I recently sold my Macbook, bought a Thinkpad, and am running NixOS full time, and I have to say that desktop Linux has gotten pretty excellent since the last time I ran it full-time.
I'm not sure if it's thanks to Wayland, or just improvements to the kernel, or improvements to the desktop environment, or some combination of the three, but at this point I actually think that for the first time I might actually prefer Gnome over macOS.
I haven't bothered with Windows since Windows 8, but it does make me happy that Linux holds its own performance-wise, even still. It doesn't look like Linux is categorically better than Windows, but it looks like for the most part they're comparable.
I agree. I attribute that mostly to NixOS though. It reminds me of the old Prince of Persia game where I could make a mistake, rewind time, and try again.
I find Ubuntu and others to be pretty fragile still. IMO, technologically Linux has been ready for years. If NixOS were packaged into an actual product experience it would be a great new entrant into the desktop operating system space.
Yeah, NixOS is admittedly kind of game changing. It's pretty hard to go back once you've gotten used to it.
I hate nixos, but I can't imagine using anything else ever again, because I like that when I screw up while trying to install something, the end result is a nop instead of wiping and re-installing.
Timeshift (included with Mint, but I don't think it's exclusive to it?) is a much more conventional solution—I believe it uses rsync under the hood—but it works very well for exactly this kind of experimentation. It can revert config changes, package installs, and even OS major version upgrades.
Timeshift is not exclusive to Mint. It's important to note that it was archived in 2022, and therefore will not see fixes or improvements. I'm a big fan of Snapper as a replacement, and encourage everyone to explore it. https://github.com/openSUSE/snapper
What does it mean to “screw up installing something”? Don’t think it has generally been a problem, though I could imagine a bad kernel module perhaps.
Can't speak for everyone, but at least in my case, especially when I was first learning about Linux, I'd mess up stuff with my graphics card driver or wifi card driver or something, and I'd get to a state where stuff wouldn't boot, or a GUI wouldn't start up. I'm decent enough now to where I'd be able to fix it, but when I was starting out I would sometimes feel that I had to wipe the hard drive to get it working (particularly before I had a smartphone, so when the WiFi went out I really had no way to look up how to fix it).
NixOS is nice because if you get to a situation like that, you can simply reboot and choose a previous generation, and then figure out where you went wrong.
Ok, so like filesystem snapshots. However, since LiveCD/Flash images became a thing, I stopped worrying about the OS at all, just keep a recent backup of my /data partition.
> Ok, so like filesystem snapshots.
Sort of, but only sort of. The filesystem is actually (mostly) unchanged for the backups. You have the /nix partition that can only really be touched by the nix program itself, and you have your root partition built based on the manifest defined in your configuration file. As such, every time you want to change anything about the system, you "rebuild" it, it stores a "copy" of the old root system, but since it's a cool lazy functional thing, it really only stores the diff's from the configuration, so they aren't terribly expensive, so it's not weird for me to have literally hundreds of generations stored on my laptop. Old stuff in the /nix partition isn't deleted until it's garbage collected, and a lot of stuff can't be garbage collected until the generation attached to it is removed.
So it's like a filesystem snapshot, but only the system files itself, the actual stuff on the hard drive actually doesn't get touched.
> However, since LiveCD/Flash images became a thing, I stopped worrying about the OS at all, just keep a recent backup of my /data partition.
I actually kind of do that with NixOS too!
My root partition is a tmpfs mount, meaning that every reboot is effectively a fresh root [1]. I have persistent volumes for my home directory and a few other things. To quote a friend, it's like a "new car smell on every reboot".
[1] Followed this tutorial: https://elis.nu/blog/2020/05/nixos-tmpfs-as-root/
I switched to Ubuntu recently on a Thinkpad Z16 and had some compatibility and battery life issues.
I think Linux is great for more mainstream models that have already been out for a few years, but unfortunately I can't recommend if you're buying a new or more niche machine.
It's really a shame, as I absolutely don't like the direction either Microsoft or Apple is going. I keep ending up back at MBP due to overall polish/hardware quality, but I prefer linux to MacOS. I hope Asahi Linux can get fully up-to-date with latest models and resolve the various QoL issues
This is where I'm at. I generally prefer Linux but I don't necessarily hate macOS, I've gotten by with a few annoyances.
It's really the hardware holding me back, still. I'm also watching Asahi closely. Any other laptop I've tried makes a compromise somewhere that I don't want - bad screen, track pad sucks, hit and miss keyboards. Plus heat and fan noise.
