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

phoronix.com

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

#281
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting thought, but you might be missing the hardware perspective. I switched from Windows to Linux this year, and the biggest issue has been drivers and hardware compatibility: audio available via headphones but not (laptop) built-in speakers, occasional display issues depending on the monitor setup, occasional WiFi issues. If hardware innovation stopped, Linux could catch up easily... but it won't, so there is…

I've had a much worse time with hardware on windows than Linux these last couple of years. My work laptop runs Windows and will get stuck in a BSPD bootloop if I turn it on with external monitors connected. My USB keyboard and mouse disconnect every few minutes. Windows may as well not even have Bluetooth for as well as it works. Some devices always show as connected, despite not being present. I have to un-pair my h…

"I've had a much worse time with hardware on windows than Linux these last couple of years."

And I want to emphasize and underline my point here that if Microsoft does just let Windows languish, we are going to gradually see this more and more every year. There won't be a big bang wakeup call. There will always be people who can say "But I haven't had a problem". What you won't be able to easily tell on the forums is that the ratios will slowly-but-surely shift, but again, with no big-bang wakeup.

I just bought a brand-new fully-AMD-based laptop for the family, stuck the latest Ubuntu on it, and almost everything works. The only thing that I've found that doesn't is that if I play a game and push it out the HDMI port, we get audio dropouts. It isn't everything on the HDMI port, we watched a lengthy YouTube video with no dropouts. But wifi, bluetooth, all the keyboard controls, battery, everything else I've seen is working.

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

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, once Adobe comes to linux, or they lose their position in the industry to competitors, we will see the shift. And the main reason is Apple doesn't support Nvidia. There are limits to what you can accomplish editing videos without a beefy GPU, so you're trapped on windows if you're using adobe premier. I mean, games like Valorant require anti-cheat root kits will still keep us on Windows forever, but those are ed…

Adobe is not the only problem. Hardware support, codecs, media support. It all just does not work that well, and I think will not work well for a long period of time. Video editing for years have not been an option for Linux. Sure there are programs, but they often crash, often encode x times slower than corporate paid crapware.

> Hardware support

For this, you have to talk to the people you are buying your hardware from. They are getting your money, not linux. They are also supporting that hardware under Windows, not Microsoft. Tell them what your needs are, and vote with your wallet.

> codecs, media support

Funny; for years, I've been installing ffdshow (ffmpeg-based codecs) into Windows to have decent codec support in Windows; even today, many users still install VLC (or mpc, mpc-hc, mpv, mpv.net, or other clone) to get media playback without any issues.

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

#283

I hope the community really gets behind Snap or Flatpak or one of the other systems for bringing a modern permissions and privileges system to the Linux desktop. It would help me be a lot more comfortable recommending Linux to non-technical people. What distro would you recommend to somebody like me who wants to be asked before an application gets access to my location, microphone, camera, network, etc...?

Enough of the the community is behind Flatpak that it's possible to run an immutable distro and get most of your apps as flatpaks without much trouble.

Snap is terrible; there is no reason to consider it. Mostly because there is only one app store allowed and it's really slow to launch apps.

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

#284

I hope the community really gets behind Snap or Flatpak or one of the other systems for bringing a modern permissions and privileges system to the Linux desktop. It would help me be a lot more comfortable recommending Linux to non-technical people. What distro would you recommend to somebody like me who wants to be asked before an application gets access to my location, microphone, camera, network, etc...?

As someone who has been using Linux exclusively for my personal machines since 2007, here's the chicken-and-egg problem that the Linux world is constantly battling: new technology is always being released and pushed out before it actually works. It's happened constantly since I started using Linux: KDE 4.0, PulseAudio, btrfs (to be fair, most distros didn't really push btrfs as a default), Wayland, etc, and now Flatp…

> Honestly, when it comes to "just working," desktop Linux is worse today than it was when I first installed it on my budget laptop in 2007.

I bought a new Alienware PC in summer 2022, installed Ubuntu immediately, wiping Windows. Everything worked. Still does. This happens on every new Dell (or Alienware), HP or Lenovo desktop or laptop I've bought the past 2 decades. I can't buy a new machine that has issues with Linux, what on Earth could I be doing wrong that they all work.

Honestly, do you work in Microsoft marketing.

