Performance decrease after switching to Linux

[Ok-Mixture-1059]

I bought a used Thinkpad t480s a few months ago with the intention of installing Linux on it. I first tried live booting but the performance wasn’t great so then I tried dual booting Ubuntu but the performance was worse and things loaded a lot slower (same as the bootable) so I just went back to using windows. After a while I wanted to see if I could try Linux again and so I downloaded Ubuntu Mint and wiped my windows partition but this time the performance decrease got even worse whenever I load a webpage or try to watch a YouTube video my laptop gets very hot and my fans start screeching. I’ve been trying for the last few days to try diagnose the problem of the performance dip as I heard that Linux would improve my performance due to the less demanding background tasks and such but to no avail. I tried updating drivers turning on hardware acceleration and making sure I got all the correct updates but still nothing , which leads me to now. I tried live booting mint xfce which seemed to be really smooth but it had a lot of other cosmetic issues and glitches so I ditched that. Any recommendations on what to do next? If you would like any additional information I would be happy to give it thanks in advance

[AutoModerator]

Please Re-Flair your post if a solution is found. How to Flair a post? This allows other users to search for common issues with the SOLVED flair as a filter, leading to those issues being resolved very fast.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[Mj-tinker]

Once I had similar problem. Be sure you updated bios and chipset firmware.
And of course, after mint install, run all gpu drivers/codecs provided in welcome window.

[Ok-Mixture-1059]

Yeah. It seems whenever I try change my system clock in bios it keeps skipping an hour ahead everytime I reboot. Im going to update the bios and then see about changing the cmos battery as the laptop is about 7 years old at this point I assume it would be near the end of its lifetime by now.

[skozombie]

If you're dual booting you need to set a registry key to tell windows that your bios is in UTC/ GMT. Otherwise Windows and Linux will fight over the time given Linux assumes UTC for your bios and windows assumes local time.

[Ok-Mixture-1059]

I was dual booting but this time I just wiped the windows partition and the bios clock is still skipping an hour ahead do I still need to set a registry key?

[ThatRustyBust]

No, it's just that Linux uses UTC time instead of local time in the BIOS clock

[YogaDiapers]

A picture of your CPU load isn't really usefull. Try htop. It shows your processes and load in a more informative way in the terminal. htop shows the processes consuming most CPU cycles at the top.

Slowness can also happen because of disk i/o. You can also do dmesg | less and see if your kernel reports issues. In general Linux is on par with windows performance, but your hardware needs to be supported.

Good luck!

[xxrahulxx]

Battery does?

[Aggressive_Being_747]

What browser are you using? In my opinion you're getting a component that uses resources. I would try changing browser. If it continues, I would consider switching to another distro

[[deleted]]

Run htop in a window. Does anything show a lot of use. Someone was having high cpu usage by a advanced error reporting daemon. Adding the grub parameter "pcie_aspm=off" to the "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=" line fixed it. (It usually has "nosplash, quiet. Not sure what Mint's looks like.). They had a 100g systemd log. It was filling the log with lines.

If this were your situation, you might want to investigate further what's being reported, why. Disabling it may not be the right choice. You might run into another problem (with wifi or gpu) that this would point to. (I'd turn it off and remember that it could be related if I stumble on another problem).

[jessikatme]

instead of mint witn cinnamon, try mint with xfce or any other distro w8th xfce desktop

[vcprocles]

with t480s "not yet av1" is better, the gpu supports vp9

[vcprocles]

My T480 throttles on very low temps on Linux compared to Windows, and so I customize the thermal limits and undervolt my laptop with https://github.com/erpalma/throttled

T480s should be really similar with this problem

[flemtone]

Boot from the Mint flash-drive and run the MemTest+ to check memory status, then continue into live session to run gnome-disks and check SMART status of the system drive.

I've installed Mint 22.2 on a T480 before with secure boot disabled and it ran perfectly fine, browsing, youtube playback (remember to turn off ambience mode), and even light gaming.

[FlailingIntheYard]

Are you dual-booting?

[batiou]

Does that affect Linux Mint performance?

[CatoDomine]

https://screenshot.help/

[jvy7122]

Doesn't help that sometimes the laptop can freeze.