I just want a MacBook Air, but Linux. The new snapdragon surface laptop 7 is close (except the keyboard) but it doesn't run Linux and I've given up on Windows a long time ago.
Cannot speak for all Thinkpads, in my case it was the Thinkpad P16s Gen 2 AMD (rolls right off the tongue). It was pretty painless to get everything set up for me.
Then buy laptops made with linux in mind like Slimbook or Tuxedo.
Slimbook Execute, Slimbook Excalibur, Tuxedo Infinity and Tuxedo Pulse are amazing machines.
They're still held back by the chips.
RaptorLake gets close (and beats) the M3 in performance in some areas, but not in heat or fan noise.
No doubt they are all great machines, but after using an air for the last few years I can't use anything else that's not as cool or as quiet.
I'm holding out for Asahi Linux, or some better (and Linux supported) snapdragon elite offerings. The new surface laptop 7 is pretty close hardware wise (except the keyboard) but it can't run Linux, sadly.
Raptor Lake is pretty ancient, though. Wasn't it basically the same as Alder Lake?
Lunar Lake is supposedly pretty close to the Snapdragon. A bit slower but no need to bother with ARM and a much better GPU (if that matters).
I think Slimbook is releasing a Snapdragon laptop next year. I'm not a big fan of ARM in the desktop but I'm genuinely curious about it.
I'm pretty sure that it's improvements in all parts of the stack. Kernel (drivers mostly - the rest has already been fine or hasn't improved that much, e.g. out of memory behavior), middleware and frameworks, desktop environments.
I was going to write a comment agreeing with you but then my audio started to get scratchy for no reason this morning
I've run ubuntu for most of the last 20 years and my desktop has barely changed. It was excellent in 2006, it is excellent now. It gets out of my way and doesn't change from one year to the next (or if there are changes they are so gradual I don't notice)
Installation of ubuntu went seriously downhill since they moved to subiquity though, but its something I can live with once every 5 years or so when I get a new laptop.
I switched to Mint Cinnamon due to the “technical enshittification” of Ubuntu.
Ahh, comes with an xfce edition, great.
I moved from blackbox to xfce about the time I moved from a desktop to a laptop, mainly for things like access to wireless etc, I don't see a particular need to move again, will try to remember it next time I get a new laptop.
> but it does make me happy that Linux holds its own performance-wise
IMHO those benchmarks doesn't necessarily say much without any power usage data. Not sure what the current situation is but historically it wasn't uncommon for battery life to drop by 2x or so in Linux without extensive tweaking.
I really want to get the new Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura, which has Lunar Lake, is incredibly light at 980 g, and has a beautiful high resolution OLED display. But my 2018 Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 6 running Linux is still alive and kicking, though its CPU is a bit weak for my C++ compilation stuff...
> I recently sold my Macbook, bought a Thinkpad, and am running NixOS full time, and I have to say that desktop Linux has gotten pretty excellent since the last time I ran it full-time.
I'm using MBP with macOS since 2013 and I'm quite happy... don't need all that much speed (I upgraded my mbp2013 to MBP with M1 in 2021) but rather that it's "fast enough" and stable and is silent :) While I like Linux on the server I had weird issues with it on the desktop (network lost, not waking up…) so I'm a bit weary... though I fathom that my next machine will have Linux (most likely with ARM) but that's still 3-5 years in the future :)
I had a 2019 i9 MacBook Pro, which I actually really liked, but it always had issues with thermal management, and I was afraid that Apple would stop supporting the Intel Macs in the near-ish future, so I wanted to replace it while it still had some eBay value. I bought the Macbook when I was still working at Apple, so I had a considerable discount at the time which I do not have anymore, and so I looked at other computers outside of Apple this time around.
I'm really happy with my Thinkpad. It's pretty fast, light, one of the most pain-free Linux installs I've ever had, and reasonably priced. I'm not overly sold on the keyboard nipple but it's easy enough to ignore.
It's definitely not Wayland, although maybe Wayland has forced tech debt reduction in other areas. I've been running Desktop Ubuntu 100% of the time for the last ~3 years and I still can't consistently use Wayland. On the other hand old school X11 mostly just works for me these days.
I get some occasionally glitches when changing DPI settings (usually when switching between my desktop monitor and my large 4k TV) and the annoying flashing when logging in/logging out which I can easily live with.
Best of all, all the games I care about run on Linux now and in many cases they run better on Linux than they ever did on Windows!
Have you not had any of the classic Gnome/Linux/Wayland issues? Electron apps running slow/freezing, weird scaling issues, screen recording issues, display output/detection issues, sound and Bluetooth issues, ...
