I set up Linux Mint about a month ago and was really impressed with its initial speed. However, I've noticed that over the past few weeks, it's become significantly slower. Everything from booting up to opening apps has gotten sluggish. I've only installed a few programs like IntelliJ IDEA and Firefox, and I'm not doing any gaming or streaming. I'm not sure how to troubleshoot this since I'm relatively new to Linux. What are some common reasons for this slowdown, and what should I check to resolve it? Here's my system info: [link to system info]. Thanks for any help!
5 Answers
Running `sudo trim -a` could help speed things up as well, especially if you're using SSD storage. Also, if you cleaned up or purged backups, that could make a difference.
Start troubleshooting by looking at your CPU and memory usage. You can check what's using the most resources by running `ps aux --sort=-%cpu | head` in the terminal. If you see anything that seems excessive, that could be the problem. Also, consider increasing your swap size since 2GB seems too low for your setup. An 8GB swap file works well for 32GB of RAM. Let me know if you need help resizing it!
It might help to check if you accidentally used a system cleaner, like BleachBit. That can slow things down if you're not careful with what you remove. Did you run anything like that recently?
You could try switching to the actual LTS kernel instead of the rolling version. In the update manager, there's an option to install different kernels. If the slowdown started after an update, the bug might be in the newer kernel you're using.
Are you connected to any network drives? Sometimes, slowdowns can be due to network issues. It's worth checking!

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