After doing some google-fu, I’ve been puzzled further as to how the finnish man has done it.

What I mean is, Linux is widely known and praised for being more efficient and lighter on resources than the greasy obese N.T. slog that is Windows 10/11

To the big brained ones out there, was this because the Linux Kernel more “stripped down” than a Windows bases kernel? Removing bits of bloated code that could affect speed and operations?

I’m no OS expert or comp sci graduate, but I’m guessing it has a better handle of processes, the CPU tasks it gets given and “more refined programming” under the hood?

If I remember rightly, Linux was more a server/enterprise OS first than before shipping with desktop approaches hence it’s used in a lot of institutions and educational sectors due to it being efficient as a server OS.

Hell, despite GNOME and Ubuntu getting flak for being chubby RAM hog bois, they’re still snappier than Windows 11.

MacOS? I mean, it’s snappy because it’s a descendant of UNIX which sorta bled to Linux.

Maybe that’s why? All of the snappiness and concepts were taken out of the UNIX playbook in designing a kernel and OS that isn’t a fat RAM hog that gobbles your system resources the minute you wake it up.

I apologise in advance for any possible techno gibberish but I would really like to know the “Linux is faster than a speeding bullet” phenomenon.

Cheers!

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
    0·
    4 months ago

    NT is actually pretty great. The Windows GUI may have gone to shit, but the underlying kernel is great. I’d even argue that it’s ahead of Linux in many respects.

    Linux is a slog comparatively, coming with hundreds of packed drivers for machines that stopped being sold a decade ago, unless you’ve tweaked your custom kernel config to only include drivers for your specific system. Windows has its fallback drivers, but most of them are downloaded on the fly rather than being precompiled into the kernel. This is part of why Nvidia drivers are such a pain to deal with on Linux.

    The Windows scheduler and the Linux scheduler deal with processes just fine. Windows deals with hitting memory limits way better, but Linux has more flexibility to control the CPU scheduler. I also find Linux to be less efficient with file system caches, but that’s probably because Windows takes forever to complete I/O operations because of NTFS. Windows will fill your RAM with stuff you may need, while Linux happily keeps gigabytes of RAM unassigned (and act all surprise Pikachu when you actually request the browser that you open literally every time you boot your PC).

    Linux doesn’t do antivirus, that’s the biggest difference. You get infected more easily, but you get faster I/O in return. This is especially the case when accessing tons of tiny files, like when booting the computer or programming. The load is relatively small when loading games and such.

    I find Windows to be a lot snappier with my iGPU in power save mode, while Gnome and KDE are snapper when the iGPU is enabled. Video acceleration make or break Linux DEs much more than Windows in my experience.

    I also find Bitlocker to perform a lot better than standard LUKS2, especially during the early boot process. The Windows bootloader isn’t restricted in its access to encryption acceleration functions the same way Grub is, so unlocking disks with similar cryptographic strengths at boot time is just faster on Windows. Plus, hibernating with encryption is possible without hacks and disabling security features in Windows, which is why it boots so fast (shutting down hibernates the kernel unless you need updates).

    Linux is generally faster at updating (though using Flatpak GUIs would have you think otherwise), which is the biggest speed concern I have with Windows today. Perhaps it’s to make System Restore actually usable (something Linux can improve on) but it takes forever to install minor updates. Maybe it’s related to NTFS as well, which isn’t too great compared to the Linux alternatives on offer.

    Windows is also terrible if you’re still running from a hard drive. With Windows 11 I’m pretty sure the devs abandoned HDD support all together with how slow it boots on spinning rust. A real pain when using virtual machines.

    If you notice an immediate difference between Windows and Linux, it’s probably because you’ve recently installed a fresh copy of Linux. My Ubuntu and my Windows partitions boot in about the same amount of time. Give it a few years of gathering cruft and you’ll probably have an equally slow Linux install.

    • Evening Newbs@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      This post is so full of inaccuracies that I don’t know where to begin. I’ll just mention the first thing I noticed: just because drivers are compiled with the kernel doesn’t mean they’re all loaded at runtime. modprobe exists for a reason.

      • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
        0·
        4 months ago

        Modprobe or not, my computers still scan for GPUs on the EISA bus. Not everything is loaded, but tons of unnecessary stuff is loaded just in case, like ancient PS/2 controller support and obscure filesystems. Installing usable drivers can even land you in a situation where two drivers fight for control over a device (Nvidia again), necessitating kernel flags or blacklists to prevent builtin drivers from loading.

        Plus, even if they’re not loaded at runtime, drivers for hardware I’ll never encounter still take up space in the kernel. Impossible to prevent with Linux’ kernel architecture and barely a problem in practice (unless you want to boot a microcontroller or want to use Linux as a bootloader).

        • Evening Newbs@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          4 months ago

          If it’s “barely a problem in practice” why did you bother to mention it like it’s an active performance issue?

          • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
            0·
            4 months ago

            Because this is a response to a post calling NT an “obese slog”. Compared to Linux, it’s almost anorexic.

            Plus, these drivers do cause plenty of issues, like that time a patch in an early kernel NFS driver caused PCs connected to a DisplayPort-to-HDMI-converter connected to certain Intel GPUs to hang while booting for several months. I’ve had to pin an unmaintained kernel for months until Intel finally patched their driver against that, it was a real pain, especially with everyone around me telling me to just install Windows like everyone else whenever this caused package conflicts again.

            When this stuff becomes a problem, the kernel often becomes entirely useless and very few people will go through the necessary troubleshooting to get their computer working again. It’s easier to clean install another OS, be that a Linux distro with a different kernel version or Windows.

    • xan1242@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      0·
      4 months ago

      You’re mostly correct. People here don’t take Windows praise lightly.

      NT is probably the best part about Windows. If you’re gonna complain about Windows, the kernel is the last thing to complain about.

      As you’ve said, there are things that are still better about NT to this day;

      • OOM conditions are way better - system continues to run mostly fine after emergency swapping memory pages into the page file. No crashes, just a freeze until the OS swaps stuff out. No data is usually lost due to this. Apps continue to run and you have the chance to save and reboot your machine.
      • The driver architecture, as you’ve alluded to, is much more flexible. No need to rebuild a DKMS module every time the kernel updates. The drivers are self-contained and best of all - backwards compatible. You can still use XP 64-bit drivers on modern Windows (if you ever need to)
      • Process scheduling is very good for anything equal to or lower than 64 CPU threads. Windows at its core can multitask pretty good on one thread and that scales up to a certain point.

      Most of NT stigma comes from NTFS (which has its own share of problems) and the bugcheck screens that people kept seeing (which weren’t even mostly MS’ fault to begin with, that was on the driver vendors).

      Mark Russinovich has some of his old talks up on his YT channel and one of them compares Linux (2.6 at the time) to NT and goes into great detail. Most of the points made there still applies to this day.