Ubuntu 24.04 LTS GUI File Operation Slowness

Introduction

Ever since I upgraded my Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to 24.04 LTS, I have been experiencing severe slowness in file operations in the Ubuntu GUI.

In this blog post, I will quickly document the issue and the workaround I found.

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS GUI File Operation Slowness

The file operation slowness mainly manifests in the following applications via GUI.

• Opening file dialog in any web browser. This mainly affects downloading or uploading files on websites.
• Opening image files.
• Opening PDF files.

These actions can take up to a few minutes to complete, sometimes even non-responsive, which is completely unacceptable.

Culprit and Workaround

The culprit seems to be the xdg-desktop-portal-gnome package. On my own computer, sometimes I would see this process being running at high CPU utilization in the background while file operations becomes almost impossible.

Although I have less idea what this package does, removing this package seems to have resolved the issue and I have not seen any side effects so far.

$ sudo apt remove xdg-desktop-portal-gnome

It is unclear when this issue will be fundamentally fixed. But once the issue is completely resolved, we could install the package back.

References

• File Selector Extremely Slow