We all know that plugging in your laptop is supposed to make it faster, but new testing of an Nvidia-powered laptop found the exact opposite, with AI performance dropping by nearly 80% when running Linux.

The surprising discovery comes from MindStudio , which tested an MSI Prestige N16 Flip AI+ powered by Nvidia's RTX Spark platform. The team wanted to see whether Linux could run on the machine without sacrificing the performance available through Windows.

It could, but there was a major catch. When running OpenAI's GPT-OSS-120B model, the laptop generated 65.4 tokens per second on Windows. Running Linux directly on the same hardware while plugged into a charger brought that figure down to just 13.9 tokens per second.

That's a nearly 79% reduction in AI performance simply from changing the operating system.…