Is Linux faster than windows?

[Leon]

Tends to be faster due to lower resource use, at least from my experience.

 

[diapered]

One last thing, I don't recommend RedHat and derivates, I use them at work and they are just "bad". Maybe someone here had a different experience, but working with them for almost 4 years I only can say avoid them lol.

@SpikeSlania is probably going to have an opinion on that hot take

Btw, I've read about Mandriva, I didn't know there was still some interest in that distro. I started with Mandrake (I'm kind of old) and I had the worst experience in my life, no wonder it died more than 10 years ago lol.

oh shit, I know that pain. Madriva was endless frustration It died for a reason, and good riddance.

 

[SpikeSlania]

One last thing, I don't recommend RedHat and derivates, I use them at work and they are just "bad". Maybe someone here had a different experience, but working with them for almost 4 years I only can say avoid them lol.

@SpikeSlania is probably going to have an opinion on that hot take

I guess since I been summoned, yes I'm a Fedora fan and am generally positive about Fedora, but I also know Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a stunted version of Fedora. Fedora is pretty much their test bed for Red Hat so we get all of the cool new toys and features way before RHEL get them in their main distro. They just have to make sure everything works perfectly before they sell RHEL to businesses while Fedora is more community driven and only second to Arch in terms of the latest drivers/programs.

But now lets take a crack at the original question.

Hello!
Since my laptop broke I've been saving up on a new PC. What's the difference between Linux and Windows? I prefer something more optimized I don't care if Linux is hard to navigate through.

What's best for gaming? I've seen videos claiming that Linux is better, but comments say otherwise with the man's claims. I just want something that doesn't affect the performance of my PC so that if can play games smoothly.

Your mileage will vary. I don't think I seen anyone ask what your hardware set up is. If you have an AMD GPU you will be great out of the box. Nvidia GPU might take a few extra steps to get going properly but the drivers are getting better. Intel APUs are greatly supported while the Intel Arc GPUs you might want to double check if the distro you use will properly support them. When it comes to gaming Linux can be better at Windows especially at running older games that Windows could struggle to run since we use Wine/Proton to run games it's a lot easier for us. But then when it comes to modern games it's down to what the developers decide. Some block out all Linux users just because they believe it will cut down on hacking so a lot of competitive online games that use kernel level anti cheat are unavailable for us. And then some games like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14 don't mind Linux users but also won't support us so if there's a random update that makes it difficult for us to try to play, we have to wait for 3rd parties to fix the issues and trouble shoot it ourselves which this has happened to me in the last year with battle.net and not being able to download updates for games and took changing compatibility layers in Lutris to finally get working. But then in terms is Linux faster than Windows? It varies. We do have a lot less bloat running in the background but drivers for Windows also tend to be top of the line in terms of performance so at any given time you can see better performance in either platform. But we do have Valve throwing a lot of money at Linux (arch) and they keep developing Proton so you won't have a bad experience either way.

im on arch now

You didn't say the line!
"I use Arch, BTW"