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Why is Linux a bit slower than windows
Post by acithium » Tue Dec 22, 2009 6:41 am
Let me start by saying that I’ve been using Linux for sometime now. I’m always talking it up to people that I know. I mean, I even have the Debian coffee cup at work (yea, I’m that guy). The problem comes when people use linux for the first time. They always say «it’s slower than windows», and their right. Just try it with Firefox. Firefox opens in windows a lot faster than Linux. I’ve tried a couple of different distros and I find this to be true. I always come back with the common response of «yea, but my system has A LOT more uptime and stability than windows ever will.» Most people don’t really care about uptime because they shut their computer down (especially if it’s a laptop) daily, stability is a big deal to most.
I guess my question is: What is the best way to make linux more responsive through the desktop (I currently use Gnome)?
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Why is Linux a bit slower than windows
Post by markfiend » Tue Dec 22, 2009 7:00 am
I completely disagree. In my experience, Linux in general, including Mint, is much faster than Windows.
A friend (actually my wife’s sister’s boyfriend) came to me on Sunday saying «hey, Mark, do you have a Linux install disk lying round? I’ve got a virus again, I want to try Linux instead.»
I lent him a Linux Mint install CD, he ran the installer in less than 20 minutes, and was completely wowed by the difference in experience between Windows and Linux. Particularly how much faster Mint is than Windows!
(Within an hour, he had run the installer for a second time, this time completely removing the Windows partition.)
Oscar799 Level 20
Posts: 10330 Joined: Tue Aug 11, 2009 9:21 am Location: United Kingdom
Re: Why is Linux a bit slower than windows
Post by Oscar799 » Tue Dec 22, 2009 8:15 am
I have to agree with markfiend.
I have an old Toshiba laptop as a backup machine,it has XP and Mint 7 main edition dual-booted.
On the rare occasion I boot XP the first thing I notice is how painfully slow it is,on the same machine Mint 7 seems really fast.
Maybe I’ve just been lucky.
ej64 Level 4
Posts: 323 Joined: Tue Nov 24, 2009 7:43 am Location: somewhere in Germany
Re: Why is Linux a bit slower than windows
Post by ej64 » Tue Dec 22, 2009 8:25 am
acithium wrote: Let me start by saying that I’ve been using Linux for sometime now. I’m always talking it up to people that I know. I mean, I even have the Debian coffee cup at work (yea, I’m that guy). The problem comes when people use linux for the first time. They always say «it’s slower than windows», and their right. Just try it with Firefox. Firefox opens in windows a lot faster than Linux.
On a fresh Windows installation this may be. Windows does a lot of prefetching, pre-loading a good bunch of your most often used apps into RAM. Win Vista and 7 even can use flash cards to cache small files permanently («ReadyBoost») — flash cards are very fast with tiny files.
Another point is, that Linux often is installed on a higher partition number lieing nearer to the inner tracks of the HD were the HD usually suffers some 50% reduction of r/w speed relatively to the outer tracks. So, this is not comparable.
If you compare an aged Windows with an aged Linux installation things are completely the other way round, Win registry and user files are horribly inflated, disk fragmentation . I still have a 6 y/o XP installation (there are some apps and files left to migrate) that needs ages to boot and some 60 seconds to start firefox. With Linux (ext3/4) you will never experience such dramatic performance drops.
And honestly, even if I compare my win7 (with 8GB readyboost) and my Mint8 (both young) with the latter installed to the slower parts of the HD, I don’t experience remarkable performance differences. Maybe I will stopwatch both out of curiosity, but so far I didn’t notice such.
I guess my question is: What is the best way to make linux more responsive through the desktop (I currently use Gnome)?
I always experienced Linux as beeing more responsive especially with multiple apps. Win7 seems to be slightly more responsive with heavy i/o and CPU loads then it’s predecessors while Linux remains far more responsive, though.
If you mean loading time then go and buy a SSD or at least install Linux to the outer tracks of the HD.
Thinkpad X220 with Samsung SSD running Xubuntu 13.04
I’m getting old gladly — I don’t like to die young .
Is Windows in general always slower than linux? [closed]
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There are multiple distribution in the company. Building the same project results in different build times (see table 1).
| win10laptop32gbram | win10laptopOld | win7laptop | win7server | linuxvm | mac | |--------------------|----------------|------------|------------|---------|-----| | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1.5 | 1 | 1.9 | Table 1: Ratio of build speed between different Operating System and hardware. Do other people from other organizations experience this as well?
Are your build done on the same hardware? If not there’s no point in comparing build time for OS comparison at all asthey are biased by hardware
Slower at doing what? It’s almost certainly going to depend on what exactly you’re doing, and «in general» is way too broad to be able to answer effectively.
1 Answer 1
TL;DR depends on the use case with up to 12 times between best/worst
Comprehensive testing has been done over at Phoronix (28.03.18) and the results are very mixed. The tests looked at:
- Clear Linux 21510
- Debian 9.4
- OpenSUSE 42.3 Leap
- Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
- Windows 10 Pro Build 16299
- Debian 9 On WSL
- OpenSUSE 42.3 On WSL
- Ubuntu 16.04 LTS On WSL
The results are all over the show. In a few tests, the WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) is faster then native Windows (GraphicsMagick) and the Intel optimized distribution, Clear Linux, sometimes has the worst results (Netperf UDP request response). While in others Windows is twice as fast as all Linux distributions (CacheBench). All in all, deciding on performance is not conclusive. Choose the OS that provides the tooling you require.
Nonetheless, the article itself does provide a winner given that only first place finishes are taken into account:
. Clear Linux was the fastest of the operating systems tested with coming in first 40% of the time, Debian 9.4 in second with first place finishes 22.5% of the time, and Windows 10 Pro itself was the fastest 12.5% of the time.
When only taking Java into account:
In the Java tests, to no real surprise, the performance tended to be about the same across all tested operating systems.
And finally, in a compile test (Golang), which is the test that is most related to the use case in the question:
The build performance on Windows 10 and WSL were slower than the bare metal Linux performance.