Nouveau is dead, it’s been replaced with Zink on NVK.

In my experience, nouveau is painfully slow and crashes constantly to the point of being virtually unusable for anything. The developers agree, as in the last couple months nouveau has been phased out of Mesa entirely. More recent Mesa versions now implement OpenGL on Nvidia using Zink on NVK, and the result is quite a bit faster and FAR more stable.

If your distribution currently still ships a Mesa version which uses nouveau, I would personally recommend you just stick with the Intel graphics for now.

And linux has io_uring which can handle millions of syscalls from a single thread without breaking a sweat. In my experience, I/O on Windows is just really slow, every file operation takes 10s to 100s of times longer than on any Unix-like kernel (1000s if windows defender is enabled)

Aside from checking the kernel log (sudo dmesg) and system log (sudo journalctl -xe) for any interesting messages, I might suggest simply watching for any processes which are abnormally high while the system is running slow. My initial approach would be to use htop (disable “Hide Kernel Threads” and enable “Detailed CPU Time”), and seeing which processes, if any, are eating up your CPU time. The colored core utilization bars at the top show how much CPU time is being spent on what: gray for disk wait, red for kernel, green for regular user process, etc. That information will be a good starting point.

“i only use 4chan”

I would be very hesitant to run sed on a bunch of files consisting primarily of highly compressed binary data.