Fedora Outpaces Windows 11 in Standardized Performance Tests on Identical Hardware

PhoneBuff has built its reputation through lab-controlled, reproducible assessments of smartphones using robotic hands. The company's YouTube presence features standardized testing across speed, durability, and battery life. After publishing a performance comparison between a Dell XPS 13 and MacBook Neo, audience members began requesting that the team evaluate Linux performance.

The team configured two identical Dell XPS 13 machines, each with an Intel Core 5 320 processor and 8GB of RAM. One ran Windows 11, the other Fedora. Using robotic mouse and keyboard controls, they executed the same applications and workflows on both systems, measuring execution time across eleven separate tests.

Fedora claimed victory in six of the eleven timed tests, with four results tied between the two systems. Windows 11 secured a single win.

Fedora vs. Windows 11 on same hardware

Testing conditions remained identical throughout. Both displays were set to 200 nits brightness, positioned at equal distance from the WiFi router, in a temperature-controlled environment. Each test ran between three and five times, with the median result recorded.

Cold boot from complete shutdown produced nearly identical results: Windows reached the desktop in 23 seconds, Fedora in 24 seconds. Restart performance diverged significantly. Fedora restarted in 27 seconds (median), while Windows required 61 seconds. Windows restart times ranged from 46 to 68 seconds across five runs; Fedora's ranged from 23 to 34 seconds.

The most dramatic performance gap emerged during file operations. Extracting a 6GB archive took Fedora's native tool 12 seconds. Windows Explorer required 57 seconds for the same task; installing 7-Zip reduced this to 17.4 seconds.

Development workflows showed substantial differences. The robot opened an open-source whiteboard project in VS Code, performed error scanning, compiled the code, and executed nearly 1,900 tests. Fedora completed this sequence in 2:20.5; Windows 11 took 3:41.99.

Creative applications followed the same pattern. DaVinci Resolve imported two video clips, applied color grading to one, stabilized the other, and exported the result in 2:10.9 on Fedora versus 2:49.9 on Windows. A GIMP editing session on a 4K image, applying smudge, heal, and object removal tools, finished in 53.3 seconds on Fedora against 60.7 seconds on Windows.

Everyday applications produced largely equivalent results. Chrome loading a locally hosted page containing video, 3D models, maps, and chart calculations completed in 19.3 seconds on Fedora and 19.8 seconds on Windows.

A 500-page document opened in ONLYOFFICE in 8.7 seconds on Fedora versus 9.3 seconds on Windows. An OCR processing pass took 36.6 seconds on Fedora and 39.8 seconds on Windows. A Blender render of the same 1080p scene produced nearly identical times: 44.2 seconds on Fedora and 43.5 seconds on Windows.

Idle memory consumption revealed a substantial gap. After one minute of inactivity, Fedora consumed 32.9 percent of the 8GB RAM, while Windows used 85.2 percent. Actual memory usage measured 2.27GB on Fedora against 6.47GB on Windows.

Windows achieved its sole victory in launching Cyberpunk 2077, starting the game in 54.3 seconds compared to Fedora's 57.0 seconds. This metric measures launch time only, not frame rates or gaming performance; PhoneBuff did not conduct gaming benchmarks.

What do the numbers mean?

These results warrant careful interpretation. The test suite contains no artificial intelligence workloads and, as noted, excludes gaming benchmarks.

The PhoneBuff presenter acknowledged at the video's outset that Fedora represents one of many Linux distributions available and that "this won't necessarily represent every possible Linux experience." Different distributions running different desktop environments would likely produce different performance gaps.

The memory usage comparison carries important caveats. Windows' 85.2 percent consumption included several Dell utilities, Windows Defender (MsMpEng), and Edge WebView2 running by default. The disparity reflects not only Windows itself but also this pre-installed software. Fedora simply started with fewer background processes.

In summary: computationally intensive tasks favored Fedora, sometimes by substantial margins; everyday applications produced equivalent performance; and idle memory usage showed Fedora consuming roughly one-third the RAM of Windows. These eleven data points should be understood as individual measurements rather than a comprehensive verdict on either platform.