Why is Ubuntu so slow?

[orangecat]

I just installed Ubuntu and put Gnome on it but the entire system feels like I'm running off a slow USB drive when its on my Windows boot SSD.

[SCHISCHKA]

you need to give a better description and information to get help on this

[orangecat]

16 hours ago, SCHISCHKA said:

you need to give a better description and information to get help on this

I just said exactly whats wrong.

[Sprawlie]

how do you define "slow". what is slow. What are your expectations.

 

You can't define something as "slow" if you have no comparitive benchmarks. The term "slow" is qualitative and isn't easy to recommend a fix since you haven't said why you think it's slow or what measurement you have to say so.

 

is boot slow? are apps laggy? 

[riklaunim]

Does the UI draws slower, does some apps lag like crazy and you are running on that GTX 970 PC? Then likely Ubuntu is using the open nVidia driver and not the proprietary driver that actually works as needed - in system settings/additional drivers you can switch, reboot, should fly.

 

Other things - you can check with "top" what's using most resources (in console). "free -m" will show memory usage. Maybe a process went rampart and is using one core and/or is leaking memory. Then it would show up there.

[Genius1237]

Like the previous post, check what graphics drivers is being used. Try using a propreitory one, if available. In my experience, they perform a bit better.

 

Also, list the specs of your PC. It would be of much help for us to answer your question in a better way.

[dvdmuckle]

If you installed Ubuntu and then put GNOME on it, you might be better off with Ubuntu GNOME which is... What it says on the tin.

 

Both stock Ubuntu's Unity DE and GNOME are somewhat RAM heavy. If you have around 4gb of RAM and a somewhat decent processor you should be fine. If things still aren't to your liking, you might want to check out Xubuntu or Lubuntu.

[Azgoth 2]

Ubuntu is not one of the lighter distros--it's probably among the more resource-intensive ones.  (The tradeoff is that it's very user-friendly, where many lighter distros are less so).  The default desktop environment, Unity, as well as GNOME, are both fairly resource-heavy as well.  If you have a lower-spec machine, this might cause problems.  Of course, you can also sometimes run into issues with performance if you take a distro and immediately switch to one of the non-default desktop environments.  Like @dvdmuckle said, if you know you're going to use GNOME, install the Ubuntu GNOME edition so you don't have all the Unity data clogging up your system.

 

If that's still running slow, you should look into a lighter distro.  Lubuntu and Xubuntu are two of the widely used lightweight desktop distros, and are both just Ubuntu with the default programs swapped for something else (at least as far as matters to the user).  Mint is another good one--it's less lightweight than L/Xubuntu, but I personally like it a bit more than the various flavors of Ubuntu.  Debian, if you're a little more Linux-savvy, would be another option, since it's a bit more stripped down than either Ubuntu (and its flavors) or Mint.  Especially if you get the XFCE or LXDE image.