question for linux nerds: howdo you improve performance, particularly when a computer is slow and laggy?

i run mint

@oneyetmany have you tried installing windows

@GroupNebula563 no need for sarcasm

@oneyetmany oh no i was just making a joke lol

@oneyetmany the typical response to "i run windows and my computer is slow" is "install linux", so i was playing off that :P

@patchuun

@oneyetmany I use mint pretty regularly. I also run into this lag issue a bit too. Is your system freezing up or is just performing poorly?

@oneyetmany Using Mint too.

Maybe the desktop environment you use or the services you run are not optimal for your pc? Just guessing, it could be anything but a good start is that.

If you meet the requirements of mint, you should have no problems unless the hardware is low end, if so Mint is not the right distro, or the desktop environment used is not recommended

@nube whats a low end desktop environment?

@oneyetmany What version of mint do you use? xfce or cinnamon? cinnamon as far as I know is not an overly demanding environment, but if that’s where you feel your pc is “laggy”, maybe you can try your luck with xfce.

Xfce it can be more friendly

But well, as I said, the causes of that slowness and lag could be anything else and not necessarily the desktop environment, mint has a task manager, it might be a good idea to look there if there is any program or service that is occupying too much memory. Computers are complicated

@nube I have xfce, do i have to re-install from the top?

@oneyetmany Mmmm, if you use xfce then you’re using the most optimal version of Mint, so… cinnamon I don’t know if it would make any difference, maybe it can be a worse experience if you’re having problems with xfce. Maybe you could try, but idk.

On Linux you can have different desktop environments, for example, you can install cinnamon to test without having to delete xfce or something, you can switch between them on the login screen

But I would certainly recommend that you try to find the cause first, you can use the “task manager” to see how your use of cpu/ram is, etc. Or see in “System Information” and then inside of it, see the “GPU” tab and see if you have graphic acceleration without problems. Just curiosity, what are the specs of your machine?