Linux vs. Windows

To preface, I don’t use Blender and know very little about it other than system requirements, but my son uses it and is putting out some impressive work. He is currently running Windows 8.1.

My question is has anyone tried using Blender on both Windows and a Linux-based OS? Have you noticed better performance on one versus the other?

As far as I remember, Linux performs better than Windows and Mac. However, in recent versions the gap has been getting smaller. Version 2.68 saw a 30% increase in Cycles/GPU performance for Windows (and only 10% increase for Linux and Mac).

Linux in general has pretty stellar render performance in Cycles on the CPU. For GPU rendering a lot of people have driver issues. General viewport use, etc. shouldn’t be much different between platforms though.

Thanks for the input. He’s running an Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU (forget models atm). He came to me when putting the system together and I suspected the software would run better on Linux, so I wanted to make sure he had hardware that would induce as little stress as possible.

Going to set him up with a dual-boot this weekend.