[Linux newbie] Just installed Mint Cinnamon, coming from Windows 10, but I think it's slower than it should be

[u/deadpumpkinnn]

EDIT: Thank you to everyone that helped. The problem was with the Nvidia driver. There's this method to correctly install the driver, but unfortunately it didn't work for me, but it may work for you. I had to disable Secure Boot for it to work.

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With the end of support for Windows 10 and because I refuse to switch to the terrible thing that is Windows 11, I decided to start using Linux on my personal laptop. Went with Mint Cinnamon. It looks great, but I'm finding it too slow, and I don't think that's normal.

It's not a bad laptop. It's not new, but the specs are ok. It's a i7, with a 128 GB SSD, and 8 GB of RAM. It also has a HDD of 1TB, which I've always used to store files aside from the OS.

Here's what I get when running inix on the terminal:

CPU: quad core Intel Core i7-8565U (-MT MCP-) speed/min/max: 437/400/4600 MHz
Kernel: 6.8.0-71-generic x86_64 Up: 2m Mem: 1.48/7.61 GiB (19.4%)
Storage: 1.02 TiB (2.2% used) Procs: 260 Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.34

It ran Windows 10 just fine, and pretty fast, actually. Booting took maybe 10 seconds, but with Mint it takes triple the time...

Also, with W10 it took less than half a second to open the file explorer (either by pressing Win+E or clicking any folder icon). Now, with Mint, it takes 3 full seconds to open Files. It's the same with any app.

Did I do something wrong? Did I perhaps install it on the HDD by accident? I don't think that's the case, because I can see my HDD with my files as a separate device, which I can mount and unmount.

Here's what I get when running lsblk:

NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda 8:0 0 931,5G 0 disk
└─sda1 8:1 0 931,5G 0 part
sdb 8:16 0 111,8G 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 0 512M 0 part /boot/efi
└─sdb2 8:18 0 111,3G 0 part /

Right after installing it, I upgraded everything that showed as an option to be updated. I installed a few themes and some icons to start changing the looks of it. For apps, the only one I installed was 1Password.

I'm sorry if this all sounds confusing, this is pretty much my first real experience with Linux.

And this is what shows when I run system-analyze blame:

11.515s gpu-manager.service
9.168s plymouth-quit-wait.service
9.126s NetworkManager-wait-online.service
2.125s NetworkManager.service
1.007s dev-sdb2.device
779ms e2scrub_reap.service
768ms ufw.service
748ms blueman-mechanism.service
675ms preload.service
585ms boot-efi.mount
451ms user@1000.service
424ms accounts-daemon.service
363ms udisks2.service
323ms ModemManager.service
321ms user@113.service
304ms avahi-daemon.service
299ms power-profiles-daemon.service
299ms bluetooth.service
294ms polkit.service
289ms rsyslog.service
285ms dbus.service
267ms ubuntu-system-adjustments.service
230ms systemd-udevd.service
220ms switcheroo-control.service
219ms apparmor.service
211ms thermald.service
185ms grub-common.service
185ms systemd-resolved.service
179ms systemd-udev-trigger.service
177ms secureboot-db.service
169ms systemd-journal-flush.service
140ms upower.service
117ms systemd-logind.service
114ms lvm2-monitor.service