This is immediately obvious if you install them in a virtual machine - even on the latest fast hardware Ubuntu and Fedora both lag pretty hard. Even Xubuntu is

This is immediately obvious if you install them in a virtual machine - even on the latest fast hardware Ubuntu and Fedora both lag pretty hard. Even Xubuntu is pretty slow. I use a VM for Zoom and MS Teams, so after some time dealing with it I finally gave up and installed Arch Linux with a minimal Openbox configuration. The VM gets to the desktop within a few seconds with autologin and automatic X starting, and is lighting fast (zoom and teams still a bit slow but everything else is instant). I set the Openbox menu to only contain the items I need - Zoom, unofficial teams-for-linux, v4l2 (webcam) test&configuration utility, pavucontrol (volume control), SimpleScreenRecorder, Thunar (file explorer) with my shared folder to get recordings out of the VM, and a shortcut to a .txt with my Zoom meeting IDs and passwords (Mousepad as the editor). It'd be nice to make a compact disk image from this and distribute it, but there are some machine-specific things that need to be configured for the VM - not hard, but you can't make it a zero-configuration download-and-run type thing (shared folders, selecting USB passthrough for webcam, configuring resource allocation to the vm, etc.). Installing Arch takes about 10 minutes and installing+configuring all the GUI software takes maybe 60 minutes more. Of course part of the slowness in VMs is due to not having fast graphics which GNOME etc. rely on, but again Xubuntu is pretty slow too, and if you install a GNOME distro on bare metal it still lags pretty often. Plus the boot times for Ubuntu & Fedora are also really high in the VM.