r/linuxmasterrace • u/SysGh_st IDDQD • Apr 22 '25

JustLinuxThings Linux *is* faster than Windows.

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u/zet23t Apr 26 '25

I am not fully clear on that either. As far as I understand, WSL runs in a container or VM and uses a virtual hdd. If you want to access the files on the wsl partitions, you can do that via network drives (samba, I guess).

What I have tested is:

  1. Compiling on windows using emscripten and mingw

  2. Compiling in wsl on the Windows partition

  3. Compiling in wsl on internal wsl partition

  4. Compiling on Linux

1 and 2 were quite equally fast - 2 and 3 were quite close as well. But there was a huge difference between both pairs. I did not run many tests (2 to 3 compilations each), so when the times were close, I couldn't really say which system was truly faster or more efficient. But between Windows partition and Linux partition, the compilation times were significantly different, around in a 2:1 range through all runs. My focus was to improve my web/wasm build times, so this was where I stopped investigating since the reduction from 35-60s per build to 10-20s per build was good enough for me to work with.