Linux gui slow and no hardware opengl

I have ubuntu 24.04 on both a laptop and a desktop I had R2025b but installed R2026a hoping it would magically fix it. Instead it seems worse. The gui is super slow, maybe 0.5 to 1 second between typing a letter and having it show up. Since it's on both machines I feel that this is not just a problem affecting me. On the desktop I tried switching to x11 (rather than wayland default on login), and that seems to speed it up to normal operation. However in none of these cases does hardware opengl work, so plots are slow.

I picked a random old version - R2023b and it runs great (tried x11 only so far) and rendererinfo reports OpenGL Hardware. So I'll use that version for now. Hopefully there is a straightforward way to run the latest versions though.

This is renderer info from R2026a.

rendererinfo

ans = 

  struct with fields:

    GraphicsRenderer: 'WebGL'
              Vendor: 'Google Inc. (NVIDIA Corporation)'
             Version: 'WebGL 2.0 (OpenGL ES 3.0 Chromium)'
      RendererDevice: 'ANGLE (NVIDIA Corporation, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080/PCIe/SSE2, OpenGL 4.5.0)'
             Details: [1×1 struct]

[dpb]

Submit this to Mathworks as an official support request at <Product Support Page>

[Lee]

That seems like a pain but will do. Is there not some linux faq or something currently.

[dpb]

Not that am aware of...but am not a Linux guy. Picking up the phone and calling generally is quite effective in my experience.

The forum is not an official Mathworks support channel, however, just (mostly) a bunch of user volunteers and as such have no access to anything inside that may be going on...although I didn't check, be certain the flavor/version you're running is on the supported list.

[Ray]

Hi Lee,

Would you mind share more information about your machine setups?

OpenGL Hardware should not be the major performance bottleneck here as you are getting WebGL hardware acceleration with the Nvidia 5080 GPU. Starting from R2025a, MATLAB is using WebGL rather than OpenGL to render graphics. The graphics performance in R26a should be very similar to R2023b.

From your description "The gui is super slow, maybe 0.5 to 1 second between typing a letter and having it show up", I suspect the slowness issue is caused by something beyond graphics. Would you please elaborate more on what you talked about "plots are slow under X11'? Are you seeing the first time draw (open the figure) is slow or the interaction is slow? Or you even find the entire MATLAB interface is slow?

Also, please feel free to create a technique support case as dpb suggested above so we can further investigate the performance issue.

Thanks,

Ray

[Thomas Stephan]

I have the same problem, on Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS and Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS. I use the machines remotely using x2go. R2022b behaves performant. R2025b behaves so slow that it can not be used. Startup takes, I don't know, I leave for a coffe break, when I return matlab startup is done. Typing commands into the interface behaves like lee reported. Seconds between keyboard stroke and the letter showing up. The same machine configuration with R2022b, no problem.

When I use R2025b locally, i.e. sitting on front of the machine, speed is ok.

It would be fine for me to use R2022b, but the R2022b installer throws a core dump on Ubuntu 24.04.4. What a nightmare.

Looks like it's time to switch to Octave.

[dpb]

Contact Mathworks support at <Product Support Page>