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Ubuntu vs Windows 10: Performance Tests on a Walmart Laptop (phoronix.com) 147

Posted by EditorDavid from the living-better dept.
Phoronix's Michael Larabel is doing some performance testing on Walmart's $199 Motile-branded M141 laptop (which has an AMD Ryzen 3 3200U processor, Vega 3 graphics, 4GB of RAM, and a 14-inch 1080p display).

But first he compared the performance of its pre-installed Windows 10 OS against the forthcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux distribution.

Some highlights: - Java text rendering performance did come out much faster on Ubuntu 20.04 with this Ryzen 3 3200U laptop...

- The GraphicsMagick imaging program tended to run much better on Linux, which we've seen on other systems in the past as well.

- Intel's Embree path-tracer was running faster on Ubuntu...

- Various video benchmarks were generally favoring Ubuntu for better performance though I wouldn't recommend much in the way of video encoding from such a low-end device...

- The GIMP image editing software was running much faster on Ubuntu 20.04 in its development state than GIMP 2.10 on Windows 10...

- Python 3 performance is still much faster on Linux than Windows.

- If planning to do any web/LAMP development from the budget laptop and testing PHP scripts locally, Ubuntu's PHP7 performance continues running much stronger than Windows 10. - Git also continues running much faster on Linux.
Their conclusion? "Out of 63 tests ran on both operating systems, Ubuntu 20.04 was the fastest... coming in front 60% of the time." (This sounds like 38 wins for Ubuntu versus 25 wins for Windows 10.)

"If taking the geometric mean of all 63 tests, the Motile $199 laptop with Ryzen 3 3200U was 15% faster on Ubuntu Linux over Windows 10."
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Ubuntu vs Windows 10: Performance Tests on a Walmart Laptop More

Ubuntu vs Windows 10: Performance Tests on a Walmart Laptop

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  • How badly does this blow out of the water my now ancient desktop? 8350, 2x gf 950. I need something low power.

    Also, how much RAM can you shoehorn into a cheap POS like this?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Entrope ( 68843 )

      The CPU appears to be slightly faster than yours in single-threaded execution and both have two physical cores, but this laptop doesn't have SMT. Its GPU is far weaker than a single GeForce 950. It should be pretty easy to load it up with RAM, though. Something like the Lenovo IdeaPad 330S is probably at least twice the laptop (for twice the price).

      • We have bought house brand stuff from Walmart a few times, in the past. Based on that experience - I wouldn't worry about specs so much, I'd worry more about how poorly the thing is probably put together and how long it's going to physically function.

        Do they offer a good warranty? But, even then, there's no such thing as a "good" warranty if you end up having to invoke it regularly.

        We don't shop at Walmart much at all anymore; and, when we do, we stick to name brand items.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Since you're loading Linux anyway... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by couchslug ( 175151 ) on Sunday February 02, 2020 @11:20PM (#59683288)

      Consider a used business class notebook with a good track record instead of budget junk which will punish your choice. I support friends and some local businesses who can't resist buying low-end junk but end up frustrated, for example by charging port failures.

      In your situation I'd look into recent HP and Dell business class machines after asking in forums (Ars Technica is excellent) what people who support fleets of them prefer. I always ask the pros because someone who deals with hundreds of notebooks will have a more accurate idea of their quality and of company service.

      Though I generally like them I'm not a Thinkpad zealot and Lenovo has been quite sloppy with firmware lately (I bought a P52 last year which luckily remained un-bricked because I immediately installed Linux, but later Thjunderbolt firmware problems coerced me to briefly reconnect the Windows spinner drive I bought as a placeholder and to get the SATA cable and caddy so I could update firmware.

      I keep PCs for many years until they're useless and business class notebooks are a great fit with plenty of off-lease machines and organ donors should parts be needed.

      • HP can go fuck themselves forever and ever amen.

        I had an elitebook. It had a known problem (Quadro G71 die bonding failure). It took over 24 hours on the phone all told to get a replacement. Never. Fucking. Again.

