Can't play (or edit) 1080 px videos - system slow overall

[Hoglob]

Hi,

I have a McBook Pro (2014) with thermal paste that has been changed recently alongside the battery, I've wiped out McOS and installed Mint as soon as I picked it up.

My specs aren't that bad I'd say:

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System:    Host: Talisman Kernel: 5.13.0-27-generic x86_64 bits: 64 Desktop: Xfce 4.16.0 
           Distro: Linux Mint 20.3 Una 
Machine:   Type: Laptop System: Apple product: MacBookPro11,1 v: 1.0 
           serial: <superuser/root required> 
           Mobo: Apple model: Mac-189A3D4F975D5FFC v: MacBookPro11,1 
           serial: <superuser/root required> UEFI: Apple 
           v: MBP111.88Z.0146.B00.1804111138 date: 04/11/2018 
Battery:   ID-1: BAT0 charge: 76.9 Wh condition: 78.2/74.8 Wh (105%) 
CPU:       Topology: Dual Core model: Intel Core i7-4578U bits: 64 type: MT MCP 
           L2 cache: 4096 KiB 
           Speed: 800 MHz min/max: 750/3001 MHz Core speeds (MHz): 1: 800 2: 800 3: 800 
           4: 800 
Graphics:  Device-1: Intel Haswell-ULT Integrated Graphics driver: i915 v: kernel 
           Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.13 driver: intel resolution: 1680x1050~60Hz 
           OpenGL: renderer: Mesa DRI Intel Iris Graphics 5100 (HSW GT3) 
           v: 4.5 Mesa 21.3.4 - kisak-mesa PPA 
Audio:     Device-1: Intel Haswell-ULT HD Audio driver: snd_hda_intel 
           Device-2: Intel 8 Series HD Audio driver: snd_hda_intel 
           Device-3: Broadcom and subsidiaries 720p FaceTime HD Camera driver: N/A 
           Sound Server: ALSA v: k5.13.0-27-generic 
Network:   Device-1: Broadcom and subsidiaries BCM4360 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter 
           driver: wl 
           IF: wlp3s0 state: up mac: 80:e6:50:1f:6a:fc 
           IF-ID-1: ipv6leakintrf0 state: unknown speed: N/A duplex: N/A 
           mac: 7a:87:11:29:72:97 
           IF-ID-2: proton0 state: unknown speed: 10 Mbps duplex: full mac: N/A 
Drives:    Local Storage: total: 610.18 GiB used: 244.03 GiB (40.0%) 
           ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Apple model: SSD SM0512F size: 465.92 GiB 
           ID-2: /dev/sdb type: USB model: General USB Flash Disk size: 28.91 GiB 
           ID-3: /dev/sdc type: USB vendor: SanDisk model: USB 3.2Gen1 size: 57.30 GiB 
           ID-4: /dev/sdd type: USB model: SMI USB DISK size: 58.05 GiB 
Partition: ID-1: / size: 458.00 GiB used: 198.90 GiB (43.4%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda2 
Sensors:   System Temperatures: cpu: 58.0 C mobo: N/A 
           Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A 
Info:      Processes: 346 Uptime: 1d 20h 38m Memory: 15.54 GiB used: 6.61 GiB (42.6%) 
           Shell: bash inxi: 3.0.38 

I had however troubles with the whole of my system being painfully slow to use with CPU over-heating (99°C !!) with the fan going crazy.

So I've installed and deamonized auto-cpufreq (https://github.com/AdnanHodzic/auto-cpufreq)

Then I've also installed and daemonized mbpfan (https://github.com/linux-on-mac/mbpfan).

Now, even after that I still had screen tearing issues and the system being slow.

So I've installed mesa-utils and followed the following sequence:

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sudo apt-get install mesa-utils 

sudo mkdir -v /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d 

echo -e 'Section "Device"\n Identifier "Intel Graphics"\n Driver "Intel"\n Option "AccelMethod" "sna"\n Option "TearFree" "true"\nEndSection' | sudo tee /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf 

After that I reboot. Now it's better, I can at least play 720 px videos without any screen tearing.

However, I still can't play 1080 px videos and can't perform any kind of video editing as well which is a shame because I have good specs.

I've tried with Olive, KDENlive (with proxy even!), Openshot... nothing works. Playing 1080 p video is plain impossible, laggy as hell.

Someone told me to install

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sudo apt install intel-media-va-driver-non-free

which I did, but then they told me it's for codec support, not to improve my system's speed!

Look I'm even using XFCE4 instead of Cinnamon to try to save as much resources as possible and yet... now I wonder what to do.

Can someone please pintpoint me in a direction to learn how to troubleshoot and dissect properly my problem so that I can improve my setup and be able to do some video editing eventually?

I was able to edit 1080 px videos without any issues on a laptop Windows 10 which had lesser specs (8G RAM dual i5 core)... I feel sad to discover that Linux is much slower than Windows on a more powerful laptop, for sure we can fix that right?

Thank you!

[10251415]

1) I know nothing about Mac hardware since they dropped PPC. The following comes from a place of profound ignorance.

2) Does the Driver Manager have anything to say other than "you're using the recommended drivers for your hardware"? Is there maybe some graphics driver that might solve all your problems? (one can dream)

3) What does "top" (or the "System Monitor" tool) think is keeping your device busy? CPU load would be a start, but having a look at I/O might also be worth a peek.

(I can play 1080p just fine on an old, generic dell box with half as much memory as your windows laptop, so the software is in principle capable of it - we just have to figure out why it's having a problem with your hardware.)

[Hoglob]

2) The only proprietary driver the Driver Manager is showing me (and use) is Broadcom for wi-fi.

3) Mostly Brave and Ferdi take a lot of CPU usage, but even when I kill them, I can't edit any video and whatever video editor I'm using take first place on top.