Some of these may be due to my laptop's shoddy support for Linux but I also had issues on my Lenovo ThinkPad X1 a couple years ago.
I don't know that I actually have any Electron apps installed on my computer, unless VSCode is Electron, in which case that one hasn't given me any issues.
I haven't had any scaling issues, I haven't tried screen recording. Sound mostly works fine, though it occasionally gets pretty confused by HDMI sound output (though that's usually resolved by re-plugging the cable). Bluetooth worked fine for me without any headaches, I even got Airpods to work without much trouble.
The only issue I've really had with Gnome, and I have no idea what this is and it's probably a bug in Firefox, is that for some reason the web interface for Transmission Server will crash the entire desktop. I need to muck about with dmesg or journalctl to figure out why and then file a bug report, but it's definitely that page (I've recreated it with just Firefox open on the Transmission Web page).
Otherwise, it's been great, I really like Gnome right now.
Systemd, Pipewire and Wayland all contributed a lot to the desktop experience.
It's also hardware - even the worst of laptops have decent mobile CPU+GPUs, of course with improving kernel and driver support, it's helping the OS.
You see improvements because Linux is still trying to get better. Linux wants to win over windows users. Windows is long past trying to win new users. Windows has moved on. Windows development now seems focused on how to better track and monetize users. Step away from windows for a few years and you will come back to something worse than when you left, similar to how airlines seem to be getting worse year on year.
I couldn't agree more. The first time I used Windows 11, I was absolutely horrified with how anti-user it is and how much of a vehicle to sell Microsoft services it has become. It's so bad that it was affecting my normal workflow and it forced me to look for greener pastures. While Windows 11 has some great technology under the hood, I installed Linux for the first time as my production desktop and I couldn't be happier. It's an environment designed for the user first and foremost and the experience, while it has some warts, is leaps and bounds better than the latest that has come out of Redmond.
>the latest that has come out of Redmond.
You may not even know about the latest from last week, it's the long-awaited Windows 11 24H2 general release.
Among other things, now you get bitlocker by default upon installation, and it automatically encrypts (not only) its own partition, plus any others within the realm of its default autoencryption settings.
This can be a little bit of an ordeal to recover from even if you have a Microsoft Account. If you have already made the effort to maintain a Local User instead, it can be accomplished but naturally you wont be able to decrypt using any online credentials. You would barely notice anyway since there are no notifications about bitlocker of any kind, much less autobitlocker with a fury. So you don't actually have any decryption keys at this point either. Other popups will occur though, nothing very useful as usual. Plus when booted to the newly installed W11 24H2 you're an authorized user so you can access your C: volume and every other volume like normal. So you would never guess there's a problem until you boot that PC to some other volume, like one having up-to-date W10 installed. And it wont boot because that whole partition has been stealth encrypted and the undamaged bootfiles no longer recognize it. It can only be accessed when you are already booted to the new 24H2 volume but bitlocker is still not "complete" on any other volumes without a Microsoft Account, so on each encrypted volume there is only an option to turn bitlocker "on" not off. You can muddle through and obtain a local decryption key but it does not work in a straightforward way (and perhaps maybe never the first time), plus decryption takes a bit of time. So it ends up being faster and easier to reformat the encrypted volume and recover the contents from backup.
To correct this, action needs to be taken in advance before the installation of W11 24H2 like no Windows before, you must make sure no other disk volumes are exposed and that the install setup process can only "see" the target volume you are intending to install 24H2 onto. Otherwise you really need to use the latest RUFUS app to tweak and adjust the Windows install routine so you can disable things like autobitlocker in your customized USB Windows install device. Before you subject a multipartioned PC to unbridled mayhem like never before. Not just a multibooter.
This finally adds up with other creeping challenges to make the latest Windows more fiddly and in need of arcane command-line intervention more so than Linux for the first time.
Not like it was since the beginning of Linux up until a week ago.
And it's a big leap.
I think it was around 2007 when I was setting up a new netbook for someone. I plugged a mouse, an old Microsoft USB mouse, and got a popup saying that windows needed a network connection in order to download the driver for my new USB device. That was the day I abandoned all hope for windows as a user-friendly OS.
The 6.10 kernel that comes with Fedora 40 (months after its release) proved so buggy on one of my computers that I assumed the hardware was faulty (the same kernel was stable on my other computer) so the computer gathered dust for 4 months till I saw a comment here about how the issue affects certain hardware models, but not others. (The hardware is stable under version 6.11.)
