Teams client for Linux.
I have far more annoyances with Windows 11 than mint these days but that is a matter of opinion and use cases I suppose. I actually generally used to like the Windows UI, but it keeps getting less responsive. I wish they'd just stop.
Here's one: Why does the OneDrive option load 3-4 seconds AFTER the new right click context menu loads causing everything to move down and for me to click the wrong thing as it moves under my mouse cursor? I hated that on the web so they brought it to the desktop UI.
What I love about Windows Terminal is the ability to run shaders on the contents of the windows. This should be a feature of the whole Windows desktop.
I guess there is no accounting for taste, but I really find Gnome Desktop to be the one that wastes me the least amount of time. Mac is a close second (even though some things are hidden in hard to find places, such as the user's Python environment).
For as long as I used Windows it always had a bizarre strata of inconsistent and increasingly archaic GUI styles going all the way back to Windows 3.1. I'm a regular user of Ubuntu, Fedora, and PopOS, and they all look and feel better than Windows.
I’ve found KDE Plasma to be quite stable. At least compared to Windows. I haven’t used macOS in quite a few years but AFAIC it’s pretty much impossible to beat that UI.
You're saying it like it's a bad thing. This is one of the major reasons I use FOSS UNIX-like operating systems. (Not just linux, but FreeBSD too.) Because the desktop environment of my choice has stayed the same for more than 20 years without the need to relearn everything and adjust your workflow every time somebody in Microsoft needs a promotion. Scary to think how much time for bullshitting on internet forums has been saved over that period.
> It still has enough annoyances that it isn't worth 6% or extra freedom for me.
It is funny that I found modern Windows an annoyance instead. Every time I have to boot my Windows machine (I boot in Windows maybe once every month), generally one of those followings things happen:
- I need to type my BitLocker recovery key because for some reason Windows always reset it (from my search it seems that the fault is my Lenovo docker that acts as a PCI-e device and Windows doesn't like when a PCI-e is removed/reattached and invalidates the BitLocker key in TPM, but it is still annoying)
- Windows need to download a bunch of updates. Not a big issue, but now that Windows 11 is all about "feature updates", at least twice a year I need to see that dreadful "Welcome Screen" asking the same questions that I already answered a few months ago
- If the above happens, this also generally also brings some feature that I need to hunt to disable. "We think it would be so fun if we can show to you a random lock screen wallpaper, especially if we can also show you some ads for money, so let's active this by default even if you already disabled this in your previous Windows install".
- Even if it is not a big Windows update, every time I boot Windows I still need to wait a while until my system is usable again since every other program will run their update process. Of course they're all separate updaters, so they have no idea they're running at the same time, slowing down both my system and network in the process
I mean, I understand your complain. If I was not deep in Linux since my colleage days I don't think I could get used to the system today. NixOS also definitely helps because once I fix an issue, I know this issue will stay fixed even if I need to reinstall the system. The fact that Linux seems to be the only major operational system that respect my choices today is a huge to me.
Performance under WSL can be atrocious depending on which side of the machine your files live. It's OK if they are on the Linux side, but if they are on the Windows side, you'll access them as a network mounted file share. Not great if you open/close lots of files.
Yep, I have an rsync script which I run from WSL to backup both my WSL home directory and a bunch of files on a separate Windows drive to an external hard drive.
It takes something like 8 minutes for rsync to get the metadata about files before it starts potentially transferring anything. On native Linux a comparable amount of files takes less than 10 seconds.
The worst case scenario is when the data has to go over the WSL border twice (one to be processed by whatever Unix thing you are using) and another when it's written to an NTFS filesystem somewhere else.
My personal happy space is actually Cygwin. It's Unixy enough and doesn't cross the WSL border. Not great because NTFS doesn't perform that well under it, but definitely better than WSL.
Same thing with e.g. docker for macOS… it’s the primary reason I opted for running Linux on my dev machine at work. Using a virtualization layer to get docker/k8s/etc gives such abysmal performance it’s really crazy that it’s such a popular approach.
I’m not even sure what I’d have to do if I used windows… how do people even use git nowadays? Run it in WSL with files shared to your editor in windows? Run git natively in windows? Is NTFS still dog slow scanning tons of small files? Is that “git bash” cygwin distro still the way to go? It sounds like a total mess.
While the benchmarks have been reasonably done with out-the-box settings, I don’t think Ubuntu has the same level antimalware protection by default compared to Windows and is thus less hampered.
My Windows 11 with no 3rd party security software is considerably more zippy for me when I set up things like Dev Drive and get Windows Defender to largely stop scanning my working directories.
I wonder how much of a difference that would make to the benchmarks.
