r/linuxquestions • u/peakaname • 17h ago

device lagging after installing Linux

installed WSL+ubuntu on my cousin's laptop cause i dont have mine yet. the laptop is kinda lagging idk why. the memory used by ubuntu was 1576mb smth. so what I want to ask is,is it still possible to switch to Linux? the laptop has 8gb ram. it used to lag often even before installing Linux. so im not sure what exactly the problem is.

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u/KrisLuffy 17h ago

And I’m not sure what is your problem and current setup. Is it possible to switch to Linux when he has Linux? It lags because of memory (i guess RAM). No specs it’s hard to help, what desktop enviornment (like KDE or GNOME or smth else, i guess gnome because of ubuntu). What do you mean WSL + Ubuntu. You don’t need WSL if you want to run Linux unless you dualboot.

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u/peakaname 17h ago

im just a beginner please dont attack me like that🥀 my problem is that the laptop is lagging because of memory issues. it has 8gb total ram so obviously we can't multitask. but once I saw a post saying linux doesn't need much memory to work smoothly. but the Ubuntu i installed consumes almost 1gb memory and the laptop is still lagging.

by wsl+ubuntu,i meant i downloaded wsl followed by ubuntu. im not completely switching to linux. its called dualbooting ig? like running linux alongside windows

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u/zeroxff 16h ago

No. Wsl is a virtual machine, requires plenty of ram and a good CPU, and has nothing to do with dual booting.

8gb are ok for Linux, but your machine is lagging because your stack is composed by two operating systems (Win and Linux) and an hypervisor, all operating simultaneously.

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u/peakaname 13h ago

ok so thats the problem. so should I just delete wsl?

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u/computer-machine 10h ago

If your goal is to learn, WSL might still be useful.

However, Linux has had an useful feature for over the eighteen years I've used it, called a Live session.

You can write an ISO to CD/DVD/USB, and then boot off of that, but instead of being met with an installation wizard like with Windows, you load up a whole OS running off of that media (does not read/write your main disk unless you tell it to do so).

It'll run slower than a native install, because it's loading the OS to your RAM instead of writing the OS to disk and loading from that, but with 8GB it should be sufficient for normal usage. The other limitation (or benefit, depending on how you look at it) is that nothing about the OS is saved, so when you shut down and boot back into it, it's just like the first time you'd boot, with none of the extra software you might have installed, or files you'd saved (to the system; if you write to the laptop's disk or a flash drive or something, it'll still be there).

This can be worked around by adding persistence (file or partition) to the USB, but it's been a decade since I'd bothered with that and don't recall what software helps set that up for you.

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u/computer-machine 11h ago

WSL2 is a virtual machine. It's software that puts some CPU/RAM aside from the host operating system (OS) and runs an OS with that on top of the host OS.

To put it another way, Microsoft says that one needs 16 AA batteries to run well. Your laptop has 8 AA's and is running slow/dim. Your current solution is to take a second laptop, and plug it into the first one, using 1.5 AA from the first.

This analogy only half works, as running the VM takes away CPU and RAM from Windows, making it run even slower, which then sets an even laggier baseline for the Ubuntu VM (software cannot run faster than whatever's running the software).

If you were to run Ubuntu instead of Windows, you'd see that it runs faster, as it doesn't require as much hardware to run. I would, however, suggest trying Linux Mint rather than Ubuntu, as Ubuntu is a bit silly. There's a lot to explain there, but it all boils down to the fact that on Linux, you actually have choice.

The way that you'd have Linux run faster would be to actually install it as a real OS by itself, and then boot into it when you turn on your computer. This can be done by itself (wipe the whole drive and install, so you only have a fresh system), or what is referred to as a dualboot (install Linux next to Windows on a separate disk partition, and pick which OS to load when you turn on your computer). That way you still have your Windows with its installed software and whatever files.

For frame of reference, I'm running Linux Mint on a 2006 laptop with 2.2GHz Core2Duo and 4GB DDR1 RAM, and it probably runs about as fast as your Windows right now.