I switched from Windows to PopOs last week and I’m having the weirdest experience. I’m loving it, and I never want to go back to windows, but for some reason that I can’t figure out my internet got kind of unstable.
I have good speeds in general, but everything is finickyier. Tabs takes forever to load, images sometimes don’t appear, videos get stuck and I’m forced to refresh the tab.
From the day that I installed the new distro, it has been very noticeable that websites take longer to load, youtube videos got choppier even posting on reddit got sluggish. Sometimes I get an infinite “submitting” buttom and have the refresh the page to try reposting my comment.
Nothing else changed other than the OS, same cable connection on the same browser. I tried resetting my modem a couple of times without any success. The other devices around the house are also unchanged, the speed and stability are the same as before so it must have something to do with my PC.
I don’t have a VPN activated, and I didn’t mess with anything in the connection settings because it came working from the box.
Is this instability some kind bug on my distro? maybe I firefox kind of sucks for linux somehow?
First question, do you have a public ipv6? https://test-ipv6.com/
If not, second question, do you have local ipv6? ip -6 addr show
If the answer to 1 is no or partial and 2 is yes, then I will say that has caused horrible problems for me in the past. I would either disable ipv6 entirely or edit /etc/gai.conf to prefer ipv4. That said, I would expect the entire network to be facing issues if this was your problem
Other than that I would try using wireshark to see where the issue lies. Is it Taking forever to get a dns response, are the addresses its receiving outdated? are there dropped packets? Is firefox doing anything at all or is the loading icon just spinning while the network does zilch and cpu/ram/disk usage at near 0.
You can give chromium a shot to rule out the possibility of firefox specific issues. Note firefox, as basically the only major non-webkit based browser left in the world today, does have more browser specific quarks. That said, firefox is usually solid for me, and I’m running ff nightly.
–edit–
fixed gai path
it may help to check some network stats with ip -s link to see if you are getting lots of errors or dropped packets. i have also heard of drivers being problematic, but that is usually for wifi. checking to see which adapter you have and what driver it is using with lspci -knn | grep -iEA3 'net|ether' might shed some light on things.
similarly to what u/firefish5000 said, i use firefox fairly extensively and have no perceptible issues other than when reddit itself is under high load.
did you go from using a custom DNS server in windows to now not using one in linux?
sounds like a bad dns server anyways, try changing it 
i use google’s (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4), but i dont know whats recommended these days
I would give another browser a try, just to rule that out. You should also be able to install speedtest-cli and run speedtests from the command line, ruling out the browser.
If you have another wired device in the house you could try running iperf3 between them to see if you’re getting full speed on the LAN.
It could be DNS, especially if you’re using firefox with DNS over HTTPS there.
Choppy videos probably aren’t DNS, but have a small chance to be. Could be video driver issues too. They can do funny things like slowing down some operations of the browser that don’t seem to be related to video.
Just a random thought, sometimes you can get a dhcp conflict if your computer believes it should be doing the dhcp and your router does too. Sometimes a static ip address is helpful to sort this out (look at your network settings for this).
For some reason, I had a very bad internet connection too when I use Pop OS. It didn’t happen in Linux Mint in my case.
There are lots of bandwidth checkers on the internet - this should be your first port of call; maybe something has change outside your computer.
Next, check your CPU usage and load (run ‘top’ on a terminal emulator). Ideally the load should be less than 80% of the number of CPUs (press 1 while running to toggle an exploded view of each CPU) and the idle time over 10%.
Do check whether you have appropriate graphics drivers running for your card. Run `lshw | less` in a terminal. I’m running a basic Intel adapter and see…
*-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: HD Graphics 530
vendor: Intel Corporation
physical id: 2
bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
version: 06
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pciexpress msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
configuration: driver=i915_bpo latency=0
resources: irq:124 memory:de000000-deffffff memory:c0000000-cfffffff ioport:f000(size=64)
The other thing to look at is offload capabilities on the NIC - turn them off if they are on and vice-versa.
Can you do a speed test and compare to another computer? It might be GPU driver issues which make everything seem to load slowly as it struggles to render. It may also be your internet just got back around the same time
What encryption is it? What v. of firefox? Is it a site full of javascript and lots of cache data?
Look at what your bandwidth is set to on your interface.
Just guessing, check cpu usage as one other mentioned. Mem pressure. The top command is a good overview, you may see other processes hogging cpu, net. Firewall off?
that happened to me for not having the ubuntu Multiverse Codecs to avoid Copyrigh.
open software and updates. the first option to activate multiverse codecs.
I know of people with your problem who went through like this for more than 2 years.
Sometimes I get an infinite “submitting” buttom and have the refresh the page to try reposting my comment.
i think that is a reddit problem, i rarely get it on YT but on reddit it happens often
Recheck that this is problem of your distro. Boot to Windows if possible and boot from live cd of other distributions. I think that this might be just a coincidence. But even if not, you will know if either Pop!_OS or GNU/Linux is guilty. Sor4MyBadEnglish, spell corrections are welcome
Try another distro and see if its the same problem. And try another browser or enable disable graphics acceleration.
Try hitting up speedtest.net to check speed/bandwidth.
Toggle hardware acceleration in the browser, and try another browser.
Maybe try setting your Dns to use something like google or cloudflare.
Follow others; recommendation for checking dmesg/journalctl and running top or htop to view resource usage.
I’d also confirm what NIC you’ve got and see if there’s a better driver available.
Most internet problems I had on linux were just dns issues, try using google’s 8.8.8.8 or cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 to see if it improves anything.
I bet you are using 100mb/s instead of 1000mb/s , had the exact issue with my debian install.
You need to configure it to use gigabit full duplex.
I tried dmesg and got a wall of messages like:
[31393.260819] audit: type=1400 audit(1636008401.057:7718): apparmor=“DENIED” operation=“open” profile=“snap.whatsapp-for-linux.whatsapp-for-linux” name=“/proc/zoneinfo” pid=5415 comm=“PressureMonitor” requested_mask=“r” denied_mask=“r” fsuid=1000 ouid=0
I have no idea of what it is, other than it has something to do with the Whatsapp I downloaded. I’ll try uninstalling it and checking if something changes.
i use google’s (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4), but i dont know whats recommended these days