this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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I went full Linux a few months ago and haven't looked back. Steam has superb support for basically everything I could want to play -- in some cases I feel like Linux actually performs better than Windows on the same hardware. I really appreciate the huge investment Valve made into making Linux gaming work.
What are those cases?
@Llewellyn
File system operations are often faster. This is in part due to Windows doing more; it has a more complex and more flexible permissions system.
Spawning threads and processes is also normally faster. Linux apps thinks nothing of spawning lots of processes with abandon, then have them opening and closing files all over the place. If you move it straight over to a Windows machine it will tend to run very badly as a result.
In addition to the differences in permissions and kernel behavior you've pointed out, there's also a huge difference in the filesystems themselves.
Windows' default filesystem is NTFS. Linux's is EXT4.
EXT4 is significantly more modern (2008 vs 2001) and featureful (no fragmentation, handles small files much better, journaling, etc) than NTFS.