Why is my computer so slow?

Question

I had 16.04 installed until the summer, but it started getting slow to the point that I had to restart it several times a day.

I installed 22.04, but things have not improved.

Is my system too feeble to handle 22.04? It consists of:

Intel® Celeron(R) CPU N3060 @ 1.60GHz
4GB memory
31,3GB of disk capacity

On the other hand, it started getting slow already a few months before I switched to 22.04. So the problem might not be the Ubuntu upgrade but something else.

I used to use Chromium. I switched to FireFox in hopes that would make a difference, but I don't believe things have either deteriorated or improved with Firefox.

You have to run apt-get with sudu, like 'sudo apt-get clean' That also applies when using update, upgrade and other options to apt-get. — Soren A, Nov 30 '22 at 13:23
Does this answer your question? Could not get lock /var/cache/apt/archives/lock - open — karel, Dec 03 '22 at 15:37
It might be because of the slow processor and less ram. Try something like Raspberry Pi OS for PCs, which has a very lightweight desktop interface. https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/raspberry-pi-desktop/ Also, your hard drive may be getting old, which causes slowness — Archisman Panigrahi, Dec 04 '22 at 16:47
Try Linux Mint and Lubuntu. You will have the same kernel as in Ubuntu. — Mahler, Dec 04 '22 at 17:42

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 04 '22 at 17:22

There could be a number of reasons why you performance has degraded over time. Since things seemed to work well-enough for you at some point in the past, it's likely that it's not just a hardware issue.

That said, the hardware is pretty minimal for today's software requirements. The System Requirements does note a few potential problems:

Minimum recommended CPU clock speed is 2 Ghz, which you don't meet
You do have 4GB of RAM, but that is the minimum requirement nowadays.
That page notes that releases after 17.10 do have a higher requirement, especially for the GPU. Unless your system is running a discrete GPU, the integrated GPU on your Celeron appears to only support a max of 8GB memory -- The Gnome requirement is for 256GB.

You might consider:

A fresh format/install (after backup and confirmation of your backup, of course) -- Systems do build up "cruft" over time, in my experience. While you could troubleshoot that directly, a fresh installation may be your best bet.
A desktop environment with less demanding hardware requirements than a full Ubuntu Desktop, perhaps Xfce4 or LXQt (via Lubuntu).
A distribution designed for lower-end hardware, as mentioned in the comments.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 27 '22 at 06:02

You can follow along this guide to do the initial troubleshooting on what might be causing the slowness of your system. Further, you might want to look into system logs for any visible error logs. Since you mentioned reboot solves the issue for a while, probably some software might be taking up resources over time. You can have a general idea of if it's a software or hardware limitation and look into that direction more then.

Why is my computer so slow?

2 Answers2