Four: GNOME woes

For weeks, my Ubuntu VM (no judgment, I plan to switch to NixOS this summer) was abnormally slow. I didn't really think too much of it because I just cracked it down to me not giving the machine enough RAM or CPUs or something. However, it got to the point where I decided to see if anything was going wrong. I ran a top to see if something was eating my CPU. To my surprise, I saw GNOME (my desktop environment) taking up near 100% of my CPU. I took note of that and checked it every so often. Every time, GNOME was wiping all of my CPU for no apparent reason. I looked up how to fix it but nothing I tried worked. I decided to look for alternatives.

I decided on XFCE. When making the switch, I screwed up my environment several times because I kept making random mistakes, but I eventually got it to XFCE and it completely changed the performance.

XFCE is way more lightweight than GNOME. GNOME is pretty, sure, but my machine runs way better on XFCE. Moving desktop environments was annoying because I kept trying to get rid of GNOME but it doesn't want to leave. It's probably due to my lack of sufficient knowledge, but I was not able to remove everything GNOME (think the keyring is still on there, etc.). Nonetheless, it's been way better since I switched, and I am certainly not going back. Lightweight, simpler software is definitely the better option. Neovim, for example...