    • With your 4 single threaded cores on an obsolete process you are seriously underwater compared to 12 thread R5 3600, for example. But why not treat yourself to twice as many cores with 3900X? The incremental system cost would only be 10% for this seriously kickass part. Might was well get yourself some non-FU Radeon while upgrading :)

  • In other news... (Score:3)

    by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Sunday February 02, 2020 @08:49PM (#59682998)
    in other news, the Pope is Catholic.
    • Honestly it's not an impressive win for Linux at only 60% more performance wins consider it should be a performance beast compared to windows and all it's bloat. In a way it's impressive Windows isn't slower considering how much shit it runs AND that it's not benefiting the same way from the long running shared UNIX and UNIX clone architecture. You can shit on Windows all you want, but it is a much younger and mostly faster moving OS than UNIX and it's clones. This is because the real determination of the
      • Windows 10 attempts to nudge you to give up your privacy to Microsoft every fucking step of the way. Ubuntu does not. That's all I have to know. Security may be OK for both, but at least Ubuntu doesn't rape your privacy by offloading your data to "da clown."
        • Just check the "don't show again" box. I use Win 10 (as well as Linux) and I don't remember ever being asked that.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kenh ( 9056 )

        According to the article:

        Their conclusion? "Out of 63 tests ran on both operating systems, Ubuntu 20.04 was the fastest with coming in front 60% of the time." (This sounds like 38 wins for Ubuntu versus 25 wins for Windows 10.)

        "If taking the geometric mean of all 63 tests, the Motile $199 laptop with Ryzen 3 3200U was 15% faster on Ubuntu Linux over Windows 10."

        Linux was only 15% faster than windows - it was rated faster in 60% of the tests performed.

    • in other news, the Pope is Catholic.

      That's arguable. The leader of the Catholic church does not list "Pope" amongst his titles, while the leader of the Coptic Orthodox church does.

    • in other news, the Pope is Catholic.

      I mean, the Pope is Catholic, but this whole comparison was crap from beginning to end. All of the tests were run on software native to and optimized for Linux. And when it outperformed the badly ported Windows versions, they're all "Oooo, see, year of the Linux Desktop!".

      These comparisons were less than worthless.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      From TFA:

      compares between Windows 10 as it's shipped on the laptop against the forthcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux distribution

      So they compared the crappy Windows installation, full of shovelware and trial versions of pointless anti-virus software and out of date drivers etc. against a fresh install of Ubuntu.

      No wonder Windows lost.

      • Well, I read a test of its more expensive variant, and apparently that one came, surprisingly, only with Windows 10. No bloatware. Hence it could well be that this one is also devoid of it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The price of the cheap ones is usually offset by the crapware they install on it. That free trial of McAfee pays them to be there.

  • Try streaming Youtube videos and playing Candy Crush.

    • Re:Low end laptop tests? (Score:4, Funny)

      by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 ) on Monday February 03, 2020 @12:09AM (#59683374)
      No. We need real world tests with things that people actually use. Like Java text rendering and Gimp.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by novakyu ( 636495 )

        But testing PHP scripts locally? How does one realistically test for something like that without running performance benchmark for MySQL and/or PostgreSQL? This test is useless without full benchmark test suite for the server software. After all, that's at the very foreground of any thinking person's mind as they consider buying a sub-$200 laptop.

  • Windows 10 is a pig (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mrsam ( 12205 ) on Sunday February 02, 2020 @09:11PM (#59683060) Homepage

    I run Windows 10 in a basic, no-frills, qemu VM. That thing is a bloated pig. Even when I'm doing nothing, something always eats 20-25% CPU, according to virt-manager. Something is always scribbling to disk. What is it doing? Who knows. And that's the best case, after leaving Win 10 idle for at least 20 minutes to settle down, after boot, when it calms down to its 20-25% CPU baseline. Before anyone claims malware: this is a stock Windows 10 image, with only one accounting application, and a bunch of tax preparation software that I manually installed (this is the only use I have Windows for), and this VM is not used for browsing or the interwebs, at all.

    Immediately after a boot I see a constant shitstorm of pegged 100% CPU, for at least 15-20 minutes. Whatever's spinning, it's spinning at a lower CPU priority. Apps appear to run with only a minor, but observable performance degradation. Windows does yield the CPU to user-facing apps, in preference to all of its built-in telemetry and spyware that it needs to start at system boot. But it still has a performance impact.

    So it does not surprise me to see degraded performance in apps, if they run soon after a system boot, since they have to compete with Windows built-in telemetry/spyware initialization, for the CPU.

    • Mod parent UP!

      However, there is a protest against this: ""Windows 10 is a pig" and this "That thing is a bloated pig."

      The Association of World Pigs says that even the worst pig in the world does not try to take your personal data.

      (Trying to be funny.)

