JyDy wrote:I have a similar problem. My laptop is pretty old & low spec (Pentium M 1.7GHz, 2G RAM, Intel 915GM). I've just installed Mint 14.
I have found that the first time I log in cinnamon goes really slowly. Most notably, the main menu is almost unusable regardless of theme.
Strangely, I noticed that if I log out and log in again everything speeds up to normal. I don't understand why this happens, and I don't know if it's just my hardware, but I would be interested if some other users could try this out and report.
PS. The hint from toyonut, above, (i.e. install "preload") doesn't help on the first login, but makes the menu go even better after the second login.
The problem you're experiencing has to do with your graphic card drivers.
Please do this litte experiment:
- Reboot your laptop and then log as usual. You'll find it's very slow. Then open a terminal and execute this command:
- Take note of the result of the command.
- Log out, log in, and repeat the command.
What you'll see is that the first time (when the laptop is unbearable slow) the renderer is
llvmpipe, and the second time is Intel.
The good news: this will be fixed really soon in an update for MDM.
The bad news: there are certain parts of Cinnamon running in distributions based in Ubuntu 12.10 (and also Gnome-shell and Unity DEs) that will remain slow because a change in Mesa drivers. The exact reason is the addition of
emulated vertex shaders for old GPUs. Previously, when Cinnamon (or any software based in Clutter/Cogl) found no support for vertex shaders, it automatically disabled certain effects (like the dimming scroller in the menu). Now they cannot be disabled because there's no way for Clutter to detect that emulation, it simply "believes" they are natively supported, but that "emulation" is painfully slow (it's done at CPU level, not the GPU).