Ubuntu 21.04 vs. Windows 10 Trade Blows On The AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX / ASUS ROG Strix G15

[perpetually high]

Windows 10 could be faster in every benchmark. Still wouldn't use it. Windows 11 looks pretty cool, though. Would run that in a VM and dual-boot if I need to in the future (for any games that still needed it)

[RedEyed]

Windows 10 could be faster in every benchmark. Still wouldn't use it. Windows 11 looks pretty cool, though. Would run that in a VM and dual-boot if I need to in the future (for any games that still needed it)

After being a linux user, linux developer and windows hater more than 10 years I decided to give windows 10 a try.
Nowadays (for me) it works blazingly well (mb awful windows experience in the past was due to slow hdd, low RAM and awful C++ development tools)

I switched all my work and user workwflow to Windows. I don't want to say this, but I have no issue with windows 10, I don't need to constantly administrate my linux desktops, I just do what I need w/o configuring OS.

Currently I'm a Python guy, so I didn't notice any difference when switched from linux to windows in terms of working experience.

Sure, I love linux and use it for servers, but as for user - I chose windows 10, everithing that I need already works very well, everybody support windows and I can finally buy a lot of good software.

What I really miss in windows is autocompletion in the terminal.

[tildearrow]

After being a linux user, linux developer and windows hater more than 10 years I decided to give windows 10 a try.
Nowadays (for me) it works blazingly well (mb awful windows experience in the past was due to slow hdd, low RAM and awful C++ development tools)

I switched all my work and user workwflow to Windows. I don't want to say this, but I have no issue with windows 10, I don't need to constantly administrate my linux desktops, I just do what I need w/o configuring OS.

Currently I'm a Python guy, so I didn't notice any difference when switched from linux to windows in terms of working experience.

Sure, I love linux and use it for servers, but as for user - I chose windows 10, everithing that I need already works wery well, everybody support windows and I can finally buy a lot of good software.

What I really miss in windows is autocompletion in the terminal.

In my case, when I tried out Windows 10 it was a true pain.
It takes 3 minutes to boot (sometimes even more). The system boots up in 1 minute and then takes me to the desktop, in where I am forced to wait much longer just for it to fully load.
The Start button is unresponsive and it could take seconds for it to open.
Disk operations are very slow when compared to Linux or macOS. And by "very" I mean usually a lot (a transfer took me 10 minutes where the same transfer took 30 seconds under Linux/macOS).

Linux, macOS and even Windows 7/8 are way faster. How come they screwed up the load times so much?

[skeevy420]

In my case, when I tried out Windows 10 it was a true pain.
It takes 3 minutes to boot (sometimes even more). The system boots up in 1 minute and then takes me to the desktop, in where I am forced to wait much longer just for it to fully load.
The Start button is unresponsive and it could take seconds for it to open.
Disk operations are very slow when compared to Linux or macOS. And by "very" I mean usually a lot (a transfer took me 10 minutes where the same transfer took 30 seconds under Linux/macOS).

Linux, macOS and even Windows 7/8 are way faster. How come they screwed up the load times so much?

Are you using HDDs or something along those lines?. My system without fastboot gets me to the log in screen within 15 seconds with another 10 from there to load up the desktop and some autostart programs; Windows 11 & 10 on an NVME, Ryzen 4650G, RX 580. Same PC with Arch on an SSD it's about the same speed. The longest part of my boot process is waiting on my keyboard to initialize because my UEFI won't continue on until I've had a second (literally) in case I need to input a key to access a submenu.

On my previous PC, Windows 10 on an HDD, it was sssssslllllloooooowwwwww. 2-3 minutes from power up to usable desktop. Linux on that same system on an SSD was a lot faster, about as fast as it is now aside from that PCs ridiculously slow BIOS. Linux on that same system on an HDD was slow, but still much faster than Windows 10.

