Why does Windows 7 still give a smoother user experience than Linux Mint 17.3?

[VirtualLarry]

I've been experimenting with Linux Mint for a while now, I have an install that started as 17.1, and has been updated to 17.3, and a newer kernel.

I also recently built two identical Haswell G1820 Celeron dual-core based PCs, with a single 8GB DDR3-1600 stick (running at 1333 because of CPU limitations, thanks Intel), using the iGPU.

I installed Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon 64-bit off of a USB stick on both of them.

Install was amazingly speedy, thanks to a Team SATA6G 120GB SSD, hooked up to a SATA6G port on the ECS H81 mobo, and the A-Data 16GB USB3.0 install flash drive (even though it was plugged into a USB2.0 front port).

But one benchmark that I like to compare performance of systems on, is using the middle-mouse-button to Autoscroll in Firefox, on this forum.

On my G4400 OCed to 4.455 with a PCI-E 3.0 x4 M.2 AHCI SSD, and a 7950 3GB GDDR5 dGPU, it's amazingly 60FPS silky smooth.

But on the Haswell G1820 iGPU with single-channel DDR3-1333 RAM, it's choppy (but regular). Not smooth at all.

I'm not sure if this is due to the iGPU limitations, but I think it's more the Linux software environment, and not the hardware. I remember when I had my Linux install SSD in the G4400 rig with the 7950, and it still wasn't smooth like it is in Windows 7 64-bit. Though, with the AMD proprietary drivers, it was smoother than the Haswell iGPU.

Is there some inherent issue with Linux that causes this disparity in perceivable performance? Or is it just that Linux Mint's desktop environment is unoptimized? Or performance issues with the open-source video drivers? (I thought that Intel themselves contributed code to the Intel iGPU drivers in Linux, and therefore there are no Linux proprietary Intel iGPU drivers..?)

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Dual boot on the same hardware and run the benchmark - make sure it's the drivers/software environment and not something wrong with the hardware. Linux/X and Windows are also completely different - it's not just drivers, it's how they draw to screen and render graphics.

Dual-channel RAM would help that iGPU in any case.

It's true that Linux GPU drivers tend not to be as heavily optimized as Windows drivers, but not to the point where scrolling should be noticeably bad.

FWIW, I dual boot Win10 and Mint 17.3 on my sig rig. Both OS UIs are plenty zippy enough for me, but if you held a gun to my head and made me choose, I'd say that the Mint UI is a bit laggy/choppy by comparison - about on par with older versions of OS X. (Which often had too much GPU effects on not enough GPU horsepower.)

 

[postmortemIA]

Do you have same setting in Firefox under Advanced -> General - > use smooth scrolling on both platforms? It makes huge difference how scrolling behaves.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I've always found scrolling in Linux to be a bit iffy, if you have Facebook that's a good benchmark to use too, at one point Facebook was completely unusable to me on Linux because the scrolling was so bad. One thing that does help is disabling hardware acceleration in Firefox. But even then it was not as smooth as in windows 7. At one point it just kind of started to get better over time, really not sure what I did.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

I found the opposite to be true on a Zotac Nano CI320 with Celeron and iGPU. Windows 7 was laggy, slow to boot (~2 minutes), and generally unpleasant to use. Ubuntu 15.10 with Unity (including 3D effects) is much smoother, boots in seconds (full reboot < 30 seconds), and everything loads much faster. Even Wireless AC range is improved. Just make sure the restricted drivers are installed and it should be fine.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, rather than dig out the Haswell G1820 Celeron rig with single 8GB DDR3 DIMM, I instead rebooted my i3-6100 rig with a Linux Mint 17,3 Cinnamon 64-bit USB3.0 LiveUSB stick.

Firefox (granted, not the updated version), is definitely a bit choppier than Windows 7 64-bit. It's not "glass smooth", where I can read the text easily while smooth-scrolling. It appears to jump several pixels at a time.

