Linux bloat?

[KBD]

Over the weekend I spent some time installing and comparing various Linux Mint and Ubuntu spins. One thing that stuck out in my mind was how much faster overall, but especially during boot, the older versions were compared to the newer ones. For instance, Linux Mint 18 boots up incredibly fast no matter which spin I used, but Mint 19 was fairly painful waiting for it to boot no matter which DE I tried. Same with Xubuntu 16, that is until I ran all the updates then it too was a slug to boot and run. I tried these on 3 different generation of intel CPU's with the same results, older version with older kernel ran great, newer version not as good.
Of course MX 17 and vanilla Debian are a rock and ran excellent no matter what I tried them on.
My question: what is dragging down the newer versions? Is it systemd? or intel mitigations in the newer kernels? or gtk3? or all of the above?
On 8 or more gb of ram and a quad core cpu with a ssd none of this may make a difference, but on old hardware that many people run Linux on, there seems to be quite a difference comparing the newer versions to the last versions of Linux. If it is mostly the kernel and these meltdown and spectre fixes causing it, that does not bode well as it seems there are more patches coming. That is my biggest concern, that it may be the kernel getting bloated and even Debian won't be able to avoid the newer kernels in future releases.
What do you folks think? Have you noticed your hardware running slower on newer Ubuntu based distros or kernels?

[oops]

I noticed than with systemd (Ubuntu 16.04 here) the boot and the shutdown is very slower ;-)

[KBD]

I noticed than with systemd (Ubuntu 16.04 here) the boot and the shutdown is very slower ;-)

Good point, I forgot to mention shutdown. I noticed that as well. I wish Debian had not jumped on the systemd bandwagon. Ubuntu makes questionable decisions at times, but keeping their upstart init system would have saved much grief.

[Stevo]

I don't think the various Spectre and Meltdown mitigations would make much more than a few percentage points slowdown in a bootup; hardly enough to really notice. MX boots just about as fast using systemd as sysvinit in my experience, too, so it seems something else is to blame.

Kernels load only what modules the hardware needs, too, so it's not that. One might consider a Liquorix kernel "bloated" because it enables more drivers than the stock Debian kernel, and certainly takes up more disk space because of that, but it boots just as fast.

[sunrat]

I run MX (sysv) and siduction (systemd) which both have extremely fast boots of a handful of seconds. One MX I have Liquorix kernel and it's also fast. The delay is less likely to be init system but more its configuration. I'm guessing Ubuntu has more services enabled.
I have noticed in the past that Ubuntu seems to be slow to boot and hungry for resources so avoid it these days.

[oops]

I run MX (sysv) and siduction (systemd) which both have extremely fast boots of a handful of seconds....

I am not alone to have this bug "A stop job is running ... " (systemd seems to be the issue?) :
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issu ... -112227569
"...Regression in systemd-coredump 229: system hangs for 90 seconds during shutdown..."

[sunrat]

I run MX (sysv) and siduction (systemd) which both have extremely fast boots of a handful of seconds....

I am not alone to have this bug "A stop job is running ... " (systemd seems to be the issue?) :
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issu ... -112227569
"...Regression in systemd-coredump 229: system hangs for 90 seconds during shutdown..."

How is this relevant to my post, or to this thread? That bug you linked was closed over 2 years ago.

[oops]

Because it is mostly the shutdown who is impacted, no the boot speed. (it was for an accurate information)

[KBD]

There is definitely something going on with the newer Ubuntu (18.04). I was running Kubuntu 18.04 on a laptop with just 3 gb of ram and it was running great, then a recent update slowed it to a crawl. I'm going to have to replace Kubuntu on that machine. I have gravitated toward Debian and Mint over the years because of their conservative update policies compared to Ubuntu. But this latest Ubuntu-based Mint 19 changed the default update settings and now depends upon Timeshift to restore your system when you bork it. I like the old way of not borking your system to begin with.
I don't think I have ever had to restore a Debian Stable operating system, except in a few cases when I messed it up by doing something dumb. Thankfully I am, after all these years, learning to leave a perfectly working system alone. But that doesn't protect you if you are using Ubuntu as they have put out some nasty kernel and grub updates since the release of 18.04.

[jordansc]

I was recently running Ubuntu 18.04 Gnome and RAM usage was ridiculously high between 1.4 and 2.8 GB during a typical session, occasionally even higher. It didn't significantly slow anything down but occasionally I did notice some program latency (no specific ones...just a random 2-3 second delay). I have pretty good hardware so this should not be the case...what the heck happened? I "de-buntu-ed" and installed MX 17. Now my system absolutely flies including startup and shutdown. Anyway, I'm just confirming KBD's observation.