https://www.phoronix.com/review/ubuntu-2610-wildcat-lake
26.10 is a bit improved
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2026
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So Ubuntu was the worst, then Windows did about 10 percent better (WTF??) and cachyos did another 6 percent better then Windows.
The fact that Windows beat Ubuntu on a low powered laptop? Very concerning for Canonical...
I think Wildcat Lake is newer than Ubuntu 26.04's kernel, so it kinda makes sense, the 26.10 beta is improved, and probably the next kernel will have more performance
Ok well that's fair. So not so very bleeding edge then.
Yeah Ubuntu is internationally a bit behind on updates, which is good for people who want things to "just work"
Kernel 7.3 seems like it will have even more improvements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_version_history
IDK how many of those improvements CachyOS has already, they're based on 7.2 but pretty sure they merge in stuff early, so they probably have most of it
Given that Ubuntu is trading stability for cutting edge - not very surprising
Is Cachyos not even more cutting edge?
it is
Cool cool, so Ubuntu is now truly at the bottom.
yep. Couldn't name a distro more shitty.
Ooooh, this sounds like the start of a great useless flame war!
I'll start: I truly despise Red hat linux. The most pretentious hacky buggy stuff I ever had the displeasure of having to work with.
#boom
Honestly at that performance level I think it's more important to focus on usability. Screen scaling/clarity, battery life, and how responsive the UI is.
It's the same reason Android tablets often get such a bad rap, people get the cheap ones that have to unload every app anytime you sneeze and the home screen UI is noticeably laggy.
While some of those metrics are subjective and more difficult to quantify, I would have liked to see boot speed, app launch, video playback, and WiFi tests of some kind.
Still interesting to see that windows is not as horrible as is often portrayed. I want their improvements to succeed because that will make Linux more likely to improve as well, even if just out of spite.
it also really depends. are you going to see a performance increase on LInux over Windows? sure, slightly but again that depends on what you're playing. for example I play EVE Online. Like it or not on Windows with multiple clients it just performs better. and if you know EVE you know you do need to run multiple clients to get anything done. I've tried it on virtually all Linux Distros and still to this day it still performs better and more smoothly on Windows.
that being said If I was playing something like Cyberpunk 2077 I'd play that on pretty much any linux distro over Windows. and then when it comes to which distro at this point it really doesn't matter. Will you get a slight increase on CachyOS over others? sure. but it's slight and not that noticeable. Add to the fact you can pretty much replicate what Cachy does on just regular Arch or even NixOS. same deal with something like PikaOS. will you get an increase on that over say Debian or Ubuntu. sure...but ever so slightly.
What's MORE important now is what DE/WM you're using. that's where you're going to see better performance. for DE's it's KDE hands down. for WindowManagers? surprisingly I've had abetter experience with gaming on DWM than any other. I've had mouse capture issues on Niri and Hyprland or refocus issues. Sway works well also.
So it really depends on what you're playing. I daily drive OpenBSD where yeah, no gaming there, and then I have another drive that has Windows with an Arch install on WSL2. I'm at the point now in my 40s where I just don't care anymore for the whole "this is better than that and if you use that you're lame" mentality. I just want things to work.