There's still about a month before Microsoft's Windows 11 25H2 and Canonical's Ubuntu 25.10 come out, but right now, we've got benchmarks comparing the two. The hardware Phoronix used to test the competing operating systems included an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X CPU with 16 cores and 32 threads, 32GB DDR5-6000 memory, a 1TB Crucial PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD, and an AMD Radeon RX 9070 GPU. For consistency, all other software and hardware configurations remained unchanged between OS installations. The benchmarks focused entirely on CPU performance, avoiding graphics testing for now.
Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2 rely on a shared servicing branch , meaning new code for 25H2 is added in a disabled state during monthly cumulative updates to 24H2 and only enabled with a quick reboot once a user updates to 25H2. This minimizes downtime and attempts to give users a seamless transition experience.
Both Windows versions used the NTFS file system and Microsoft's latest drivers. Ubuntu, in comparison, was tested in two configurations: the current long-term support release (24.04.3 LTS) and the upcoming 25.10 stable release, each running the Linux kernel and Mesa graphics stack, plus the ext4 file system.
Results from these tests indicate that Ubuntu 25.10 often outperforms Windows 11 25H2 in multi-threaded workloads, thanks largely to kernel optimizations that appear to use Ryzen hardware more efficiently.
For CPU-intensive tasks like rendering, encoding, and scientific computing, Ubuntu demonstrated up to 15% better performance than Windows. Notably, Windows 11 25H2 showed roughly the same results as 24H2, with no significant improvement, Phoronix reports .
These results suggest that users who prioritize raw CPU throughput, especially in creator or development tasks, are likely to see some performance advantages with Ubuntu Linux.
