Linux @lemmy.ml GolfNovemberUniform @lemmy.ml 9mo ago

Windows 11 vs Ubuntu vs Fedora 39 vs Arch Linux - Speed Test!

Even though different Linux distros are often fairly close in terms of real-life performance and all of them have a clear advantage over Windows in many use cases, we can't reject the fact that Arch Linux has undoubtedly won the competition. And now I'm so glad to have another reason to proudly say "I use Arch btw"

::: It was a joke of course :::

67 comments

Jesus

Installation size:

Fedora - 7.7 GB

Arch (actually EndeavourOS) - 45 GB

Ubuntu - 49.2 GB

Windows - 72 GB

How the hell is Fedora so small? That's insane.
- He just look at how much empty space the file explorer showed... I don't know how good of an indication that it is. The OS may choose to conserve a decent amount of space for things like swap, hibernation file etc.
  
  Also, preinstalled apps.
  
  I mean, I think it's fair to lump that all together as space taken by the system, no?
  
  It's not like you can use that space for storing files
- What are these sizes from? All my Linux installs start with <20G root disks and end up with some spare.
  
  And Windows at 72G? Whilst it's more than Linux it's not that much.
  
  I think the videomaker may be failing to account for swap space. The latest Fedora releases use zram (swap that lives in memory instead of hard disk) by default, while the rest do not. Windows in particular does not take 72G and tends to be aggressive in swap allocation. The fact that he presents this data as “free space available” adds confusions while seemingly burying the simplest answer.
- How the hell is arch so large? My laptop is only 27GB and that includes all user data and several years of crap being installed as well as several docker images. A fresh install should rival that fedora install.
  
  Yea I don't understand either
  
  I've recently installed arch in a VM and it didn't take more than 8GB. That's with firefox and vscode installed
- 7GB is a reasonable size for a Linux install with a GUI and some software. The rest are excessively large. I've never gone over 30GB of disk usage in my root partition, even with a large number of programs installed.
  
  It seems quite likely that, in the Arch ( EOS ) system at least, a tonne of that space is being used up by the package cache. By default, the system keeps copies of the packages for all software you install. This can indeed take gigs of space but it has nothing to do with your running system. A simple command purges them all and reclaims the space. You would obviously want to do this before reporting installation size. I bet he did not.
- Oh, so his numbers are just garbage then. You can install regular Windows 10 on a 16gb drive with no modifications. (You can't fit anything else, and there's not really even enough space for updates, but it's possible.)
  
  I regularly install it on 30gb VMs and still have space left over for whatever apps it needs.
  
  If Windows 10 immediately destroys itself while trying to do its first update, you didn't actually fit it in 16gb. It hasn't fit inside of 32GB for several years now.
- Ya, I am not going to trust anything coming out of a post that cites that numbers for install size. As others have said, even the Windows one is bonkers.
  
  As an EOS user myself, I love the conclusion but have no faith at all in the methodology.
  
  If you want an article to make Linux look good, a test of the new Damn Small Linux would be interesting. It fits a basic version of practically every program you need into a 700 MB system. It also includes the APT package manager and full access to the Debian 12 stable repos so you can easily add anything you want on top of that.
  
  It would be interesting to know what footprint it would require to run the “tests” he runs here.
- My guess will be hibernation file and swap. If any of those had suspend to disk enabled, the hibernation file will be the same size as installed Ram... which can take up a good percentage of that used space. I have a pretty bloated xUbuntu install on my system right now and it's sitting at 10.6GB. Including swap and /home, but no hibernation file.
  
  Hibernation I've found handy on my laptop, but I wish there was like a fastboot option with Ubuntu. I know windows 11 does it to boot faster.
- Because it runs everything stock
Good intentions but many of these tests are arbitrary and flawed.
- Where'd you get that image? I made that 7 or 8 years ago. Has it been making the rounds? It's weird to see it in the wild lol
  
  Lol @ the idea that backtrack/kali is someone's daily driver.
  
  Windows wouldn't be too terrible if it wasn't for all the pop ups all the time.
  
  I need to work with it because I need to create a WPF app with Visual Studio, and when I switch from Windows to my personal computer, the difference is mind blowing.
  
  Windows push you fucking add with a notification sound. It's probably on me that I didn't disable yet, but I don't have to do that on any Linux distro.
  
  AW man, my first choice back in the days was Debian. Seeing now your map made me remember the pain of learning along the way while solving nuclear bomb events and configurations that I had no idea even existed. Still, it was a great experience! Nowadays I just use win 11.
- Shhh! Windows bad!
- Edge Flatpak: unofficial, using zypak, same app on every Distro. Also launch times are damn irrelevant
  
  "storage used" is likely just the DEs filesystem abstraction
  
  I was very very surprised about Ubuntu starting so fast. Afaik they preload Snaps now, which should increase that startup time.
- Why
How is fedora 2x faster in video rendering? I don't get the huge gaps between the Linux distros in general. Like arch being 20% slower in php and Ubuntu 20% faster in kernel compilation
- I think it depends on kernel/software/driver versions and will vary when these change. Also bloatware is a thing, even though it doesn't affect the results very significantly
- Different distros build their packages with different options and have different versions of those packages so the Ubuntu and fedora php packages might have an optimization the arch one didn't
- Could be the memory performance if it's light GPU usage and memory is the bottleneck.
Where my openSUS at ?
- Still updating
  
  Haha yeah, zypper is so damn slow. I thought about trying dnf in opensuse but didn't want to risk breaking my install.
- Opensuse? WHERES GENTOO
  
  Still compiling.
- Yea I agree. We need more distros tested
Windows just losing in nearly every metric. Why am I not surprised? However fedora? What's going on?

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Where OpenSUSE? :(
Does anyone have a similar video but only for graphics. I want to know more about the floating point ops, OpenGL and DirectX with Wine compared across those 4.
- I don't remember such videos. Though there should be Windows vs Linux benckmarks for popular games that support both operating systems (natively or with Wine)
God damn Arch users. /s
Long live to my boi Arch
FreeBSD's boot speed is just behind arch a little bit (on HDD).

But Windows 8 (with fast startup) on an core 2 duo machine with 1G of RAM boot faster than any debian, ubuntu. (the boot speed decrease when you upgrade hardware lol :) )
- I had a Windows 8 machine (8G of RAM) in the past. It booted in like 15 seconds. But on Windows 10 or Linux it took more than a minute. Why didn't Microsoft brought this feature to Windows 10?
  
  What feature?????
You know Arch users can just tattoo it on their forehead. That way they don't even have to say 'btw, I use arch'. People can read it on their face.
- Isn't that trope getting a little bit boring?
- Nah it's fun to say it yourself. And it's even better to say it when there's an advantage over all the other distros

67 comments