No, I am saying that the performance -can- drop in Linux if you use it the same way that people often use Windows. People often install lots of things without any regard to the side effects.

For example, I've logged into a less-experienced admin's Linux web server, only to find a bunch of desktop services running that did not need to be installed. The admin had used a package manager to install a graphics library package, which had one dependency that triggered many other dependencies, including the whole X11 system, which was now starting up at boot and taking up valuable resources even though it wasn't even used. The admin was trying out something but didn't end up needing it, but he left it installed and running. On top of that, he hadn't disabled the unnecessary services like Bluetooth, so there were a few of those running for no reason, too.

Performance is not usually killed by one or two major things - it is an accumulation of very small things.

If you know what you're doing with Linux, you won't see performance drop. If you know what you're doing with Windows, you also won't see performance drop.

One last note:

not like windows and android where you can't see those services...

You can see every service and process on Windows. In fact, Windows.10 makes it even easier to see what processes map to which services.

Android tries harder to shield the user from the services but your average user doesn't even bother much with processes anyway. If Linux desktop became mainstream-popular tomorrow, you would see new app stores for Linux popping up everywhere, filled with games and apps that contain ads and their own copies of libraries, and apps that run in the background. And people wouldn't care until their system got slow and then they'd complain that Linux is slow.

My.point was not that Linux gets slow - it's that bad user practices will make the operating system slow no matter if it's Windows or Linux or Mac or whatever.

Hey how do you use wsl, been wondering when I met need it, what use case?

Yep. Printers and scanners are also pretty bad. I can't think of a single major brand that hasn't tried to shove a 300-megabyte "driver" package onto my system. It's like a shifty guy on the street corner, "Hey, man, wanna buy a watch? I'll throw in Paperport for free."

Linux is indeed great. My point was that if you take average, less-technical users and set them in front of a Linux desktop with enough knowledge to install new apps and launch them, THEY are going to eventually see the same kinds of problems on Linux.

There is a reason we technical folks remove unnecessary packages. Why load up the
Bluetooth service on a server that doesn't use it? Why load up KDE on a simple web server? We remove them because they have small impacts on system performance and we can make Linux run even faster without them. The opposite is true - if you are one of those users that installs a ton of packages, you're eventually going to run into problems. You'll have users who remove package X that also removes a dependency package that breaks another app and you'll have those users complaining about how Linux is terrible, when it's really just user behavior.

As far as your list of benefits go, a couple of those overlap with Windows. For example, you don't -need- to update Windows if you don't want to. You can even spin up XP and use it today if you wanted to. The catch is that you'll have a hard time finding drivers and your system will not receive critical patches. However, that's the same problem with Linux. If you never update, you'll eventually be left with a system that is not patched. I have a client right now who has a really old Fedora server that is so out of date that its openssl libraries are too old to allow it to communicate with most other modern servers, which means I cannot update it through a package manager like yum anymore. I could certainly manually compile openssl and swap that out, but that's a headache and a half. There are always workarounds but that's the same story with Windows. My point here is that if you truly dive down into the comparisons, there is not a huge difference if you are technically savvy on both platforms. They each have their strengths and weaknesses.

Again, it's about comparing apples to apples. All things being equal, you'll run into the same end result. But most people who compare Linux to Windows are not comparing apples to apples.

Take a look at Adobe's creative cloud, which runs on *NIX and Windows. Both implementations use update services (core sync) and a node.js service. The update process in its entirety isn't all that lightweight and can sometimes make the OS hang for a moment, and this happens on both operating systems.

Windows makes a lot of cruddy software easily available to the masses. People install massive software packages for printers and scanners, they install shell extensions, webcam apps that add fancy frames around pictures, trial versions of software, photo-organizing software, note-syncing software, hardware-support services, plugins for Outlook and Word, meeting apps galore (Teams, Zoom, Chime, Webex, etc), anti-cheating services for online gaming, and the list just goes on. Again, Windows simply makes a TON of software available to the masses, and so they consume a lot of it.

Linux doesn't do that. Linux has its distro-specific package managers that focus on fast, lean, efficient apps. BUT if we're comparing apples to apples, then you have to consider the average Windows user who wants to install all that stuff, and imagine a future where it's ALL available on Linux. If the user installs all the same software that ends up loading up their system with small services, it's going to start making the system slow. And if there's massive mainstream interest in Linux, then you can bet that you'll see far more malicious software targeting Linux, making it more important to have security software installed (which further slows down the system).

At the end of the day, you have a finite amount of system resources (CPU, RAM, etc), and no operating system will be able to save a user from themselves if the user wants to load up their system with a ton of junk.

It's also very difficult to compare the two perfectly, because it's more than just a couple of kernels. For example, you have things like the ext3/4 filesystems in Linux that rarely need defragmentation, compared to FAT or NTFS running on a mechanical HDD. However, since SSDs are mostly mainstream, you don't run into the same fragmentation-slowness on NTFS.

As far as the "the reason for it's slowness is not apparent" goes, yes, there's always a reason and it's almost always apparent if you know where to look. Not a lot of Windows users are that savvy, so there's still a lot of them that will fill up their systems with junk and not maintain things properly, and they'll end up seeing slownesss. That's why I said, if you know how to use either operating system well, then you won't see the slowness on them.

Go install 100 random apps on your Android phone, launch them and use them for a little bit, then close them and keep a record of how many different notifications you get in a week without having the app fully running. Then go check your process list, and you'll probably see half of them still running MOSTLY idle. But a few fractions of a percent here and there will end up adding up quickly, and suddenly your phone is constantly churning out another 5% to 10% of its CPU all day long. That's not software updates, that's just a bunch of apps thinking that they each are important enough to keep running in the background.

Good.