I have problems with Windows, but it's the fastest desktop os I think, mostly because it's graphics stack is way the best of all. Running a number crunching C code is exactly the same on Windows or Linux. (See all the benchmarks on the Internet.)
Note: windows programmer for 19 years now. Only because of the cash.
The disadvantage of NTFS which you point out, isn't because of a fuckup. It's not designed for your use case. You might even find Microsoft telling you that themselves here :- https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Cc938932.aspx
As to your point about productivity, I can't comment without knowing specifics. As a primarily C++ programmer, I haven't run into any Windows showstoppers that prevented me from shipping. I have run into showstoppers with their dev tools, but I see them as separate from the OS.
Note: windows programmer for 19 years now. Only because of the cash.
The mantra among the consults I've met in the UK is if you're charging by the hour, do it in .Net on Windows. If you're charging a fixed rate, use Linux and Python.
I'm not suggesting there is anything better for an end user but I'm pointing out that it doesn't work well enough.
I still use it however and have a fondness. The accumulated knowledge of fixes is incredibly valuable.
Haven't tested ext4 and ntfs drivers directly against each other, but an useful trick if you ever need to copy millions of small files from NTFS is to mount it on Linux because Linux driver can work with it way way faster than Windows one.
I dual booted a laptop for a while with Vista. (I can't speak to anything later, because I use Linux now, and haven't looked back, so take the appropriate grain of salt.) So with Vista / Gentoo on exactly the same hardware (a Lenovo T61):
- boot time on Linux was orders of magnitude faster
- WiFi AP connect was significantly faster[1], esp. on resuming from suspend-to-RAM
- Windows had a tendency to swap things out if they weren't in use, and had to swap like crazy if you paged back to a program you hadn't used in a while; Linux, by comparison, will only swap if required to due to memory pressure.
[1] i.e., WiFi was reconnected before I could unlock the screen. No other OS I've had has been able to do this, and it's bliss.
> mostly because it's graphics stack is way the best of all.
Riiiight. The T61 had an nvidia in it, and it was fairly decent; drivers were decent between the two OSs, and performance on each was about on par with the other. (I used the proprietary drivers; nouveau performed unacceptably bad — bear in mind this was 7 years ago.)
> Running a number crunching C code is exactly the same on Windows or Linux. (See all the benchmarks on the Internet.)
This I will agree with; but what do you do after the number crunching? It's the scaffolding around the program that mattered to me: Linux has a real shell, with real tools. I can accomplish the odd task here or there. But yes, running a "number crunching C code" will perform about equally: you're really only testing the processor, maybe the memory — crucially, the hardware, not the OS.
To be fair Vista was the slowest NT 6+ OS, especially booting is way faster on Windows 8+.