I don’t see this mentioned enough. I have noticed that with Windows, many applications you install will either add themselves to the startup programs list or spin up background services that run from boot. This can slow down the system boot process and can introduce excessive overhead and generally lead to worse performance.

With Linux, you generally have to manually enable background services or startup applications when installing a package, which gives you a chance to decide whether you actually want or need an app to run in the background. Furthermore, aisde from things like system monitoring software and things like SSH servers, most things don’t actually need to run in the background (honestly, most Windows apps don’t need to either other than for checking for updates which I’ll talk about, but most people let them because it’s automatically enabled and they can’t be bothered to disable them). A major contributor to this is the package manager. With it, individual apps don’t have to worry about checking for updates. It’s all done by the package manager, which means a single daemon can keep the entire system up to date as opposed to individual apps spinning up their own updaters. Windows does have both third party and Microsoft supported package managers as well as its own app store (which is also technically a package manager), but most apps are still the traditional win32 type that you install by literally downloading and clicking on an executable.

I’ve also noticed that Linux apps generally completely shut down once you close out of its window whereas many Windows apps keep running. Not sure why to be honest, but the result is that it reduces overhead and helps avoid the problem of the system performing progressively worse the longer it has gone without a reboot.

On an older computer or an otherwise less powerful one, this can be significant and could mean the difference between a barely usable computer and a decently performing one. It also means that you can install tons of apps and as long as you have enough hard drive or SSD space, they generally won’t affect performance if you’re not using them.