I assume you are limiting your definition of "system-taxing" to playing games specifically?

As other people have noted, filesystem performance is often better under Linux.

I also will point out that at least some rendering tasks can be faster under Linux as well:

http://blog.thepixelary.com/post/167616662857/improving-perf...

Just like with the filesystem performance discrepancy, this article seems to point out WDDM (Windows drivers) as the reason for this rendering discrepancy.

And while we are on gaming (since I am a gamer as well!) when comparing games that run natively on Linux as well as Windows, Linux often has a performance edge over Windows:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Win10-Li...

Of course most games do not support Linux natively so in order to game on Linux you have to use WINE, Proton, or full virtualization to get a non-native game to run and this extra middleware layer adds overhead. But this doesn't mean gaming performance on Linux is worse than Windows; as comparing native-to-native performance shows.

Using git as a filesystem performance metric is horribly flawed -- git was written from the beginning to perform perfectly on Linux. It's the most native linux application I can think of.

(Not because it's using secret system calls, but because its design was vetted and performance tailored for Linux.)

I didn't really specify git myself, but it doesn't seem like NTFS is a particularly high performance filesystem these days:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4....

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-transfer-files-faster-wi...

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ubuntu-oneiric-ocelot-b...

https://superuser.com/questions/1124472/why-is-linux-30x-fas...

I also want to point out that just because NTFS isn't the fastest filesystem on the block doesn't mean it is a bad one. From what I can gather just casually googling it seems like NTFS emphasizes safety at the cost of performance at times. So depending on your workload and desired behavior NTFS might be the file system of choice for you. It's also worth noting that IF NTFS is intended to be more user-safe it sort of makes sense why may be the choice for the most common OS which aims to serve all users (not just technical ones).

I thought it was mainly because windows doesn't have a dir cache in the kernel. The WSL filesystem performance thread is linked above which goes into this.

And that can't be fixed without involving 10 different teams and potentially outside partners.

And there's something wrong with the filesystem, which can't be fixed without the same deal except that will definitely require the cooperation of the outside partners because apparently you can write an extension for NTFS and fixing it would break the existing extensions, which Microsoft doesn't have the source for and doesn't ship.

And there's a thousand other paper cuts, and a very large fraction of those would require cross-team coordination and testing, which is a horrible time sink in a large company.

Fundamentally, Windows has poor performance when dealing with lots of little files, which is exactly what compiling large code bases involves. And to top it all off, their build system, conspires against their own OS. You'll get better performance using cmake + ninja (on Windows that is) then you will with cmake + visual studio.

Edit: also as a practical matter, if all my company's code is in git, and all outside code bases I work with are in git, I kinda would like decent git performance regardless of the origins of the tool.

I use windows as an outlook appliance at work, and as a gaming appliance at home. Otherwise I do everything in linux and am much happier.

It is also extremely slow on big files. Try opening a file, seeking out to 10GB, and writing 4KB. Instant, on any Unix. Better have something else planned for the afternoon, on Windows.

Games really aren't a good benchmark for overall system performance as they are generally optimized for Windows and non-Windows ports often receive a lot less attention. Also, most games are primarily stressing one thing - the graphics stack - and not I/O, scheduling, memory management etc.

Which game? I don't agree with the position of the person to whom you are responding, but there's almost certainly much more optimization put into the Windows version.

Why is “much more optimization” a limitation? What is preventing devs from optimizing the linux version? If the OS is more performant that should require less effort, no?

My point is more that a game's performance is not necessarily a reliable way to measure relative performance of the OS. What game was it?

Windows absolutely dwarfs Linux when it comes to gaming market share. Game developers will factor in return on investment and therefore a proportional amount time will be spent on optimizing the Linux port.