A little off topic but mentioned in the article, does anyone know why macOS does feel slower than Windows and Linux on the same hardware? Does it have to do with the 2x scaling Apple is doing all the time?
I don't know what hardware you're using or what "slower" exactly means here, but OSX has always been silky smooth at 60fps for me, focusing on that nice feel, more than an instant responsiveness. To be fair, MacOS is still highly responsive, but it's polished, causing an intentional minor frame delay, which increases smoothness.
Windows, on the other hand, is responsive, but has incremental stutters from time to time. It happens in video playback, to the point when I'm out and about and at a mall a tv with a video is playing, I can tell if it is on Windows or Linux. It's more obvious in video games which has these microstutters all over the place, starting with DX9.
Linux has page tearing, and depending on the desktop can be highly responsive or not at all. Many linux desktops can be manually configured to turn on gpu acceleration on the desktop so the gpu handles the vsync and everything else making it butter smooth like OSX with more responsiveness, but you have a trade off at that point between how much responsiveness vs how much polish you want.
(When you drag your mouse across the screen, it skips pixels. When you're dragging a window, does the compositor follow the mouse flawlessly, skipping around, or does it smooth behind the mouse a frame or two making it look nicer?)
Maybe you're running a 4k60 external monitor out of a 2015 MBP. In that example, you'd be maxing out your GPU on the desktop, potentially causing a delay when dragging windows around that may or may not be noticeable. On this hardware setup, Linux and Windows are both lighter weight and will be more responsive. ie, ymmv depending on your setup.
I tested this with my iMac 5k with 32GB of memory and Radeon m295x (4gb of vram). The apps start slower than what I noramlly see on Windows but I don't have a lot of the same apps, so it's hard to compare. I agree that it has to do with responsiveness but I don't know, sometime I prefer the responsiveness. I do see stutter in Safari once in a while, it is not always 60fps for me.
The screen is set to default for display.
My previous 2012 rMBP was the same difference between Windows 10 (Bootcamp) and macOS.
iOS on my iPad Pro (first gen) is very responsive and smooth at the same time. I wish I could get the same experience on my Macs.
OS X/macOS have always been slower than Windows and Linux on the same exact hardware in my experience. I've been comparing them since the early 2000s and here are my observations: Programs are slower to start, dragging and resizing windows is slower and programs that need to display a large amount of text/data are less response e.g. when selecting text, scrolling, waiting for navigation, etc.
These problems are exacerbated by the poorly implemented / missing window management features of the Mac OS, the general lack of a good keyboard acceleration system and Apples penchant for hiding useful features beneath label-less icons or hidden/stateful gestures.
The upgrade from El Capitan to Sierra was a huge performance hit. My 2010 MBP went from wholly useable to being a quaint poky relic. CI test run elapsed time doubled in length after the "upgrade."