    • It's probably Windows Searching indexing your drives. How to [superuser.com] turn that crap off to save battery and disk wear-and-tear.

      You can also run ResMon (Resource Monitor) to help figure out what the fuck Windows is doing.

      • Re:Windows 10 is a pig (Score:5, Informative)

        by mrsam ( 12205 ) on Sunday February 02, 2020 @10:17PM (#59683176) Homepage

        I'm aware of Windows Search and I already have it disabled, and Windows still grinds away doing whatever crap it thinks it needs to do. If it were only search, you'd think that without you doing anything, it would eventually index everything it wants to index, and then go to sleep. No, this is something else. Task Monitor shows various things constantly waking up, burning CPU, then going away to be replaced by other services that feel the urge to do something.

        • Windows 10 certainly is a pig. One thing I've noticed is it's especially bad on a computer you only boot up once in a while, like a VM used for a particular application. Then it seems to be overwhelmed with scanning and patching at every boot.

          Windows also consumes more and more disk space endlessly over time, which is extra-annoying on virtual machines.

        • Re:Windows 10 is a pig (Score:4, Informative)

          by Afell001 ( 961697 ) on Monday February 03, 2020 @11:56AM (#59684952)
          I've got a multi-VM workstation that I use for my personal projects (Threadripper 2950X 16 core/32 thread, 128 GB RAM, 4 TB m.2 NVME SSD). The host is Kubuntu. I have VMs for Windows 10 Enterprise, Mac OS, FreeBSD and a couple other Linux distros (CentOS and OpenSUSE). Of the guest VMs, Windows is the resource hog, and like you said, there is always something gobbling up memory and fiddling with disk I/O even when nothing else is running. Surprisingly, the most trouble-free installation (knock on wood) has been Mac OS, and it's the one that I know is the least legal. The one I actually like the most? FreeBSD. It's been a very smooth, trouble-free operator, and takes the least amount of time for me to maintain. I seriously considered using it as the host instead of Kubuntu.

    • I've seen exactly what you are observing (I have a test Win 10 laptop running right now) - it's been running for about a week with nothing but Tera Term, Device Manager & Task Manager running. With nothing connected to Tera Term, CPU load is 14% right now and SDD disk is 2-3%. Getting decent performance after boot takes about 10 minutes after boot, BUT this system had been dormant for a couple of months and it ran at 100% for several hours when I first brought it up while it caught up on updates. Aft

      • The only positive that I can take from this is that Windows 10 runs reliably for days/weeks without needing a reboot.

        Win 7 would do that within a few minutes of startup, and my Win 7 PC would run reliably for over a month before I had to reboot it.

        My PC running Win 10 (used for running Blue Iris and nothing else) will sit at 35% or more just idling, with nothing loaded or running other than all the telemetry and crapware that it starts natively.

        It's a bloated blob of sadness. I've never been able to test the long-term run time because it constantly whines about updates and to be rebooted all the damn time.

        Even with update

        • Agree 100% with your comments.

          Unfortunately, I'm stuck with testing on Windows 10 because that's what my customers use.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by antdude ( 79039 )

          Same for XP, 2K, and other NT based Windows OSes. 3.x, 9x, etc. nope.

      • Never observed this. Once all the background crap is started up (which takes a few seconds) CPU usage goes down to under 1%. Microsoft did something to "bust" WMI recently, but you can fix that by stopping wmimgmt and then restarting it (and any other dependent services that shut down with it, if any).

        Sounds like the computer is infested with crap to me. Note that much crap can come pre-installed by the machine vendor, and the default vendor installed OS should almost never be used for anything -- it sho

      • I've got the same thing, got moved to a newish laptop for which the only version that'll run is 10 because there's no drivers for older versions, and I can't believe how sluggish this is, it runs like molasses, things like switching windows focus can stall for several seconds (and yes, I know about focus assist, makes no difference), UI elements are sluggish, and it constantly writes to disk in the background. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING! THERE'S NOTHING RUNNING, THE SYSTEM IS COMPLETELY IDLE AND THERE'S

    • Re:Windows 10 is a pig (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Waccoon ( 1186667 ) on Sunday February 02, 2020 @10:49PM (#59683250)

      Observing Win10 performance is also quite difficult. New versions of Process Explorer (after Microsoft bought it out) will give completely different results than the old versions (the ones made by SysInternals).

