Speed ​​up your Xubuntu with these simple tricks

Xubuntu 17.10

Xubuntu is the official Ubuntu flavor intended for computers with few resources. It is not as light as Xubuntu but it is lighter than Kubuntu and Ubuntu. This official flavor brings with it the Xfce desktop, a very complete and lightweight desktop. Nonetheless, Xubuntu can be heavy for certain computers. One of those reasons may come from performing multiple Xubuntu updates, increasing resource consumption due to the new Ubuntu version.

Next we tell you various tricks to speed up the startup and operation of Xubuntu no need to change hardware parts like hard drive or ram memory.

Clean your equipment

If we have an old Xubuntu installation that we have been updating according to the versions, a big step is to clean and slim down the number of files we use. For this we can use tools like Bleachbit. But before passing this tool, we recommend that Let's review the applications that we have installed and delete those that we do not use. An email manager that we do not use, a disk recorder, etc ... And after that, then apply the bleachbit tool.

Eliminate the kernels that we do not use

The kernel is an important element but it is also true that we only need one. So a good solution is to remove the old kernels and leave only two versions: the one we use and the previous version that works without problems. To remove kernels without problems we can use the ukuu tool, a tool that has a graphical interface that will help us eliminate any old kernel version.

Change standard apps

Xubuntu comes with applications that consume certain resources to perform basic tasks. Some of these applications are outdated and may be superseded by others. Thus, Libreoffice can be changed by Abiword and Gnumeric or we can remove all this and change it to a shortcut to Google Docs. Chromium or Firefox are great browsers but very heavy, we can choose other solutions such as SeaMonkey or palemoon. The same goes for VLC or Gimp.

Faster charging

In addition to all of the above, we can install and / or activate two programs that help us speed up Xubuntu. The first of them is called preload and the second is called zRam. We open a terminal and write the following:

sudo apt install preload

zRam can be installed using the following command:

sudo apt install zram-config

After its installation, we restart the computer and we will already notice its effects. Preload makes file loading during system startup asynchronous, thus speeding up the process and zRam compresses files in ram memory making the equipment have less weight to handle.

These steps are not the only ones, but they are the simplest and the ones that make our Xubuntu significantly accelerate. It is worth doing it and obtaining its positive results for our Xubuntu.


A comment, leave yours

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked with *

*

*

  1. Responsible for the data: Miguel Ángel Gatón
  2. Purpose of the data: Control SPAM, comment management.
  3. Legitimation: Your consent
  4. Communication of the data: The data will not be communicated to third parties except by legal obligation.
  5. Data storage: Database hosted by Occentus Networks (EU)
  6. Rights: At any time you can limit, recover and delete your information.

  1.   Lvis J. Casasola G. said

    Greetings Joaquín García!

    I was wondering; I have reviewed some articles outside the website ubunlog where they mention that the Zram function does not support some processors, for example: Intel Atom, the one I use has the characteristics of: N450 (1.66GHz, 512kb cache), so is it true?
    You would help me a lot by mentioning it, as I am undecided if it is worth the opportunity to install it on Xubuntu 18.04 and improve my performance.

    I have also installed preload, but this one leaves a lot to be desired since instead of speeding up the OS process it slows it down. Why will it happen? I did it on Xubuntu and didn't get good results.

    Also, something outside the topic of this page. Why are there times when installing repositories or other programs this sends a message of: (Error: retrieving gpg key timed out.) Are the servers not working?