#Ubuntu is surprisingly unresponsive compared to Windows. Launching programs can take 5-10 seconds (with no indication that anything is happening). Resizing a window sometimes resizes the frame and then takes a second to fill in the contents. Even the internet seems slow to respond.
Some of this might be due to the fact that Ubuntu is running off a physical hard drive while Windows was running off an SSD, but that doesn't seem sufficient to explain it.
I would have expected to get *more* performance without Microsoft constantly uploading data. Does this match anyone else's experience? Any ideas?
@peterdrake Something seems way off there; possibly a video driver issue. While running on a rotational drive will certainly be slower than solid state, in my experience a Linux distro on a rotational is about as responsive as Winblows on a solid state.
If you're running an nvidia graphics card, make sure you're running their driver. I've encountered this behaviour with nvidia cards without their driver blob running.
@cdp1337 I just downloaded fresh drivers from NVIDIA.
@cdp1337 I have no program called smartctl.
The hard drive isn't that old (and hasn't been heavily used), so I doubt that's the problem.
Nothing sticks out from top or iotop.
@peterdrake `smartctl` is provided via the package smartmontools.
It could just be that all the recent work on various packages don't play nicely with rotational drives anymore... I dunno. It's been a good number of years since I ran any OS on rotational drives, (the only use I have of them anymore are archive drives for a NAS).
@peterdrake Failing drive then? `smartctl --all /dev/hda` (or similar drive path), could provide some details.
If the drive is getting old and is starting to fail, that can result in slow head scan times. Smart can provide you with some internal metrics about the drive.
Another issue I've ran into is swapping. If your OS is trying to copy memory over to swap, that will also hinder system performance.
`sudo iotop`, `top`, and the System Monitor GUI application can provide some hints about what's using resources.