      Win10 is very selective about what information it gives you, and will clearly show 0% CPU usage when 3rd party performance tools will readily show all kinds of stuff is going on in the background. I've seen instances where hard drive access occurs, complete with mechanical sounds and a blinking LED, but Windows insists there's 0% drive access going on. I never saw this kind of behavior on Win7, which I still run on my main workstation.

    • I too confine Windows to VMs for my convenience and their own protection (rebooting into a clean snapshot comes in handy).

      I get similarly annoying results on VirtuaBox and KVM, so it's not just you or QEMU.

    • It's installing updates I bet. You can turn that off.

    • Re:Windows 10 is a pig (Score:5, Informative)

      by ras ( 84108 ) <russell+slashdot ... rt DOT id DOT au> on Monday February 03, 2020 @01:12AM (#59683528) Homepage

      There was the talk at Linux Conference Australia this year. The subject of the talk was that "NTFS is not really slow". In the real world it's slower than ext4 or xfs, but not slower than say zfs or btrfs. Of course zfs and btrfs do a lot more. Frankly that sounds like someone making apologies for an old design (ext4 has a 4 in it's name for a reason) - that for whatever reason Microsoft has stuck with.

      But that was the least of it. What prompted the talk is his application ran 10, maybe 100 times slower on Windows. They traced the problem back to the close() operating system call. NTFS's close doesn't take appreciably longer than anybody else's close of course - all it does is decrement a reference counter, and perhaps release some memory. So NTFS maybe a little slower - but it's nowhere near as bad as these numbers seem to imply. The problem was Microsoft Windows Defender intercepted the call and kept the handle open so it could virus check the file, thus making the call run thousand times or million times slower, depending on the size of the file.

      He defended this was necessary - something that the operating system had to do. Well, maybe virus checking is something a operating systems has to do - but I note that none of iOS, Android or WinPhone in it's latest incantation didn't fell the need to do it. But even if it does need to be done, it doesn't have to happen in the close call, effectively distorting its semantics into something more akin to a TCP socket shutdown over wet string. I can imagine Linus's description of that choice. I doubt it would be printable.

      Anyway, in order to get around that they decided to refactor each close so it had it's own thread. (Notice the OS could have done that too.) But then they ran out of threads. So they they used thread pooling and queuing the file handles to be closed. (And of course the OS could have done that for them.) But then they ran out of file handles. (The OS could have handled that - but not an app.) And they they discovered when you do this in a lot of threads you've given the virus checker permission to monopolise every CPU by giving it lots of threads, the system just about dies. And so it went on. I don't know where it ended up - I lost interest, but part of me curled up and died because Microsoft has forced every Windows app author out there who care their apps performance to walk down this same road to hell.

      I lost interest because this is a complete and utter cluster fuck. It is a horrible design being made worse at every step by kludges designed hide the effects of a cluster fuck of design decisions. The moment any competent engineer saw the system design heading in that direction they would kill it with fire. But no, in the talk he kept defending the competing close source OS's design as being completely rational and excusable.

      WTF? You are at open source conference man. I realise we have been overrun by a "lets make this a safe place for everyone" meme, but surely we are still allowed to call gob smackingly poor engineering out for what it is.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by SirSlud ( 67381 )

        I watched that talk and your takeaway (read: not that of the much smarted guy giving the talk) is so much naive nonsense.

    • Being a standard image doesn't mean something isn't wrong. Maybe it's disagreeing with the vm. Maybe you keep interrupting it while indexing or installing updates and they keep trying to reapply. One thing is certain, that level of CPU usage would prevent owing down CPUs and would effectively make Windows 10 useless on all portable devices decimating battery life. It doesn't. Any way you cut it there's something wrong with your specific instance / setup to be seeing the things you are seeing.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dargaud ( 518470 )
      Yeah, I also run Win10 in a VM for a few softwares that don't have Linux equivalent (that number is currently down to ONE). Upon original install I spent an entire day disabling services and trying to kill things off like Cortana, indexer, etc... But most of that craps spawns back from the dead after automated Windows updates. It even resets my theme ! It's hopeless. How can people use this garbage is beyond me.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Even when I'm doing nothing, something always eats 20-25% CPU, according to virt-manager. Something is always scribbling to disk.

      Ubuntu does that too. If I don't boot its VM for a few days it grinds away updating 900 packages for a while. The only real difference is that Windows does them automatically by default, where as Ubuntu makes you manually click the notification. I like the control that gives me but all the PCs I manage for other people have automatic updates.

