Linux Mint was throttling my modern hardware by default — 3 changes fixed it completely

Source Domain: www.makeuseof.com

On a modern PC, you expect your high-end NVMe drive and multicore processor to give the best performance. That’s why I couldn’t accept that my hardware was the problem after noticing micro-stutters while heavy multitasking on my fresh Linux Mint install. My curiosity led me to investigate, and I realized that the problem was Linux Mint itself.

By default, it uses conservative kernel defaults for broad compatibility, which can unnecessarily limit performance on modern systems. Altering these three system configurations unlocks the device’s true speed.

Lower Linux Mint’s swappiness

My RAM stopped fighting me

Afam Onyimadu / MUO

When you switch back to a tab it often has to reload, and minimized apps can take a moment to wake up. You would observe this even if your system monitor shows gigabytes of free RAM. So even though memory is available, it feels like the operating system isn’t using it.

The reason is tied to a kernel setting called swappiness. This is a number from 0 to 100 that controls how aggressively the device inactivates processes from RAM and moves them into your drive. On Linux Mint, the default is 60, which allows it to work on most devices, including underpowered notebooks. However, on more powerful devices with 8GB or more RAM, this means Linux Mint is shuffling things to swap long before it needs to.

The problem is latency, not throughput, so even a fast SSD…

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