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I've been on Windows since ever and my dabbling in SysAdmin work encouraged me to give Ubuntu a try.

I installed Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on my ThinkPad T590 with the following specs:

  • CPU: Intel Core i7-8565U
  • GPU: Intel UHD Graphics 620
  • STORAGE: 440GB SSD
  • RAM: 16GB DDR4, 2400 MHz

I kept my Windows 10 installation and shrunk its partition by 250GB to make room for Ubuntu so I can have a dual boot setup. I created three partitions:

  • 60GB ext4 mounted /
  • 20GB swap area
  • The rest is ext4 mounted /home

Everything went well and I started installing the software I need - Visual Studio Code, Slack, Google Chrome, Spotify, etc...


I noticed that the Ubuntu desktop experience is a bit more sluggish than the Windows one. Also, the fans in my machine would turn on for the smallest things. On Windows, I have no problem running all of the aforementioned software at once without the fans starting. On Ubuntu, I just start Slack and everything's on fire.

That's surprising to me since I have pretty modern hardware, after all. My issue is similar to this reddit post. I started digging for graphics drivers, but I couldn't find any. The ArchWiki says:

Since Intel provides and supports open source drivers, Intel graphics are essentially plug-and-play.

So... where are these drivers? Are they already installed? Here's the output of sudo lshw -c video:

  *-display                 
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: Intel Corporation
       vendor: Intel Corporation
       physical id: 2
       bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
       version: 02
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pciexpress msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
       configuration: driver=i915 latency=0
       resources: irq:168 memory:c7000000-c7ffffff memory:a0000000-afffffff ioport:3000(size=64) memory:c0000-dffff

If I have the correct drivers, why is my machine struggling? What am I missing?

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    According to the output, you have driver=i915, which is correct. I don't know how many drivers you've expected to have for just one piece of hardware, and why. Apr 5, 2020 at 15:26
  • I'm a beginner, so I don't know what I should expect. I thought that maybe I'm using some default Linux driver and that there is a specific one for this exact GPU that is optimized for that GPU only. As far as I know, that's how things are for Windows. So if my drivers are all right, what could be the problem? I doubt that Windows with all of its bloat is faster...
    – dodov
    Apr 5, 2020 at 15:33
  • Intel UHD Graphics 620 is not uncommon. Just curious, how many optimized drivers are there on Windows for that GPU? In Ubuntu, and other distros, drivers come as part of the Linux kernel, and are auto-loaded as kernel modules. Anyway, you may want to provide some more info, for example, run inxi -F, and copy/paste the output. Apr 5, 2020 at 16:18
  • Been using Ubuntu on T-series Thinkpad since 2010, and each time Ubuntu runs circles around my colleagues' identical machines loaded with Windows. Do you see any process taking up CPU? Right after installation there may be processes busy indexing files in the background and this could last a few days.
    – xenoid
    Apr 5, 2020 at 16:30

1 Answer 1

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You have a swap partition...on an SSD. I'm pretty sure this is something you shouldn't have or need. Try turning Swap 'oof' and see if that improves things...it will certainly prolong the life of your SSD

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    Seen from a performance perspective, the faster your swap device is, the better performance in case swap is needed (memory is low). And modern ssd's handles the write load of swapping quit well.
    – Soren A
    Apr 22, 2020 at 21:59

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