The biggest performance boost from an upgrade in the last two decades was switching from a Western Digital VelociRaptor HDD to a Samsung 840EVO SATA SSD. That was going from 6ms to 0.06 ms random access latency.
The performance boost from switching from Windows to Linux wasn’t perceivable even on Gentoo where I literally compiled for the exact hardware, I had and used a custom debloated monolithic kernel. But it got me a massive boost in user agency and freedom of choice.
You can’t beat two orders of magnitude reaction latency reduction with an OS change. Windows is bloated. But it’s not that bloated (at least Windows XP, 7, and 10 weren’t; didn’t try 11).
I play on Gentoo btw.You sound like you’re talking about application run performance. That shouldn’t be noticeably different. Startup and application load time tend to be where the gains are.
If I/O latency is bad enough it can affect runtime performance from game FPS to browser “snappiness”
I know it. I’m literally typing this on a Raspberry Pi. I used to run Arch Linux on it, but Arch Linux on ARM has severe issues. It’ll literally go months with no package updates.
One day I’ll get brave and switch it to Gentoo. Just need to put together a build server first.
Yocto and compile it all yourself. Arch people might think they are cool because they have to use a console to install their de but creating the devicetree for your board and then only get a console over a serial connection or ssh is the true linux experience.
I have had great success running NixOS on my Pi. You can build software on your main computer and remote deploy with SSH :)
