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
This looks like a hardware issue.
I’d guess at overheating, or an error with the CPU’s energy management.
First thing I’d do is look if there’s a BIOS update available.
Then install lm-sensors (there’s also a GUI frontend called psensor and a gnome shell extension) to show CPU temperature, and check if they’re too high. If they aren’t, you could set your CPU to always use max power and see if that fixes it, but it will reduce battery life.
Or try a different distro from a live USB and see if that makes a difference.