Hot Take Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Leads Over Windows 11 In Creator Workstation Performance

[Miravi]

Phoronix:

The past few weeks I have been testing out the new HP Z6 G5 A workstation desktop PC. It's a beast in being powered by the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9975WX, eight channels of DDR5-5600 memory, and paired with a NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Max-Q workstation graphics card. The full review on the HP Z6 G5 A workstation will be published on Phoronix in the next week or so but given the timing and that it shipped with WIndows 11 Pro, here is a look at how Windows 11 Pro is competing against the newly-released Ubuntu 26.04 LTS in creator/workstation workloads.

With Ubuntu 26.04 LTS having debuted last week and using it for many of the HP Z6 G5 A workstation benchmarks at Phoronix, I was curious to see how it was performing against HP's optimized Microsoft Windows 11 Pro installation for this workstation PC with all available system updates as of testing time. The HP Z6 G5 A workstation review unit was equipped with the 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9975WX processor, 8 x 16GB DDR5-5600 memory modules, and the NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Max-Q Workstation Edition graphics card.

Given the HP Z6 G5 A is a workstation product, these benchmarks for Windows vs. Linux comparison were primarily looking at the creator/workstation workloads native to both operating systems.

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Leads Over Windows 11 In Creator Workstation Performance Review - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com

Category	Winner	Key Driver
Heavy Rendering	Ubuntu	Superior multi-threading/scheduling
GPU/CUDA	Tie	Shared NVIDIA driver architecture
Video Encoding	Ubuntu	Compiler optimizations (GCC 15.2)
Web Browsing	Tie	Software-bound, not OS-bound
Overall Value	Ubuntu	Outperformed Windows in 60%+ of tests

Ubuntu still offers competitive performance. Other distros and Linux configurations would be able to outdo Ubuntu's results here.

 

[LinuxFan58]

First compliments with your heavy duty performance PC

Question: did you do synthetic tests?

When I do head-to-head comparatives on identical laptops Ryzen 7 U5700 16GB laptops with SSD (wife Windows11 and I am runnning Linux Mint Xfce) Wiindows applications always outperforms Linux applications. Software bound (with graphics acceleration) Windows 11 always wins, Synthetic bare bone OS test are often won by Linux. So I would say Windows has the upper hand in real world applications.

 

[Miravi]

Synthetic benchmarks actually comprise a minority of the tests conducted in the article. Most of the testing demonstrated real processing loads. I don't know exactly the conditions of your observations, but Phoronix is a great outlet for all kinds of comparative tests between different hardware and software.

I didn't run the tests myself. Follow the article for more details on Phoronix.

In this other article, Linux greatly outperforms Windows while running games specifically built for Windows:

SteamOS destroys Windows by up to 75%, and I have the receipts to prove it

SteamOS isn't only easier to use than Windows 11 — it's straight-up faster.

www.xda-developers.com

 

[Sorrento]

Wouldn't mind getting my fingers on that PC & I thought such things didn't bother me anymore