After doing some google-fu, I’ve been puzzled further as to how the finnish man has done it.
What I mean is, Linux is widely known and praised for being more efficient and lighter on resources than the greasy obese N.T. slog that is Windows 10/11
To the big brained ones out there, was this because the Linux Kernel more “stripped down” than a Windows bases kernel? Removing bits of bloated code that could affect speed and operations?
I’m no OS expert or comp sci graduate, but I’m guessing it has a better handle of processes, the CPU tasks it gets given and “more refined programming” under the hood?
If I remember rightly, Linux was more a server/enterprise OS first than before shipping with desktop approaches hence it’s used in a lot of institutions and educational sectors due to it being efficient as a server OS.
Hell, despite GNOME and Ubuntu getting flak for being chubby RAM hog bois, they’re still snappier than Windows 11.
MacOS? I mean, it’s snappy because it’s a descendant of UNIX which sorta bled to Linux.
Maybe that’s why? All of the snappiness and concepts were taken out of the UNIX playbook in designing a kernel and OS that isn’t a fat RAM hog that gobbles your system resources the minute you wake it up.
I apologise in advance for any possible techno gibberish but I would really like to know the “Linux is faster than a speeding bullet” phenomenon.
Cheers!
Modprobe or not, my computers still scan for GPUs on the EISA bus. Not everything is loaded, but tons of unnecessary stuff is loaded just in case, like ancient PS/2 controller support and obscure filesystems. Installing usable drivers can even land you in a situation where two drivers fight for control over a device (Nvidia again), necessitating kernel flags or blacklists to prevent builtin drivers from loading.
Plus, even if they’re not loaded at runtime, drivers for hardware I’ll never encounter still take up space in the kernel. Impossible to prevent with Linux’ kernel architecture and barely a problem in practice (unless you want to boot a microcontroller or want to use Linux as a bootloader).
If it’s “barely a problem in practice” why did you bother to mention it like it’s an active performance issue?
Because this is a response to a post calling NT an “obese slog”. Compared to Linux, it’s almost anorexic.
Plus, these drivers do cause plenty of issues, like that time a patch in an early kernel NFS driver caused PCs connected to a DisplayPort-to-HDMI-converter connected to certain Intel GPUs to hang while booting for several months. I’ve had to pin an unmaintained kernel for months until Intel finally patched their driver against that, it was a real pain, especially with everyone around me telling me to just install Windows like everyone else whenever this caused package conflicts again.
When this stuff becomes a problem, the kernel often becomes entirely useless and very few people will go through the necessary troubleshooting to get their computer working again. It’s easier to clean install another OS, be that a Linux distro with a different kernel version or Windows.