My bf bought me a brand new laptop with Win 10 preinstalled, and even after disabling or uninstalling as much as I could, it was literally like watching a slideshow. Then I installed Linux, and it...worked like you'd expect a brand new computer to work, fast and smooth. Never used Win 11 because I stopped using Windows after that.

Myyyyyeeeeh. A lightweight distro or a conemporaneous distro sure.

If I'm running GPU accelerated Steam, tons of tabs on Firefox and the same highly customized KDE desktop full of translucent components and extra animations I am willing to bet they'd both chug.

Which is what the conversation is about: new software doesn't suck, it's doing more stuff.

For sure, all things being equal Linux does run ligher on RAM and VRAM, so if you're using something that is speficially memory-limited so Windows and Linux fall on opposite sides of overflowing the available memory you'll definitely see better performance on Linux, but that's not an inherent issue with poorly made software having a huge performance overhead.