Desktop java is dead. Actually desktop anything that's not web is going to end up dying. The server is where the languages will duke it out next and Java is fine there. C# is also fine on the server. The nice thing about Java is it easily runs on linux and has many OSS libraries to help quickly standup server applications.
The best way I can think to phrase it is "in-browser VMs are dead". This covers Java, Flash, that one Microsoft had for a while, and anything else that uses the browser plug-in mechanism to load heavy frameworks.
Your experience is not necessarily because Java is slow. It could just be the applications you are running that are slow for reason that have nothing to do with the language.
Swing is probably going to be slower (maybe?) than some native windowing framework.
But Java as a language running on the JVM is certainly not slow.
I've just been looking up pycharm and it seems that the slowness issues are to do with things like opening files and doing parsing. These things are likely to be slow for anything but the language they are written in.
Pycharm is an example of one of the apps I am talking about. It just feels like it struggles at times, eventhough I have a fairly new machine.
Java was the first language I learned while going through college but I find the verbosity to be irritating.