cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/linux/t/646160
With currently reviewing the HP Z6 G5 A workstation powered by the new 96-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX Zen 4 processor, one of the areas I was curious about was how well HP’s tuned Microsoft Windows 11 compares to that of Linux.
So this is not about ubuntu, but really just any kind of linux? What a shitty title
Ubuntu is relatively heavy. Lighter distros probably do even better.
Always did on my hardware at least. When I was using Windows, my old laptop started lagging very much and it was becoming unbearable. I could not get a new one immediately. I got to know about Linux one day and installed it to try it out because there was not really anything else I could try.
I could not believe myself how buttery smooth my laptop became after that. 95% of the games that I used to play on Windows run with more performance on Linux.
I’m typing this on an 8-or-9-year-old laptop that used to be a Windows machine years ago. Exact same experience–it got too sluggish so I wiped it and installed Linux and it’s been fine ever since.
I sure am eyeing that new Framework, though… :)
Yeah. Maybe even better with a distro with a more updated kernel btw.
(btw)
It’s not a “shitty title”, because Ubuntu Linux is the thing they actually tested.
Whether Debian or Fedora or Alpine or Void or whatever would do better or worse is not a given, and isn’t something the OP can comment on because they didn’t test it.
We can probably infer that gains of a similar amount would be seen on most mainstream distros (as they’re all pretty similar under the covers), but that’s not on the OP.
In particular, Ubuntu ships with various non-free drivers and kernel patches that will be present in some, but not all other distros.
If course it’s not on the OP, it’s on Phoronix. This is a shitty title from any party, but from them last least I would have expected more, instead of just attributing the performance to a specific distribution, the most corporate-y one no less.
Linux, the kernel, doesn’t operate in isolation. The system under test was Ubuntu, which comes with specific packages, package versions, patches, kernel configuration, and so on. It is reasonable to say that the combination between this specific operating system and hardware led to the observed outcome. Different combinations of software and hardware may yield other results or replicate the same outcome. The certainty of these outcomes can only be established through testing. Therefore, your outrage seems unwarranted, and your assertion is not only baseless but incorrect.
Ubuntu comes with various drivers, kernel patches, and configuration options that other distros lack or have their own replacement for. It also comes with a different kernel version (6.5 for 23.10) compared to other Linux distros out there.
I can’t tell you if these changes affect performance much, but there may be big performance differences between distros for specific workloads. Running the same tests on Arch or OpenSuse may produce different results, you can’t assume all Linux performs the same.