  • Of World Importance: We need a universal OS. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Sunday February 02, 2020 @09:24PM (#59683082) Homepage
    The world needs a free, universal OS. Ideas:

    Governments could get together and buy Windows from Microsoft. These 2 articles, of hundreds, seem to show that Microsoft managers have little social ability: 1) Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. [networkworld.com] "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC." 2) Multiple Problems Reported With New Windows 10 Updates [forbes.com].

    Buying Windows from Microsoft would be cheaper than continuing to get Windows from Microsoft. But there is a complicated problem: Who would manage Windows development? Linux has a poor user interface, in some ways. It would be difficult to find managers to develop excellent user interfaces.

    Arrange that Linux can run Windows programs. 5 of the Best Linux Distros for Windows Users in 2019 [maketecheasier.com]. Wine [winehq.org] runs Windows programs on Linux. But the documentation assumes you want to run Windows games.

    • Re:Of World Importance: We need a universal OS. (Score:4, Informative)

      by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Sunday February 02, 2020 @09:37PM (#59683104)

      Linux already is free. We don't need yet-another unsupported minority OS.

      If people were smart they would set a future date and switch but momentum is just too strong. The majority of people, sadly, just don't give a fuck about privacy or MS respecting them.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by SuperDre ( 982372 )

        Linux might be free, but it's still dependant on the frills of people who want to work on it, and also by what goes into it and what doesn't.. At this point Linux the biggest problem is still that you need to have a lot of knowledge (more so then with Windows) if you want more than just browse and type a letter..
        I try linux every couple of years, and yes it does seem to get better, but it still has it's problems and returns me back to Windows. It's other biggest problem is that Linux != Linux.. with so many

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday February 02, 2020 @09:52PM (#59683118)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • No, governments should NOT get together. Do you really want a backdoor-ed OS with weak encryption for civilians? Or how about patch management performed by the NSA?

        The NSA has been working on Linux for 20 years [github.com]. There's another project called BSD -- UC Berkeley is run by the gov't of California -- whose TCP/IP code is even used in Windows. As long as software engineering groups are transparent to everyone, it doesn't matter who's running the show -- that's the entire point of Free Software.

    • Linux has a poor user interface

      Linux does not have "a" user interface, it has many. KDE, Gnome, XFCE, Cinammon, LXDE, among others.

      Most of the user interface is actually part of the particular program being run, and is not really the responsibility of the OS.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 )

      Linux has a poor user interface, in some ways.

      You could say the same thing about Windows or IOS.

      The interfaces for Linux are less polished than the one (1) interface available for Windows, but not significantly so in my experience. I think for most people they're perfectly functional.

      MS should open source the code to Win 7 and let people fix all the miscellaneous crap that MS couldn't or wouldn't fix. Win 7 was by far the best OS that MS ever made, hands down. Harden it up and it'd be great.

      • The Windows 10 kernel is just fine. You need to replace the Windows 10 GUI (explorer.exe) with the Windows 2000 GUI. Windows 2003/XP was the last version of Windows that had a proper interface (Windows XP you could tell you wanted it to be "proper" rather than look like a Fischer-Price playtoy). All Windows UIs raced downhill to unuseability since then and required third-party apps to make them functional.

    • I know Microsoft is a public company and subject to the whims of the investors, but who in their right mind would decide to sell off Windows? At this point, Microsoft can afford to buy out governments, not the other way around.

      As for running Windows on Linux, this reminds me of when everyone in the 80's was developing x86 bridgeboards for their own platforms, so you could run MS-DOS programs on your Mac or Amiga. We all know how well that worked out. Hell, Commodore had a healthy market for PC clones in

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Which governments do we trust with Windows? Not the US/NSA, and not the UK/GCHQ. Not China, not any of the FIVEEYES... Maybe Iceland? But I don't think they can afford to buy Windows.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sad_ ( 7868 )

      What is this madness?
      There already is a free universal OS, several of them in fact.
      any *nix is universal and almost all of them are free.
      it's in fact windows that is not universal and does it's own silly thing / has its own standards/interfaces.

  • Embedded Linux and Linux support of the most common drivers make it much better for low cost equipment. To this is the power of Linux. "World domination thru world cooperation".

