[Joeri]

If you’re only used to windows you might not notice how inefficient it is, and you may also be doing the “right” kind of workload for windows. On an i7 6700hq thinkpad I did the experiment and ran both windows and linux for an extended period. In my experience linux was about 30% faster for typical web development tasks (npm install, angular build, …), but performed around the same for web browsing, and was much slower in video calls.

[mtrower]

Solaris (commercial and open-source derivatives), freebsd, openbsd, at least a dozen linux distros (from debian to things like gentoo, sourcemage, LFS...), MacOS, Windows... a handful of "toy" OSes... I've run a lot of different OSes over the years. I've used heavyweight desktops, lightweight desktops, straight X, straight terminal... across a large variety of hardware from the 90s until maybe 2016 or so. The point being, that I actually do have a lot of experience in a wide variety of environments with a wide range of interactive experiences.

Currently, my primary working environments are some sort of Unix, with CDE, stumpwm, or dwm - pretty ultralight environments by today's standards. I do think these environments can be described as "fast".

As to the actual machine in question (with the i7-4700k), that's my gaming desktop. It's run mostly Windows over the years, with some OS X thrown in there. For the past year or so it's been pretty much just OS X, but I do boot into Windows from time to time for this or that. Neither of these OSes are as fast as the stripped down environments that I prefer, but neither is appreciably faster or slower than the other, either, in my experience (unless something is broken; I could of course tell you horror stories about both platforms). From my perspective, both of them are enormous inefficient monstrosities, but the hardware is also really fast.

> In my experience linux was about 30% faster for typical web development tasks (npm install, angular build, …)

Yeah, these types of things aren't great on Windows. Especially if you run into corner cases, a lot of tools that were written for Unix environments go to dog on Windows. I don't know what most of the individual issues are, and I don't really know that it's even a matter of CPU (vs. operative latency, deadlocks, etc.). But the poster I was responding to seemed to be saying that Windows itself is too much for a modern i5 to handle, and that just isn't my experience.