Hi everyone!
My daily driver is a Surface Go 1 running Fedora with 8GB of ram and 128GB of storage. It is always hooked up to a Philips 273B screen via USB-C.
Most of the time, it is really fast and a perfect tiny Linux and Gnome machine easily hookable to a big screen for when you're not travelling.
However, sometimes, after installing updates but maybe not always, it is slow as hell. Sometimes, detaching the Surface from the big screen and hooking it again, solves the issue, but not always. It is a behavior I already had when I was using Ubuntu and I've had on Fedora since version 36.
Here are some useful printscreens from HTOP and the ressource management system:
#high cpu usage
#low cpu usage
I thought that maybe installing the Surface kernel would stop the issue, but it didn't..
Sometimes it's annoying enough to make me just want to use my wife's MacBook Pro 2012 running Fedora as a daily driver but the form factor is less practical.
Thanks in advance for any help!
Edit: it happens on startup, even after days of inactivity
Edit2: Thanks everyone for your help! I’ll see if it’s worry investigating more as the problem is more complex to solve than I thought
I have had this with some laptops if the charger is faulty. The laptop goes into a limp mode, where the CPU locks to its lowest clock speed.
Since the display is using USB-C it may be triggering the slowness. Some USB-C monitors also deliver power to the connected device.
Is the laptop slow, even when running off battery, or only when running off battery?
Keeping an eye on the CPU frequency with something like Btop can maybe help troubleshoot the issue.
That limp mode is usually controlled by 'BD PROCHOT', it can be disabled, but check your sensors and make sure there isn't something wrong before doing so.