After doing some google-fu, I’ve been puzzled further as to how the finnish man has done it.
What I mean is, Linux is widely known and praised for being more efficient and lighter on resources than the greasy obese N.T. slog that is Windows 10/11
To the big brained ones out there, was this because the Linux Kernel more “stripped down” than a Windows bases kernel? Removing bits of bloated code that could affect speed and operations?
I’m no OS expert or comp sci graduate, but I’m guessing it has a better handle of processes, the CPU tasks it gets given and “more refined programming” under the hood?
If I remember rightly, Linux was more a server/enterprise OS first than before shipping with desktop approaches hence it’s used in a lot of institutions and educational sectors due to it being efficient as a server OS.
Hell, despite GNOME and Ubuntu getting flak for being chubby RAM hog bois, they’re still snappier than Windows 11.
MacOS? I mean, it’s snappy because it’s a descendant of UNIX which sorta bled to Linux.
Maybe that’s why? All of the snappiness and concepts were taken out of the UNIX playbook in designing a kernel and OS that isn’t a fat RAM hog that gobbles your system resources the minute you wake it up.
I apologise in advance for any possible techno gibberish but I would really like to know the “Linux is faster than a speeding bullet” phenomenon.
Cheers!
Linux encourages users to send patches while Microsoft is the sole company that can modify Windows.
It’s very common to see patches from Google/Meta/Cloudflare/Amazon squeezing more performance for their particular use cases. That benefits everyone in the end.
Microsoft on the other hand is more concerned about its enterprise sales and overall profits. So they don’t care that much. Windows 7 was horribly bloated, and they didn’t address until Windows 8 because they had to, because they realized it was too bloated to run on their new tablet PCs so they had to do something about it.
Apple cares a lot, because their thing is energy efficient fanless netbooks, and phones, and tablets. macOS and iOS are very close in how they work, so Apple has all the incentive to keep it efficient because their software will also affect the hardware side of the business. Microsoft doesn’t, it’s the hardware partners that get stuck dealing with it.
The NT kernel is fairly good, it just doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Microsoft mostly add features on top of older features, they never go in and be like “this sucks” and rewrite a feature, because that’s very risky to do and may break millions of applications and affect their bottomline. Linux doesn’t have to care about that.
I’d say, if Windows was open-source, we’d have some pretty solid Windows distributions because the community would care to go in and fix a ton of bottlenecks that aren’t worth it for Microsoft as a company to even bother reviewing the patches let alone develop and test them. It’s much more lucrative for them to release AI crap like Copilot than make Windows 10% snappier. Because most Windows users are corporate people that makes decisions based on marketing and business items than being an enjoyable experience. Less frustrated users? Nah. More productive employees with crappy AI features that barely works? Hell yeah 🤑
TL;DR: Windows sucks because of Microsoft’s business interests don’t require Windows to be that good, merely good enough.
This is the right answer. To complement it, I’d just say I’ve read someone before say that at Microsoft there’s no incentive to squeeze performance, so why bother if it won’t help you get promoted or get a bonus? All these things add up over time to make Windows only care about it when there is actually a huge bottleneck.
It’s also worth noting (for non programmers out there) that speed has no correlation with the amount of code. Often it’s actually the opposite: things start simple and begin to grow in complexity and amount of code exactly to squeeze more optimizations for specific use-cases.