Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance On The Intel Core Ultra 7 Meteor Lake

When taking the geometric mean of all 84 tests that ended up running on each operating system, Ubuntu 23.10 with Linux 6.7 came out 15% faster than Windows 11.

This lead isn't as wide as we've seen on some higher core count systems but overall Linux had a strong showing in the CPU tests for the most part. This was good to see as there was some curiosity on whether the Linux kernel is behaving optimally yet for Meteor Lake CPUs but even with the single-threaded tests I didn't run into any awkward situations yet. Though with Linux results proving competitive, it does for the most part rule out Linux being to blame for the poor CPU performance benchmarks on Meteor Lake.

The geo mean also included the few graphics benchmarks run on Windows and Linux. Right now the integrated Intel Arc Graphics performance was around 85%+ the speed of the Windows 11 launch-day driver, so while a nice showing for open-source does give hope we'll see some more gains coming soon to the Intel Linux GPU drivers. And even with not hitting parity to the Windows graphics drivers yet, yesterday's Intel Arc Graphics benchmarks show the performance being marvelous generationally from prior generations and with leading power efficiency and competitiveness against AMD RDNA3.