this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
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When you become one with the penguin, though ... then you can begin to feel how much faster modern hardware is.
Hell, I've got a 2016 budget-model chromebook that still feels quick and snappy that way.
I've got a 2007 laptop that was shitty even for its time, and it does the job perfectly as a home server with Debian and a few good open source services I want to host
Sadly, it is not how it is for me. I've never (in last 20 years) experienced freezes that bad and that frequent as with my new beefy Linux PC.
But... 2016 was a decade ago. If it feels quick and snappy that way that means the post is right.
Which it kinda isn't but hey.
the point is the software is what's wrong, not the hardware. it feels snappy because it's linux, not because it's old hardware.
Except the Linux userbase has been saying that exact thing for the past ten years, so again, has Linux also degraded in sync or, hear me out here, is this mostly a nostalgia thing that makes you forget the cludgy performance issues of the software you used when you were younger and things have mostly gotten snappier over time across the board?
As a current dual booter I'll say that Windows and Linux don't feel fundamentally different these days, for good and ill. Windows has a remarkably crappy and entirely self-inflicted issue with their online-search-in-Start-menu feature, which sucks but is toggleable at least. Otherwise I have KDE and Win11 set up the same way and they both work pretty much the same. And both measurably better than their respective iterations 10, let alone 15 or 20 years ago.
Try Windows 11 vs. Linux on a shitty old laptop with a budget 2-core processor and 2GB of RAM. Then tell me Windows and Linux don't feel any different.
My bf bought me a brand new laptop with Win 10 preinstalled, and even after disabling or uninstalling as much as I could, it was literally like watching a slideshow. Then I installed Linux, and it...worked like you'd expect a brand new computer to work, fast and smooth. Never used Win 11 because I stopped using Windows after that.
Myyyyyeeeeh. A lightweight distro or a conemporaneous distro sure.
If I'm running GPU accelerated Steam, tons of tabs on Firefox and the same highly customized KDE desktop full of translucent components and extra animations I am willing to bet they'd both chug.
Which is what the conversation is about: new software doesn't suck, it's doing more stuff.
For sure, all things being equal Linux does run ligher on RAM and VRAM, so if you're using something that is speficially memory-limited so Windows and Linux fall on opposite sides of overflowing the available memory you'll definitely see better performance on Linux, but that's not an inherent issue with poorly made software having a huge performance overhead.