I dual boot Windows 10 LTSC and Fedora 41 KDE. Anything related to launching/booting is slower in general on Fedora than on Windows.
For example, opening Firefox is almost instant on Windows, it just takes a few seconds to load completely. On Fedora, however, It takes 2 seconds for the window to pop up and about 2-3 seconds for it to load after that. Another example is Steam. It takes about 10 seconds on Windows but it takes about 30 seconds on Fedora. Both Firefox and Steam are DNF, not flatpak. Booting to Windows (no hibernation or fast boot) takes like 3 seconds, but it’s around 7-8 seconds for Fedora.
ASUS N551JW
OS: Fedora Linux 41 (KDE Plasma) x86_64 on Wayland
Kernel: Linux 6.14.4-200.fc41.x86_64
DE: KDE Plasma 6.3.4
CPU: Intel(R) Core™ i7-4720HQ (8) @ 3.60 GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M (proprietary driver 570.144)
Integrated GPU: Intel i7-4720HQ
RAM: 16GB
Storage: 1TB WD Blue SSD. Fedora partition is BTRFS
I ran systemd-analyze to see if something is oddly taking too much time, but everything seems close to each other.
It depends if you had Core Isolation on on Windows, but if you have CPU virtualization enabled, iirc Fedora default has everything going through it with a default IOMMU policy. I set iommu=pt as a boot option to stop that. Core Isolation and IOMMU are different things but are both tied to CPU virtualization existing, and on Linux things like the GPU and PCI buses holding USB controllers get forced through IOMMU instead of DMA(?).
I suspect Btrfs with default config is slower than other options with raw I/O. I haven’t tried it and do ext4 root with data=writeback,nobarrier on Linux.
I switch between Windows and Linux frequently and was surprised last night at Dota 2; it takes 2-3 seconds to load the loading screen (black screen Dota 2 logo middle) Linux, but was 1s/instant Windows.
With this though I had Dota 2 going through Steam’s runtime and pressure-vessel stuff on Linux as a requirement (couldn’t avoid it for deps or something), whereas Windows is just running dota2.exe
I also thought it might be because of Btrfs, but I’m not sure about that since I haven’t run much distros on my machine. Anyhow, I’ve seen like 2 people have performance issues on Linux (compared to Windows) in general who has 4th gen i7 CPUs. Do you think it might be because my hardware isn’t supported well?
I think it might affect PCI passthrough, but CPU virtualization instructions should be present still.
Nah; I think Linux can handle your hardware fine, but Linux likely has more things going on in the background though (ext4 is known for less resource usage for file metadata while Btrfs might do checksums/etc, and Snapshot stuff automates in the background vs ext4 not doing it at all).
I’ve tweaked Linux to be pretty snappy GNOME and Xfce even with mitigations=off and fun stuff like this line of boot flags, but Windows 10 LTSC was always faster (I use 8th-gen i5):
I tried your boot flags and it’s still pretty much the same. The boot felt a bit faster but that’s it. I guess this is just a Linux/Fedora issue then, as you said.
Edit: Do you think Arch would be faster with Btrfs? Does it have less stuff going on in the background?
pls read about Window’s prefetch/superfetch. Clear the prefetch cache, disable superfetch (service sysmain), reboot and retry again opening Firefox and see how much longer it takes.
Windows does all kind of tricks to give you the impression that it’s quick, but in fact it’s not.
You will get comparable response times , when you start Firefox a 2nd time on a system w/o prefetch/preload.
