Windows v. Linux - Video rendering (time, size, quality)

I have been using Sony Vegas for a couple of years now with Windows 7. I can't say I have any complaints with it.
Since joining the Linux world, I have obviously made the switch to kdenlive. Seems like the more popular and easy to use video editing program.

I did a little comparison with Windows & Linux.
I rendered the same file which was 312 MB.

With Sony Vegas in Windows, the rendered file went down to 70 MB and took a little over 17 minutes to render. While rendering I couldn't do anything else as it was far too slow.

In Linux, my Kdenlive rendered file was 117 MB and took a little over 12 minutes. While rendering I was surfing the internet as if I wasn't doing anything else.
After the rendering was complete I used a program called Arista Transcoder which then rendered the file down to 24 MB (with no noticeable video quality loss). This process took just under 2 minutes.

Who wins?
Quality - Draw. You'd have to spend too much time looking hard at each video to see a difference in quality between the one rendered with Sony Vegas and the one rendered with Kdenlive & Arista Transcoder.

Time to render - Linux. Although with Linux it took two steps, it was still about 2-3 minutes faster then with Windows.
Plus while rendering in Linux you can check your email or do whatever else you like on the internet without any noticeable performance decreases!
I suppose the plus with Windows is I had 17 minutes to clean or do whatever else I had to get done around the house, but for the most part the computer was far too slow during the rendering process to even surf the internet.
I should note this might be different for everyone. My PC is an AMD triple core processor with 8GB RAM.

File Size - Linux. If you don't use Arista Transcoder, then Windows would win, but Arista Transcoder shrinks the file size considerably with little to no noticeable loss in quality.