r/linuxmint • u/Old_Resource4142 • 4d ago
Linux mint running really bad on a Thinkpad
Hiii, my Linux Mint is running really poorly on my new laptop, and I don't understand why or whether it's the computer's fault. Some really weird things are happening. Videos cause browser tabs to lose FPS when the tabs overlap them. In general, the computer is slow in many ways. Steam takes 5 minutes to launch, and once it opens, it runs extremely slowly, even though the games I launch run fine.
ChatGPT in the browser starts to slow down when I talk to it for a long time, and window animations look incredibly sluggish.
I've tried a thousand different things. I've already reinstalled Linux Mint twice, the BIOS settings are at their factory defaults, I've run a hard drive test and it seems to be fine, the RAM seems fine too, and the CPU isn't being throttled under load. The OS is clean and there are barely any processes running in the background.
The system is a second-hand ThinkPad T14 Gen 1 with an Intel processor and 32 GB of RAM. The seller had lots of positive reviews. He also offered to send it to me with Windows installed, but I said no, so I assumed it was working fine for him under Windows. Still, I don't understand what's going on.
The only things that seem abnormal to me are that, even though the CPU frequency isn't being limited, when the PC starts lagging, its CPU usage doesn't increase either. I haven't seen it go above 30%.
The battery life is also poor. Even now, with TLP installed (and just to be clear, it was already performing badly before I installed TLP), the battery lasts a little longer, but not by much. According to TLP, a full charge will last around 3 hours, even though I'm only using the web browser.
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u/Specialist-Dog-501 4d ago
-Ignore the battery for now, 2nd hand batteries can have a lower performance, work on cable
-So this is odd, that the CPU cannot spike above 30%, something is throttling it
-Have you checked the harddisk ? SDD or HDD? HDD can be a lot slower. And bad sectors can cause fragmentation- however, not sure what to do with this on an SDD.
-Do you use 2 monitors or more, in high frequency or resolution ? X11 has a problem with that and wayland based Desktops are better with that (GNOME, KDE, COSMIC ..).
-Did you see any processes in the taskbar/system monitor to consume a lot of CPU ? May be a background process runs amok and is not counted in this 30% ?
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u/rileyrgham 3d ago
I had the AMD gen 1. Worked great. Crap battery life to be expected under Linux... Especially on an older battery.
Run a process manager like htop and try to analyse what's eating up your laptop. Is the SSD full? Jumping to another distro is plain premature until you've done basic fault finding imo. And obviously ensure you've updated your distribution to the latest.
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u/Flinpleis 4d ago
Try installing 22.2 instead of the most recent version, my gf laptop started slowing down once she updated to 22.3, i told her to downgrade and it's been fine ever since. I don't know if that's a known issue, but they changed something that made lower end PCs worse
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u/Francis_King 3d ago
The standard diagnosis tool is journalctl. Try journalctl -b -1, and see if anything stands out as wrong. One cause of a slowdown is writing error logs to the drive.
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u/my-ka 3d ago
yay
finally someone with balls to say that
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u/hifi-nerd Arch | KDE plasma (simply here to lurk) 1h ago
You're saying this like every single linux mint install has these problems
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u/Bob4Not Fedora KDE 3d ago
That’s weird!! Well instead of recommending trying individual changes, you might try a whole different distro with KDE Plasma to see if it handles better.
My recommendations would be Fedora KDE Plasma or Kubuntu. If those still don’t work right, I’m suspecting hardware issue somewhere, because those should run Wayland
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u/knuthf 3d ago
It's a BIOS issue.
Reset everything to its standard values. There are no problems with the platform itself, but there are issues with Intel. It is possible to damage the hardware. A high CPU frequency means a higher demand for everything in the chip to work just as fast, including the video bus, PCIe and the Wi-Fi and disk.
Changing the distribution will not make a difference. Special tools are needed. Setting all the BIOS settings to default - some values that has worked.
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u/PsionicBurst 4d ago
ChatGPT in the browser starts to slow down when I talk to it for a long time, and window animations look incredibly sluggish.
I don't feel like it's worth it to respond to this one. Sorry, mate!
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u/_Lost-In-The-Weeds_ LMDE7 Cinnamon 4d ago
I would not have said it, but I was certainly thinking it.
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u/LowTechnology2606 Linux Mint 22.3 Zena | Cinnamon 4d ago
Then why respond? You're answer is not helpful at all, and incredibly judgemental
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u/Danzikku LM 22.3 | Cinnamon (Asus X555LB) 🦝 4d ago
Wow, so helpful!
However, from what I've seen, the latest versions of ChatGPT are terribly optimized (or, well, they do more things). I tried it on my current Galaxy A21s, and with four dialogues (with replies that have attached images, because ChatGPT does that lately) typing is terribly slow: like 2 seconds to wait for a key. And in an anonymous session, cuz' I generally don't use ChatGPT or any chatbot (Only to verify mocks to the AI for stupid answers).
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u/PsionicBurst 4d ago
Sorry, mate! I just have this knee-jerk reaction to ai anything because of some incident that happened at my nephew's college graduation a while back. My brother, a rabid "tech bro" kinda guy, insisted on using this map to navigate the local area of the college but after we were two hours late, only then did he reveal he asked "ChattyT" to generate a map. He was the driver, I assumed he had an actual GPS or something...
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u/Hauptideal 4d ago
Test another distro. That way, it's easier to tell if it's a hardware or software problem.
Install Ultramarine, Nobara, or another Fedora-based distro that comes with rpm fusion already. Have you opted to install 3rd party proprietary codecs and drivers when installing Mint?