Aside from time-wasters like that though, I agree: I prefer Linux over Mac -- but Mac is more secure.
So, this got me curious. Assuming a cpu heavy benchmark with no syscalls (calculate primes or something like that) I’d not really expect a major difference between OSs. I guess you have the scheduler possibly fucking things up and the memory management. Maybe?
What else could contribute to a raw cpu benchmark difference?
There are such an enormous array of possible influences on this, most likely being the power profile.
By default Windows on a laptop (in this case a Zenbook S 14 with Core Ultra 7 256V) uses a reduced power mode where it limits the max frequency and is less aggressive in scaling up core frequency because of the greatly reduced return per unit of power (which can destroy battery life and make heat profiles unacceptable).
This comparison makes no mention of the power profile, nor does it observe battery usage if applicable.
This looks like a misleading if not completely useless clickbait comparison. Others mentioned schedulers, and while schedulers can account account for a percent or two difference across this sort of wide workload, instead a huge disparity is seen.
Coworkers switched from Win11 to Ubuntu, our main Spring Boot project compiled time was cut in half. I guess ntfs is a factor in this specific use case, it's a medium sized project with a few thousands files and classes.
NTFS is 100% the problem here. It really struggles with many small files type use cases. In pretty much all my projects, I notice a huge compile time cut in Linux and Mac as opposed to Windows.
Also a lot of typical Linux pipelines become unbearably slow if you try to replicate them in Windows.
Or the more obvious answer: newer binaries/libraries/kernel for Linux. Is it still hard to believe Windows leaves a lot performance on the table? And it does mention powersave governer for Ubuntu.
the scheduler has been an issue for windows for quite some time... along with the built-in anti-virus (and ads).
It's almost certainly the scheduler, IMO.
> On average the Ubuntu 24.10 release was about 14% faster than Microsoft Windows 11 out-of-the-box on this Lunar Lake powered ASUS Zenbook S 14 laptop.
What else was the "Out-of-the-box" Windows installation trying to do while they were running the benchmark? Sitting here on my Windows 10 installation with nothing but Firefox and Task Manager open, there are dozens of things clamoring for the attention of the scheduler and using CPU:
https://i.imgur.com/NxBOBXm.png
Yeah, I've installed several of these services on purpose, but I've also uninstalled or inhibited a bunch of things that I didn't need.
>What else was the "Out-of-the-box" Windows installation trying to do while they were running the benchmark?
It's trying to maximize the performance to power usage ratio out of the box. The default power profile is very conservative, which on a laptop means better battery life and reduced heat. Given that this comparison didn't do even rudimentary power consumption, heat, or CPU frequency scaling measures, it is overwhelmingly likely as the difference.
> there are dozens of things clamoring for the attention of the scheduler and using CPU
Linux machines have hundreds of processes too. It simply doesn't matter in 2024. That isn't a factor and isn't relevant, nor is the scheduler to blame.
This is a silly misleading benchmark that is de facto clickbait. Pretty surprisedto see it doing well here.
Wonder if it is putting things onto p-cores more aggressively. Would need to the power graphs at the same time to see that.
You have shitton of custom soft there
Power management maybe.
Power government seems like a likely candidate.
If it hasn't changed since 24.04 the default power governor in Ubuntu 24.10 is "powersave". I'd be curious to see how performance improved if Phoronix tested with the "performance" governor.
It could go either way honestly. The "performance" governor tries to max out the CPU clock rate all the time but because of transient thermal capacity this is not always optimal. The CPU will rip as hard as possible even under powersave, and it might hit a higher transient peak because it starts out cold.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned Virtualization-based security in this thread. I suspect this is responsible for a big part of the gap.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-vbs-harms-performa...
I play sc2 on Ubuntu nightly. Except for the battle.net being super slow to load the game play is insanely good.
Same
Wait....Starcraft 2 works on Linux?
It has been running flawlessly on Proton for years. Here's one way to do it without having to tinker with Wine guts or whatever.
1. Install Steam using your distro's package manager, e.g. sudo apt install steam
2. Download battle.net's setup.exe from their website
3. In steam, "Add non-steam game" and add the setup.exe
4. In steam, right click on the battle.net setup.exe and in properties, under Compatibility, check the box that says "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool" and select Proton Experimental.
5. Run it, which will allow you to run the installer on the first run. On subsequent runs it will just launch the battle.net launcher, allowing you to run the game immediately.
And everything works!!! Of course, you can feel free to do it manually with Wine or using a different tool such as Lutris. To be honest, this works with almost any Windows game that I can think of.
