Ubuntu squeezes more performance than Windows 11 on new AMD Zen 4 Threadripper

It is NOT. This is biggest mystery I have about people's perception about Arch Linux. Arch provides latest upstream stable packages unlike point releases. NOT developer branches of packages BUT STABLE versions of package as soon as it is available. Point releases like ubuntu gives you old versions of software. And backport security patches against that version from latest stable packages which again leads to possible bugs etc etc. Apart from Linux, you will never see anyone calling a latest stable version of a software as "bleeding edge". You don't say iOS 17 as bleeding edge. It is the latest stable version of the iOS. Windows 11 is not bleeding edge, it is the latest stable version of windows OS.

I have a 5+ year installation Arch installation from which I am writing this comment. It is fast easier to use and predictable. Point releases always give you a easy jumpstart and it is often a pain to maintain in the longer run. Arch definitely requires initial time investment (It is after all a DIY distro, not a managed distro), but it is easier to maintain. I use Arch because I am lazy. I don't want unpredicatable changes.

I don't think I am going to complain getting firefox 119 (which is the latest STABLE version at the time of writing) within a week or two. Especially in these times where we should be using latest packages for security and stability.

Also repost for Linux distros (like stable/unstable/testing) is testing a package against the distro. It is NOT checking the stability of the software itself. It is checking the stability of a software/packages against a particular distro.

They are. Just there are many different GUIs. Each distro by definition has different ones and you can easily change them yourself etc.

There are dozens of sound GUIs, hell, I've tried 4 redshift GUIs before settling on QRedshift. It's so easy to write software for Linux that you have countless opportunities. That's why the command line is easier - it always works(ish).

If this is really true, I am deeply saddened. I grew up using almost entirely nothing but Windows since 98, and have used every version (except Windows Me) since.

As a desktop and enterprise OS, Windows is pretty fantastic to develop with, natively, contrary to many opinions here. Technologies like COM, .NET (Framework), Win32, Direct{2D, 3D}, and the Windows API are all very powerful and fairly future-proof, too.

Core Windows/NT development is extremely fun, interesting, and the choices that the NT kernel developers made in the 90s put it light years ahead of the competition. Consider its advanced permissions model (ACLs versus UIDs and GIDs), its plug-and-play driver model, and its ability to run on a wide variety of hardware.

The core Windows NT kernel is quite excellent, and was always in some ways far superior to what Unix offered. E.g. proper asynchronous I/O from day one. Dave Cutler and crew did a bang-up job. Linux is only getting competitive things like io_uring now(ish).

The problem was the shitty API and user space they papered in front of it with. Lack of a proper CLI shell, slow filesystem, the godawful "registry", a low quality, unsafe windowing toolkit (Win32 API), and then, after WinXP, bad UX / environment stuff. And, of course, the fact that everything was proprietary, closed/closed-source, and the $$ licensing story for running a WindowsNT server was always garbage.

As a user operating system none of this mattered so much because the sheer mass of the market meant that driver support and application support was always going to win out on Windows.

But these days, with all my attached devices being USB-Cish things that just implement USB standards I have zero issues in Linux. In fact, audio interface support works better for me in Ubuntu than it does in Windows right now.

But people who were serious about running servers naturally stuck with Unix, despite it being in some ways technically inferior on paper -- because that experience on NT just wasn't as good. Remote administration via GUI. Anemic CLI. MS proprietary everything. Per-user $$ licensing stuff. Tight coupling with IIS & SQL Server, which has their own licensing stuff, etc. etc. etc.

Anyways, I think it would be a shame if MS gave up on the NT kernel.

With WSL1 they did an interesting job of getting Linux user space running overtop of the NT kernel, but they dropped that approach with WSL2 and went with a more VM approach.