Really, it's like the Linux Mint desktop is refreshing or re-compositing or whatever at 30FPS, but the Windows 7 64-bit desktop is compositing at 60FPS. That's what it kind of feels like.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

I've done some testing and do see a bit of choppiness on the Celeron machine but no longer have Win 7 on that machine to compare. The HTPC with FX 4100 and Geforce GTX 560 SE performs the same between Win 7 and Linux Mint 17.3. You can run an FPS counter to see your framerate, but even the Celeron machine produced nearly 60 FPS on average while scrolling.

Opera performed somewhat better but you'll have to install an extension to enable autoscroll.

 

[VirtualLarry]

The HTPC with FX 4100 and Geforce GTX 560 SE performs the same between Win 7 and Linux Mint 17.3. You can run an FPS counter to see your framerate, but even the Celeron machine produced nearly 60 FPS on average while scrolling.

Thanks for the FPS counter, I'll try that. Though, if the Firefox app is updating at 60FPS, but the Mint Cinnamon compositor updates at 30FPS, it will show 60, but still be choppy.

Btw, were you running the proprietary NV drivers in Linux Mint?

 

[Magic Carpet]

It's been this way, historically. I never ever had any *nix to perform as smooth or/and fast as Windows in desktop duties. Windows 10 now has widened the gap.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

Btw, were you running the proprietary NV drivers in Linux Mint?

Yes. I also have the proprietary Intel drivers installed, and I'm not sure if it's those drivers or the iGPU that is the problem, but I suspect it's the drivers.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

It's been this way, historically. I never ever had any *nix to perform as smooth or/and fast as Windows in desktop duties. Windows 10 now has widened the gap.

On said Zotac Nano everything is better and faster than Windows except for the iGPU drivers.

 

[Elixer]

I think it was mentioned that wayland should fix these issues...
However, when that will be solid, and fully supported is anyone's guess.

 

[replica9000]

Firefox may not scroll silky smooth, but it scrolls a lot better than Chrome does. Chrome almost seems to suffer from screen tearing when scrolling.

 

[sweenish]

On said Zotac Nano everything is better and faster than Windows except for the iGPU drivers.

I'm leaning toward this being a result of Linux having a lower floor on hardware than Windows. Similar to the netbook fad, Linux was the better choice because netbooks weren't beefy enough to run Windows well.

You had passed the Linux floor, but not the Windows one. So, Windows performance suffered.

With enough hardware to run Windows smoothly, it should follow that Linux also runs smoothly, but that is apparently not the case for OP and a few others. I can't speak to this, as I've never tried to compare them very hard. Because my *nix stuff is all virtualized anyway.

 

[TeknoBug]

You need the correct video driver under Linux, I noticed hectic screen tearing while scrolling in the browser on Linux but installing the needed driver made a huge difference, I encountered this very case with my NUC and had to get the Intel video driver through some repository (which was a headache to setup), or alternatively run XFCE4 with compton.

And everything on Linux blows away everything on Windows on my NUC (i3 4010U).

 

[TeknoBug]

Firefox may not scroll silky smooth, but it scrolls a lot better than Chrome does. Chrome almost seems to suffer from screen tearing when scrolling.

Never liked Chrome under Linux (only use Chrome beta for Netflix), but this fixed it for me using smoothwheelscroller extension:

 

[replica9000]

Never liked Chrome under Linux (only use Chrome beta for Netflix), but this fixed it for me using smoothwheelscroller extension:

Thanks. I've only recently started using chrome myself, mostly for Netflix and YouTube. btw, Netflix works under Chrome stable without any hacks.

 

[TheRyuu]

Is there any difference in the user experience if you use a kernel which has full preemption enabled (PREEMPT in uname -a) and is using a high enough timer resolution (at least 300hz)? Comparing Windows to a Linux kernel which was designed more for server use than the desktop isn't the most fair comparison.

Furthermore, if we're talking about both systems being on a HDD then the comparison isn't technically fair since Windows has features like prefetch which can make things load faster. Although stuff like prefetch is still a feature of the OS so if you want to say that's one of the reasons why it gives a smoother user experience than that's fine too. I'm not sure if we're including stuff like the speed of programs loading from a HDD here or not.

