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Comment by skrtskrt | Hacker News Reader

I just tried out both Ubuntu (gnome) and Mint (Cinnamon) on a 2015 MacBook Air, dual core i5 with 4 GB RAM. Mint was noticeably snappier - I really didn't enjoy Ubuntu, but a lighter desktop will probably make the difference.

Another comment talked about the RPi 4's capabilities, but mine had multi-second input lag running a fresh install of Ubuntu/Gnome on a single 4k screen.

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Similar experience for me, tried to enjoy Ubuntu but Mint comes up more polished and, especially when using the dedicated XFCE release, much faster than default Ubuntu. Still worth doing the basics in terms of stopping services not needed for desktop/laptop use. I ended up removing 8 (!) resident services that were all of no use to me - tadaa, more RAM and responsiveness gained.

Note, I used: "systemctl list-unit-files --type=service | grep enabled" to find all enabled services easily and then: "systemd-analyze" for basic timing analysis

The difference is astounding in virtualbox. Ubuntu Gnome is nearly unusable- mint works pretty well. Using i3 for Ubuntu helps quite a bit.

With i3 (no GNOME elements at all, and precious little desktop environment stuff), I think my old 1920×1080 laptop tended to idle at using around 60MB of RAM. With 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, I never set up swap, and over the course of four years or so this only bit me about three times, and I spent a lot of that time running two substantial Firefox sessions, a 2GB RAM VirtualBox VM and a handful of other things like urxvt, Inkscape and Chrome all at once.

What I love about linux is that we have the option of doing this. My main machine in my office is from 2009- 4GB RAM, linux mint and fluxbox. It's time to upgrade as I've gotten away a bit from slinging 1s and 0s but damn- still does a job for that.

RPi4 had significant, hardware-based performance issues in v1 of the board...

Do you have any links to this? I know about the USB-PD issue which they fixed in v1.2, but that's about it.

I think it was all bound to this - power issues make weird quirks throughout the system.

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