Why is Ubuntu 14.04 so slow on my laptop? [closed]
Solution 1:
Because you only have 1GB of RAM! That isn't the only problem, but it is part of it. Simply, your computer can't handle the intensity of Unity's graphics.
Windows XP is not nearly as CPU / Graphically intensive as Unity, the default desktop of Ubuntu 11.04+. It is based on compiz and has all sorts of fancy graphics, such as the see through dash and the expanding launcher. I would advise installing Lubuntu or Xubuntu, or putting XFCE or LXDE on, and using that rather than unity.
I have both on 3 old XP computers, and they are running well (typed on a 2006 Lubuntu laptop with 683 MB of RAM).
It is as if the CPU was overloaded and no memory available
The CPU probably is overloaded / there probably isn't enough RAM available. Try installing and using midori - it is lighter, and is what I'm using at the moment.
My pronouns are He / Him
Solution 2:
Two things:
1) Ubuntu 14.04 uses Unity 3D, which is based on Compiz. The whole thing is rendered through hardware-accelerated OpenGL. This is fantastic if you have good drivers and a good video card, not so much if either is missing.
There is absolutely no need to switch distributions. Just install a lighter desktop environment, log out, and log back in to the new desktop. For ease of use the preferred one is usually Xfce.
2) Combination of the broken update-apt-xapian-index cron job, and broken process scheduling in the kernel. Long story short, you need to append 'noautogroup' to your boot options, otherwise process niceness will not work. So:
- elevate to root with sudo
- in /etc/default/grub, edit GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT to be "quiet splash noautogroup"
- run 'update-grub'
- reboot
This is safer than using the kernel.autogroup sysctl variable, which may panic some computers.
Anyway, contrary to what a lot of people say, Ubuntu runs fine with 1 GB of RAM if you don't use the bloated default desktop.
Edit: actually I filed a Launchpad bug about the second issue last year: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1219548
Solution 3:
You are extremely likely to have 2 relevant bottlenecks:
- the low amount of RAM available to the system, which in some cases is even less then the nominal value, for example if your GPU is stealing some RAM from the system the total amount available to the system is obiviously 1Gb - WhatTheGPUIsUsing
- the slow HDD. Tipically old notebooks have a 5400rpm disk, this is probably a really small figure for todays standards, there isn't a good troughtput that the OS can use.
The first consequence is that you have low RAM and not even the SWAP does any good because of the slow HDD.
Basically when you have a low amount of RAM the system uses the SWAP, a partition on your HDD, to store temporary files just like you do with your RAM in the first place, this allows the OS to get more temporary storage and "fix" things when there isn't a good amount of RAM available.
Unless you have deactivated or removed the swap partition, the swap is there and it's working against your timings, but you can't really do too much because even using a swap on a slow HDD is better then having your OS or your applications terminated because of the memory that is not there.
So you should just keep things as they are now, you can maybe do 2 things:
- try another distribution like Archlinux, which is tipically faster and lighter but requires some tuning and you need to read some wiki articles and manuals to know what you are doing
- try to boot into console without a GUI, if you can live with just the console your performane will benefit from that, obiviously it depends on what you have to do, if you have to code and write documents or check emails, you can do it with a terminal, if you like to browse the web, well you can do that too but it's certainly not up to what you get with firefox under an X11 session.
Solution 4:
There's also gnome-session-flashback which should look familiar if you have used previous iterations of Ubuntu. Apart from having a similar look-and-feel, it is also less resource-intensive.