  • Its likely that many of the applications listed are faster on linux - but that doesn't solve the fundamental problem:

    I need MS office for work. Libreoffice / Openoffice are not compatible enough.
    I need Matlab for work. It works on linux, but it works better on windows.
    My wife needs photoshop, she has many years of experience using it for photo editing.

    OTOH, I can install widows services for linux and have access to a linux shell if I want to do linux-like stuff. I haven't checked, but probably the perfo

    • Why would you want to install "Windows Services for Linux"?

      Simply compile the software and run it natively on Windows.

      Furthermore, it is not surprising that almost all software runs more slowly on Windows -- Windows cannot do I/O, for one, and secondly almost all Windows software is compiled using low performance shoddy Microsoft compilers like MSVC.

      So if you want to compare, for example, Python on Linux (compiled with GCC) against the same version of Python on Windows, then compile the damn thing with the

      • WSL gives me a linux environment with access to windows disks but which supports linux style network interfaces. My final target is linux, but I don't have a lnux laptop because when I'm traveling I need access to windows software as well.

        No religion - this works for me and is fast enough that I never notice the lag. There is probably a better approach but I don't know it and this seems to work.

    • I need MS office for work. Libreoffice / Openoffice are not compatible enough.

      Give Softmaker a try, the compatibility with native Word docs seems to be very, very good. And the interface is far better than LibreOffice. You can use menus or a ribbon or both. It's actually pretty good.

      https://www.softmaker.com/en/s... [softmaker.com]

      I use LibreOffice but it's a butt-ugly eyesore that feels clumsy and thrown together. The icons are pure shit (and I've tried every set I can find). The menus aren't very logical and stuff is buried in places where it doesn't seem right. I'll admit I'm biased after using W

  • More time is spent optimizing the Linux builds compared to the Windows builds.

  • Quick question, as I have the same OSs on two of my computers. Did the Windows 10 computer have a similar GPU ?

  • Same experience (Score:3)

    by Chewbacon ( 797801 ) on Monday February 03, 2020 @12:44AM (#59683456)

    Last laptop I had was unusable most of the time with Windows running on it. Ended up putting Ubuntu on it for what was 90% of my usage, unless I had to use MS office and then I'd be in Windows for just that bit of time. Ubuntu was not only faster, but nicer to my battery. Windows was just so damn busy in the background doing shit I didn't need it to do and, as I put it, the Windows was using the computer instead of letting me use it.

  • So how did it go using real-world applications? What about Photoshop? Office? What about games - can it even run MTG Arena?

    Until Linux can do what Windows and Apple have done for 20+ years, it will still be a non-desktop operating system.

  • While I cannot speak to Ubuntu as I found the interface entirely unusable and uninstalled it after about 15 minutes in favor a Linux Mint, I will say that the battery life on my Yoga 2 Pro (core i7) was significantly worse than with Windows.
    Performance was on par with Windows 10 in most things, though I never noticed that anything was "faster".
    I have installed TLP, which did improve the situation, but overall the battery life is 30-40% worse when I boot to linux

    On battery, I use Windows 10 when I plug into

    • I had this kind of problem also. One of my systems would run for 3 hours under windows but a little under 2 hours on linux. Under linux it did not seem any faster to use but the battery sure drained faster. This is on a very powerful laptop so 3 hours is pretty good for it.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 )

        A lot of laptops don't comply with the specs for implementing ACPI, instead they implement it specifically for windows which has various non standard quirks.
        Depending on the hardware, some gets considerably better battery life running linux and macs get better battery life running macos.

        • This laptop doesn't use any drivers from the laptop manufacturer. It is pretty much all desktop type hardware made to fit in a laptop (Sager/Clevo makes these kinds of things). So it has a desktop Intel i7 8700K, GTX 1080, 64GB ram and Z370 chipset.

          For some reason Linux just doesn't work that well on these laptops.

  • They are measuring software that was created with Linux in mind and with Windows as a second priority. Ofcourse they'll get better results on Linux. I also bet that Microsoft Visual Code runs faster on Windows than on Linux, what a surprise!

  • How much of this would be down to antivirus? Anything involving file IO appears to be quite a bit slower on Windows with antivirus running than if you disable it (disconnecting from the network first of course)
  • Now let's talk about how Ubuntu did power-management on that ULV laptop.

  • You know what's also much faster on Linux?

    API and ABI incompatibilities and ecosystem fragmentation.

  • It's $279 at the time of this post.

  • Currently selling for $279, marked down from $599.

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