Windows 11 vs Linux: is Microsoft's OS really worse than Linux? Here's who wins against CachyOS and Ubuntu
Ninety-nine benchmarks, three operating systems, and a laptop costing $5,399: the verdict from Phoronix on the Razer Blade 18 RZ09-0582 reshapes several certainties about the comparison between Windows and Linux. The laptop, equipped with Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 for notebooks, is the first model that Razer is certifying for use with Linux through Canonical's hardware certification program.
Michael Larabel, the author of the test, put the out-of-the-box configuration of Windows 11 provided by Razer to the test against Ubuntu 26.04 LTS with Linux kernel 7.0 and against CachyOS, the performance-oriented rolling release distribution based on Arch Linux. The latter, updated the week before the test, was already running Linux kernel 7.1, GCC 16.1.1, and the NVIDIA driver R610, while Windows 11 and Ubuntu were limited to the older R595.
CachyOS wins the majority of tests
Out of the 99 benchmarks executed, CachyOS secured first place in 51% of cases, followed by Windows 11 at 38% and Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, which came last at 10%. On the flip side, Windows 11 was the slowest in half of the tests, with Ubuntu finishing last in 43% of instances.
In the graphics benchmark GravityMark, Windows 11 excelled in pure Vulkan mode, while CachyOS proved slightly faster in Vulkan ray tracing thanks to driver R610. With Hashcat, however, the Microsoft system remained the fastest in both SHA-256 and SHA-512 algorithms, aided by OpenCL acceleration.
The situation flipped in rendering: using Blender in CPU mode, both Linux distributions had shorter rendering times compared to Windows, with CachyOS often ahead of Ubuntu. The trend continues with the NVIDIA OptiX backend, although Ubuntu prevailed in the Barbershop and Pabellon Barcelona scenes. The proprietary V-RAY renderer from Chaos Group tells a different story depending on the engine: with RTX GPU acceleration Windows 11 wins, but when switching to CPU computation, CachyOS clearly dominates.
Mixed results in other professional workloads
With IndigoBench, CachyOS dominates in CPU tests while Ubuntu catches up in OpenCL acceleration on GPU. The Intel Open Image Denoise denoiser favors Windows 11 across all three tested configurations, while Intel's OSPRay engine significantly boosts the two Linux distributions.
In the realm of video encoding, CachyOS excels with the OpenAPV encoder and in most SVT-AV1 presets, which have historically performed better on Linux. However, Windows 11 makes a comeback with the H.265 Kvazaar encoder in 1080p preset and with the ASTC Encoder in both Fast and Exhaustive modes.
Notable surprises in AI-related workloads
The transcriber Whisperfile, based on Whisper.cpp, runs faster on Windows 11 in both the Small and Medium models. An even more significant difference is seen with Llama.cpp on OpenBLAS backend, where the Microsoft system surpasses both Linux distributions by a considerable margin, a result that contradicts the usual assumption that Linux is automatically more efficient for these types of workloads.
Overall, Windows 11 narrowly surpasses Ubuntu 26.04 LTS on the geometric mean of the results, but CachyOS edges ahead of both with a still limited advantage. A data point that, as Larabel himself warns, counts relatively little: for those who truly use this type of machine, the individual workloads matter, not the statistical summary. Nevertheless, both Ubuntu and CachyOS work well from the first boot on a notebook designed for both gaming and AI development.