Granted, all of that being said this opinion may be unpopular (especially since this is the *nix subforum) but could it be that Windows is just a better desktop OS and provides a better desktop experience?

 

[AnonymouseUser]

could it be that Windows is just a better desktop OS and provides a better desktop experience?

Windows gets better graphics drivers. Intel's graphics drivers are lacking to the point their weaker iGPUs are simply unable to provide the same performance it does under Windows. At the same time I get better performance from my Intel wireless AC drivers and improved SSD performance than I did under Windows**, and without Microsoft spying on everything I do.

** All drivers were up to date

 

[replica9000]

Is there any difference in the user experience if you use a kernel which has full preemption enabled (PREEMPT in uname -a) and is using a high enough timer resolution (at least 300hz)? Comparing Windows to a Linux kernel which was designed more for server use than the desktop isn't the most fair comparison.

Furthermore, if we're talking about both systems being on a HDD then the comparison isn't technically fair since Windows has features like prefetch which can make things load faster. Although stuff like prefetch is still a feature of the OS so if you want to say that's one of the reasons why it gives a smoother user experience than that's fine too. I'm not sure if we're including stuff like the speed of programs loading from a HDD here or not.

Granted, all of that being said this opinion may be unpopular (especially since this is the *nix subforum) but could it be that Windows is just a better desktop OS and provides a better desktop experience?

I'm pretty sure Linux has this too. But if we're simply talking about a recently loaded webpage, I suppose it's already in RAM anyways.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Is there any difference in the user experience if you use a kernel which has full preemption enabled (PREEMPT in uname -a) and is using a high enough timer resolution (at least 300hz)? Comparing Windows to a Linux kernel which was designed more for server use than the desktop isn't the most fair comparison.

I was primarily purely talking about the scrolling smoothness in Firefox.

Does Windows run at a higher timer resolution by default than Linux? Linux Mint is a desktop-oriented distro; you would think that they would have fixed / adjusted that in their distro.

Would that alone perhaps account for the less than perfectly-smooth scrolling in Firefox?

Or are the Intel IGP drivers to blame as well?

 

[replica9000]

I get the same result whether it's the Intel IGP, or with an nVidia card and proprietary drivers. Also doesn't matter if I use Fluxbox w/ Compton, or KDE. Either way the scrolling isn't silky smooth, but it's also not that bad. I could potentially blame LCD motion blur for my experience.

 

[TeknoBug]

In my experience, Debian is a lot more polished than Mint but just not as user friendly. Once I have everything setup in Debian similar to Mint, Debian just runs a lot faster and smoother- I actually feel the overhead in Mint sometimes. But I do like Mint, it's a good out-of-the-box desktop OS whereas I don't have to spend hours on it like I do in Debian to get it where I want it to be.

 

[ninaholic37]

I use Pg Up and Pg Down to scroll. It's pretty much instant on 800MHz CPU.

 

[TheRyuu]

Does Windows run at a higher timer resolution by default than Linux? Linux Mint is a desktop-oriented distro; you would think that they would have fixed / adjusted that in their distro.

When Firefox is running no, Windows actually runs with a lower (slower) timer resolution (~15.626ms). Most linux distros use voluntary preemption and a 250hz (4ms) timer resolution by default. Even if Mint is desktop oriented I don't think they bother changing that stuff. They normally just pick something that works well enough for everybody. Higher timer resolutions do use more power (tickless helps with this) and hurt throughput.

Windows has a dynamic timer resolution so programs can request a higher one if they need it. I don't think Firefox does though since it doesn't really need it unless maybe a video is playing. Granted there may be other differences in the operation system which make something like the timer resolution/tick rate matter more/less.

Would that alone perhaps account for the less than perfectly-smooth scrolling in Firefox?

I don't know, I remember something about Firefox not having the best hardware acceleration on Linux so maybe that plays a factor in it?

Or are the Intel IGP drivers to blame as well?

Again I don't know, could be a combination of all of the above or none of them. I didn't think the Intel drivers were terrible (aren't they open source).