Which OS is better for chess? Windows or Linux.

[lucasart]

It's questionable whether engines run faster on windows vs linux (I guess there's no difference), but where windows is clearly better is chess GUI.
There is no mature enough chess GUI on Linux.

You "guess" there's no difference. But, of course, you haven't bothered to measure...

As for "there is no mature GUI on Linux", you obviously didn't bother to look. Ever heard of cutechess?

So much hand waving here

[Manattable]

It's questionable whether engines run faster on windows vs linux (I guess there's no difference), but where windows is clearly better is chess GUI.
There is no mature enough chess GUI on Linux.

You "guess" there's no difference. But, of course, you haven't bothered to measure...

As for "there is no mature GUI on Linux", you obviously didn't bother to look. Ever heard of cutechess?

So much hand waving here

Im running Arena on LINUX.

[jdart]

I keep one Windows box as my main desktop, mostly to run Chessbase, Lightroom, Quickbooks, and some other essential apps (I don't think Wine is an option for all of these). Chessbase is an essential tool IMO: I use it daily.

I have four Linux boxes and have had more at one point, and those are for programming, tuning and testing. Most are configured as servers with no UI except the command line, except a couple that run xboard. Linux has been my main development platform for over a decade.

--Jon

[crem]

As for "there is no mature GUI on Linux", you obviously didn't bother to look. Ever heard of cutechess?

So much hand waving here

Sorry, I've never heard of cutechess. Could you answer me whether cutechess has the following features:

Can you go through different variations in cutechess to see engine evals? Can it store those evals in PGN? Can you annotate variations with comments and on-the board graphics?
Can you stop a game in the middle, save on disk and resume next day?
Can you browse openings database in cutechess? Can you edit it?
Can you make several engines annotate your moves as you go through the game?

Thank you for your answers.

Cutechess doesn't even save settings of last game/tournament played! So if you set it up, started, and then realized you have to tweak one small thing, you have to redo all again! If something went wrong during the tournament (engine crashed), can you make it replay a game?
Cutechess is a feature-poor piece of software with a very unfriendly UI.

I understand that cutechess is not a chess GUI but rather a tool to run chess tournaments, but even that it does pretty poorly.

[Modern Times]

To the original poster - if you have no experience of Linux I'd stick with Windows unless you have way too much spare time on your hands.

I've used Linux and and off for a decade, and never got on with it and came back to Windows every time.

[yurikvelo]

Question is very specific: Windows speed penalty on heavily multhithreaded NUMA machines with at least 16+ threads.

If one invest in such machine to run chess engines - Linux or Windows won't matter.

But does this penalty really exist? If it exist - it has simple cause which can be fixed in couple minutes, or it is unresolvable?

[Ras]

I can confirm that Linux offers about 10% more NPS with the same PC and engine and compiler, even in singlethread.

I think that Win7 is a more practical desktop OS than Linux, but MS has declined sharply with Win10. Not only the espionage, but also the combo of forced and immature updates. With Linux, there is no espionage, and I can at least choose whether and when to update.

[MikeB]

I saw somewhere that on the new Ryzen 2 Threadripper Linux achieves a lot more nodes per second. I would be grateful for some comments to enlighten me. If I switch over to Linux can I run all my current programs? I really have no knowledge of Linux.

Like everything else in life , there is no one size fits all. Windows, Linux or even macOS can be the preferred choice. I would say those that are more technically inclined, can be fine with Linux or macOS or Windows - those that like to be spoon fed will probably be better off with Windows. If somebody does want to consider moving from the windows environment to the Lunix or macOS - reach out to somebody with that OS to see how they do it.

And finally there is no need to give up your favorite windows apps on a Mac - under Parallels, they can run in coherent mode and open in their own windows side by side with Mac apps.

IMG_8146.jpg

[Jesse Gersenson]

I saw somewhere that on the new Ryzen 2 Threadripper Linux achieves a lot more nodes per second. I would be grateful for some comments to enlighten me. If I switch over to Linux can I run all my current programs? I really have no knowledge of Linux.

Every one of the world's 500 fastest computers runs Linux (source, https://www.top500.org/)

About 0.8% of computer users, in the US and Europe, use Linux. Among chess players, and computer chess enthusists, the number is about 6%. Most power users regularly use Linux.

[crem]

Every one of the world's 500 fastest computers runs Linux (source, https://www.top500.org/)

About 0.8% of computer users, in the US and Europe, use Linux. Among chess players, and computer chess enthusists, the number is about 6%. Most power users regularly use Linux.

Top500 computers run Linux because it's easier to setup Linux on custom hardware, not because it's faster by itself.
But from user experience perspective, Windows is still better for many tasks, including image processing (Gimp/Krita/Pinta is much worse than Photoshop), sound recording (Protools/Cubase/etc is much worse than whatever Linux has, although there's finally version of Reaper for Linux), and playing/analyzing chess.

It may happen that Linux versions of engines are slightly faster, but it surely doesn't compensate with the lack of user experience.