this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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This has been tested to death and, barring some exceptions, and barring Nvidia hardware, performance is more or less the same.
Then whomever tested it "to death" wasn't particularly comprehensive. I speak from more than a little personal experience.
Of course it won't help in every case, nor did I claim it would. That's not the point, and your contrarianism doesn't help anyone. Good day.
Helps everyone who might make the mistake of thinking your information is accurate.
Linux can feel faster in a number of cases because its scheduler is better IMO, but that doesn't help when running something like a game. A desktop feeling snappier won't increase your benchmark scores or framerates.
It'll certainly breathe new life into that crappy old laptop, but it's not magic.
It is not, ext4 does circles around piece of junk ntfs and I've got the load times from my own old world of warships install to prove it.
Windows gg ez'd its way out of making a better filesystem with the advent of SSDs which doesn't have performance hits from fragmenting like a spinning disk does.
I still remember running defraggler every few months just so I could play Batman Arkham Knight on Windows, otherwise the game would freeze lag and run at a ridiculous 10 FPS.
Windows also eats 2GB RAM at idle for no reason compared to usually 1.3-1.4 for KDE and 1.0 flat for XFCE. Zswap/Zram also helps a lot when you don't have an SSD.
And to top it off, Compiz, Wayfire, KWin, etc all outperform Windows's desktop compositor by miles in terms of performance and visual snappiness. Windows lags heavily on anything mobile like a light laptop or tablet, yet you can run a full transparent 3D compiz cube no problem with basically no hit to hardware usage due to its use of OpenGL.
That's what we call an anecdote.
No that's what we call HDD fragmentation, and the whole point of fragmentless filesystems like ext2/3/4, UFS, HFS, APFS, etc.
And it's not like a small difference, the load time and HDD read demand was down by 40% system wide, not just videogames.
I'd even go and demo it again, but I removed windows from my ye olde HDD a few years ago. I mentioned WoWs specifically because its a asset heavy game that I actually happened to have installed both on Windows and on Linux on the same HDD, each within their own respective partition.
spoiler
Also bonus, HDDs were getting so bottlenecked that Vista introduced preload file fetching to guess which files to cache in RAM based on read call usage, which then also became a feature in Linux with the preload daemon which no one uses anymore.