See: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/ppgk04/starcr...
Also, nice username --- I imagine it is Donny Vermillion from Starcraft 2 haha.
Yet I still feel Windows is more fluid and responsive just by using it generally. I have a pretty up to date dual boot laptop and Ubuntu still feels like having some kind of "shadow lag" all accross the system.
Weird because my experience is the opposite. I worked for a company that makes everyone use Windows, and I accessed my PC using Citrix. I always assumed that the incredible amount of lag and jank was contributed by Citrix. Then after I'd been working there a while I went to the office in New York where my actual desk was, logged into actual physical PC I'd been using the whole time, and it was exactly as bad in person! Right click, wait one whole ass second, context menu drifts into existence. Jank everywhere. I couldn't believe people pay real money for it.
With what OS's are doing for mitigating exploits these days for CPU (especially Intel), poor Windows schedulers, or historically bad power management, it's hard to pinpoint what's causing this.
Mhm... older CPUs were pretty close, but I guess Windows is really slow in adopting scheduler optimizations. The last one for Ryzen was in the pipeline for two years.
Wow those are some pretty spicy gaps. Would have guessed closer to 1% OS difference
Well on my Lenovo P15 Gen 1, Windows 11 is substantially more responsive than Ubuntu. I had been running Ubuntu on it for a couple years and switched over to Windows to play some games. I was shocked. And games aside, I mean desktop, vs code, etc, non-GPU heavy things.
Probably you were suffering from CPU throttle, trying with thinkfan and throotled projects should match or exceed your (non GPU) related problem
My CPU was no where near being throttled. I'm talking about basic desktop responsiveness.
It could be, by default no turbo boost is enabled, and after a few activities you should feel the lag and maybe unresponsiveness of using small amount of CPU power, I can be bad guessing, but using some Intel CPUs after 8th generation, this was a recurrent problem. In summary, it feels like an underpowered machine; then enable turbo boost, starts to heat up and feel the new kind of unresponsiveness, nice until there is to much heat (like 60 celsius); then, unlock the fan to keep the temp low, this recover a little bit of responsiveness, but that temp limit seems low; then, you get throttled in to play, with it you can play with the limit up to 98 celsius, so you can have a better experience overall and tweak your preference.
The only thing Windows is better at (almost equal) is 7-zip decompression. I wonder why.
No power consumption info, no info on what governor settings Ubuntu setup. As happy as I would be to notch such a notable Linux win, also would like the real details on what's happening here.
If it hasn't changed since 24.04 the default power governor in Ubuntu 24.10 is "powersave". I'd be curious to see how performance improved if Phoronix tested with the "performance" governor.
Nice. Yup.
These days I'd vastly prefer tests with declared tuned daemon profiles, as they cover a much broader amount of systems tweaking than just CPU governor.
i always think to myself how embarassing this must be
I don't know exactly what's happening here from a quick glance, but it's well known that Windows' default file system, NTFS, does not perform as well as Linux does when it comes to working with a large number of small files.
> well known
Did we at some point redefine this to mean "good" or "appropriate" or "acceptable"? If not then, in context, I have no idea what your point is.
I wish there was a benchmark with Windows 11 LTSC and showing if it has any actual performance advantage or not
Ads and telemetry?
Great example of horrible software eating up all the hardware performance gains.
Windows benchmarks used to have parity for a very long time. XP/7/8/8.1/10* had performance benchmark results within the margin of error ~ 2% at most.
I feel like every performance chart should have a tag that says "Bigger is better" or "Smaller is better" Makes it a lot easier to scan the charts.
They are there?
This is strange - I wasn't expecting such a difference on CPU-only benchmarks. In my experience as a software engineer I find Linux much faster than windows mainly due to the file system being more performant (e.g. the builds run noticeably faster). For CPU-intensive tasks I always thought they were quite similar.
On the other hand since upgrading from 6.6 to 6.11 I noticed a great improvement in UI responsiveness on my old X1 Tablet and I doubt this Ubuntu uses a recent kernel even.
Disclaimer: I haven't used Windows in a long time.
> Linux much faster than windows mainly due to the file system being more performant (e.g. the builds run noticeably faster)
It's not the file system. It is the file system filter. NTFS is a high performance FS.
Microsoft is working around this via a feature called DevDrive. It uses ReFS instead of NTFS as ReFS leverages copy-on-write.
I think it must somehow use a recent kernel, otherwise Lunar Lake wouldn't be supported?
This release of Ubuntu uses 6.11 which is about as fresh as anyone could hope for.
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