[tildearrow]

Are you using HDDs or something along those lines?. My system without fastboot gets me to the log in screen within 15 seconds with another 10 from there to load up the desktop and some autostart programs; Windows 11 & 10 on an NVME, Ryzen 4650G, RX 580. Same PC with Arch on an SSD it's about the same speed. The longest part of my boot process is waiting on my keyboard to initialize because my UEFI won't continue on until I've had a second (literally) in case I need to input a key to access a submenu.

On my previous PC, Windows 10 on an HDD, it was sssssslllllloooooowwwwww. 2-3 minutes from power up to usable desktop. Linux on that same system on an SSD was a lot faster, about as fast as it is now aside from that PCs ridiculously slow BIOS. Linux on that same system on an HDD was slow, but still much faster than Windows 10.

Yes, HDD indeed. No opportunities for upgrading.

Problem is, even Windows 7/8 is faster on HDD... And is ironic because Windows 10's flat design should actually take LESS time to load...

[RedEyed]

In my case, when I tried out Windows 10 it was a true pain.
It takes 3 minutes to boot (sometimes even more). The system boots up in 1 minute and then takes me to the desktop, in where I am forced to wait much longer just for it to fully load.
The Start button is unresponsive and it could take seconds for it to open.
Disk operations are very slow when compared to Linux or macOS. And by "very" I mean usually a lot (a transfer took me 10 minutes where the same transfer took 30 seconds under Linux/macOS).

Linux, macOS and even Windows 7/8 are way faster. How come they screwed up the load times so much?

I had the same experience before, it's so damn slow and luggy! I couldn't understand how ppl can use it.
The fact is, that Windows 10 just can't work on HDD
But when I installed it on machine with SSD - everithing became as fast as on my lovely Arch.

[skeevy420]

Yes, HDD indeed. No opportunities for upgrading.

Problem is, even Windows 7/8 is faster on HDD...

Unfortunately, that's my experience as well. Win10 off HDD was nightmarishly slow. No amount of tweaking seemed to help my last PC there. About the only thing that did was disabling game launchers...but that's a given...

[perpetually high]

After being a linux user, linux developer and windows hater more than 10 years I decided to give windows 10 a try.
Nowadays (for me) it works blazingly well (mb awful windows experience in the past was due to slow hdd, low RAM and awful C++ development tools)

That's fair, and I think that's how it should be. People should use what's working for them. Linux and Ubuntu work best for me right now, that's not to say that won't change in the future, but I definitely won't be moving away from Linux. May use MacOS on the side since it's based off of Unix, but if that was the case, why not just use Linux? That's why I'm personally interested in the new Apple chips gaining Linux support. That's a win for everyone.

In my case, when I tried out Windows 10 it was a true pain.

More my experience was well. I have almost all the Windows in a VM that I go to from time to time, all of them have some use for me believe it or not. Plus I'm a sick son of a gun, and I like that stuff. But Linux is where the heart is, always

[arQon]

What on earth is going on with zstd and (to a lesser extent) 7-zip? Why would that be so much faster on Windows? After all isn't compression mostly CPU bound (in which case the differences should be minor)?

Sort of, but much less than you're probably thinking. Aside from the IO (which is also fairly significant, as you say) these algos are predominantly *memory* bound "really". I've no idea why the Ubuntu versions are so much slower, but if it's prematurely evicting pages that the compressor still potentially wants so that it can buffer more of the writes, I suppose that might do it - but that seems a stretch.

So yeah, I think I'd be inclined to go with the suggestion that something in the compile flags was "wrong", but depending on the corpus it could be the result of bad memory management instead. The (apparently required in the comments of literally every benchmark article) noise about governors etc is just that: noise. Unless the governor is outright broken (e.g. Intel p-state) the CPU will be running AFAP all the time: there are no lulls in this sort of work for anything to downclock it.

[tildearrow]

IMHO this is due to OpenCL support:

If so then this is not a fair comparison and it should be done again.