Linux

So It does depend on the situation, there have been some issues with significantly reduced performance for heavily multi threaded games through wine/proton. It seems like that is getting cleared up by a direct implementation of the relevant stuff in the kernel, rather than being a distro specific thing. There are also some performance losses due to linux giving all application equal priority for “video random access memory” on a GPU (so if a game needs more than what is available it gets forced to use other memory which slows things down a lot) but there are some fixes coming down the line to make a system default to giving games higher priority for VRAM than the browser or desktop. In general stuff through a translation layer will always cause some lose in performance though.

Realistically, on a super high end machine (multi thousand dollar GPU, nonsense amounts of ram, and absurd core count over clocked CPU) the bloat of windows doesn’t use up enough resources to impact performance, but on a lot of mid and low end machines Linux will outperform. The issues with translation layers are getting solved at an astonishing rate right now and… windows is just getting more bloated and buggy as Microsoft tries to push more subscription services and data harvesting.