There's a bad memory leak in gnome-shell which was found & fixed back in March, but the Ubuntu devs still haven't merged the full fix into Bionic for some reason: https://bugs.launchpad.net/gnome-shell/+bug/1672297

Edit: Having tried in on my laptop, installing the gjs + libgjs0g version 1.53.3 debs from http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gjs/ onto a bionic install seems to work fine. Worth trying if this bug is affecting you?

I'm running Gnome and for the most part it has been excellent; Linux in general, though, still has a lot of trouble maintaining good UI speed at the same time as I/O throughput. I'm on Fedora, and dnf/rpm is an excellent example - even though I'm on an SSD, I can tell when something is updating in the background because stuff will lag for a little while. It feels like this has been a problem forever, and while it has definitely improved over time it's still not really possible to say, in a simple way, "I care more about interactivity than other stuff, prioritise that" (as far as I know, anyway).

> while it has definitely improved over time it's still not really possible to say, in a simple way, "I care more about interactivity than other stuff, prioritise that

that's not what mainline kernel optimizes for, you have to use liquorix or another kernel (https://liquorix.net/)

You would assume that big guys like RedHat would already have done this for you.

RedHat's business is servers' support: it's quite logical that the desktop they provide is as much as possible similar to the server's configuration because developers will test on their workstation.. So no, I don't expect that RedHat will do this.

I've found alt-f2 then r (ie. restarting gnome) puts it back in as good a state as a fresh boot. Sometimes my extensions won't load and this also restarts those.

Just tried this and it works great. Much better solution than rebooting. Thanks!

This doesn’t work under Wayland. Is there a way to something similar on Wayland.

Using Fedora 27 with Wayland, I have not found a way to do this other than logging out and back in :/

You should try cinnamon. There's no accounting for taste, but after using gnome 3 for three years I tried cinnamon (version 3.6, older versions weren't good) and I found it better across the board.

I've been very happy with Cinnamon for a while on Mint 18.x, and since I upgraded to Mint 19 last night, Cinnamon is even better. It's just a bunch of small improvements all over, that just make the overall experience that much better.

Tried it with for my now very old netbooks (because 1024x600 is low-res now), kept it on my desktop machine because it's simple, out of the way and fast.

I love Cinnamon and run it on a few machines, and as soon as they sort out mixed DPI support I'll be switching back from Gnome on my main machine too. It's been a while since I've tested actually...

I just stayed with Mate with Compiz (Ubuntu Mate) and my desktop is still as snappy as it was during Gnome 2 days.

I've recently given KDE Plasma a try and was really impressed by it's speed and smoothness.

I think it shows when your desktop does not rely on interpreted langues so much.

KDE Plasma is written mostly in QML, so JavaScript.

Mostly? Nope, just the UI elements. Much of the heavy lifting is done by KDE framework and Qt libraries (C++).

AFAIK it gets compiled AOT to C++ code. Technically, should be pretty fast out of the box.

I have the same problem at home. Oddly, my computer at work doesn't have this problem. Both run Ubuntu with Gnome.