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

#286
post #75
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Zen 2 Threadripper box that I dual boot (it's a workstation for coding that I sometimes play games on), and I can confirm. I don't know what the exact technical reason is or why nobody in Redmond is embarrassed. But anything relating to the filesystem is simply dog-slow on Windows, and the more high-end your system is, the more this becomes the major bottleneck.

I blame Windows Defender (anti-virus). It's the first thing I disable whenever I want to do some serious disk I/O. Also Windows still uses NTFS which dates back to 2000. For compatibility reasons, fair enough. But surely NTFS wasn't designed with SSDs in mind, let alone NVMEs.

> I blame Windows Defender (anti-virus).

It would be nice if Windows Defender tone down their on-the-fly aggressive scanning for anything I/O related. For any I/O activity, it regularly consumes up to 30% of my CPU. Moving files to a different directory rev up Windows Defender even it scans the folder in the past.

I wish there is a granular control over Windows Defenders in a way that it would not be aggressive with every I/O activity. I would assume that Microsoft intentionally did this due to rise of randomware attacks and we unfortunately have inept people who mindlessly clicking anything. And they don't want to be liable for being lax.

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft should invest in Proton, make Windows apps work seamless on linux, and then just make a "Windows" replacement for Wayland that runs on Kernel... Then, and only then, will we have "The year of the linux desktop"

I really dunno why people advocate ripping out the kernel and using Linux instead, while keeping Windows userspace. The NT kernel is the best part of Windows. It has built-in asynchronous real-time I/O. A completely plug-and-play driver model. Far more advanced permissions model. It is far ahead of the competition. The userspace and UI of Windows is very straightforwardly modified; that's why it has changed so much e…

Because the userspace, old and baroque it is, is the compatibility layer for the existing apps. Not the kernel.

The kernel is a very nice piece of work, but it come from slightly different assumptions, than the reality turned out to need.

Btw, the recent Dave Cutler interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi1Lq79mLeE) is great. Worth the 3 hours it takes.

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

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The improvements coming for Wayland's HDR/color management are likely to help with that, as the features they're aiming for appears to beat Window's more slapdash implementation with per-window color management, where window contents are accurately tonemapped and composited within the widest color space the monitor supports. Adobe would need to be incentivized to port their suite over for it to be taken seriously, bu…

Will Wayland be able to render mixed HDR and SDR content correctly, with e.g. an HDR video on YouTube rendering with extended range while the rest of the screen renders as normal? Currently only macOS can do that. With Windows you have to choose between SDR and HDR display modes which affects everything on screen regardless of type, which makes SDR content look dingy in HDR mode.

On that subject, anyone know why shifting to HDR dims everything that way? My mental model of it is that SDR brightness goes from 0 to 100, and HDR brightness goes from -100 to 100, and that turning on HDR moves everything not HDR-aware down to the bottom of the brightness space.

I could look this up, but never think about it outside of conversations like this and figure it might be more fun to talk about it.

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

#289

I've been playing around with Ubuntu training myself for the day that I have to give up windows 10. My only complaints are that Linux can be tedious, everything is just 43 commands away; it requires greater understanding of not just what the system is doing, but how it is doing it; and the documentation is written like a Wikipedia article on advanced nuclear theory. Windows and OSX have, for the most part, just worke…

I feel the exact opposite. Changing things in Linux is usually just a checkbox in the settings. Whereas changing things in Mac or Windows can be an uphill battle, digging through registry keys, or installing third-party software just to change basic features.

For example, how do you rebind the "switch window" hotkey on a Mac from Cmd+Tab to Alt+Tab? There's no way to do it out of the box. You need to install some third party program called AltTab just to set hotkeys.

How do you disable tracking in Windows 10? Well here's a 50 step plan. And you better pray that none of these settings will be reset the next time there's a forced update.

https://nordvpn.com/blog/disable-windows-10-tracking/

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

#290

Not surprised though, with AMD being able to patch the Linux kernel and scheduler to its liking in order to squeeze out the maximum performance for it's architecture, versus depending on Microsoft to have the good will to figure it out on their own dime. I'd be curious if the businesses buying these $20k+, 96-core, HEDT workstations actually do run Windows on them in order for this to be that big of a problem for Mic…

Epic Games runs mostly Windows Threadrippers for Unreal Engine development. Compiling Unreal faster, or anything really, even Windows itself is a compelling argument.
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