How to speed up the Unity Dashboard on older computers

If a few days ago we told you about Canonical's plans for reduce Unity graphical load 7, it's time to try optimize another of the elements that we use the most of this desktop in our Ubuntu operating system: the board or dashboards.

The desktop is certainly one of the busiest elements of the system and, if you are running Ubuntu under a machine with limited resources, you want to optimize performance and speed of this component to the maximum to improve its overall response. In this news we will show you how to speed up the Unity dashboard on older computers.

The board o dash is the equivalent of the Start button in Windows operating systems. It is, therefore, one of the main accesses of the equipment and to which we will constantly go to search for applications, information, files, etc. There are several tricks that allow us to improve the experience with this component and then we will show you one of them.

Located on the left side of the screen, when we launch Unity Dash (by clicking on its own icon) to search for a file or application, a transparent window is generated that applies a blur effect on the background of our desktop.

Leaving aside aesthetic issues, this effect has a memory and process consumption every time we call the dash that we can reduce by using tools such as Unity-Tweak-Tool. Thanks to this little app we can disable this effect that has a significant load on computers with limited resources.

For install it, we can access the System Software Center or, as always, obtain it through the console by entering this sequence in the terminal:

sudo apt install unity-tweak-tool

Once installed, we will access it and see its main menu similar to the one in the following image:

Next, we must choose the option Launcher and inside, the tab Search. There we can see the button background blur which allows to enable and disable the effect that we mentioned. By deactivating it, we will reduce the consumption of resources that it produces in our equipment.

Once you change the value, you can check its effect by rerunning the Unity Dashboard.

Source: maketeachesier.