these 5 steps to speed up your Ubuntu are very simple steps and simple ones that can be done all over the world just read carefully and comply with them. The results are immediate and our Ubuntu will accelerate although it will not be able to reach the speed that would change the computer for a full computer.
Table of Contents
Step 1 to Speed Up Your Ubuntu: Startup Applications
First we have to go to the Dash and then type «Applications at Home«. After clicking we will open a window with one list of applications and services that start in our Ubuntu when we turn on the computer. This list can be concise and light but if the pc goes slow, the list can be very long. We only need to uncheck the services we consider unnecessary such as printer programs, virtual hard drives, or some other similar type of service.
2nd step to speed up your Ubuntu: Activate the graphics card drivers.
Both Unity and other desktops use many graphic effects to attract the user. Sometimes if our Ubuntu doesn’t use the right drivers, the system can become slow with graphics management. That is why the best option is to use your own drivers that improve the management of graphics. If we use an Intel graphics card there is no problem as Ubuntu will use the corresponding drivers, if we have an AMD Ati card we need to go to Settings-> Software and Updates-> Additional Drivers and select the private option. If we have an Nvidia card, we must repeat the above operation but select the driver with the highest numbering that will be the most up-to-date driver.
Step 3 to speed up your Ubuntu: Switch desktop environment.
The third step is simpler than the previous ones: switch desktops. Unity is not a heavy choice but there are many lighter desktops like Xfce, LxQT, Enlightenment or just using another window manager like OpenBox or Fluxbox. In any case the change will be substantial and our Ubuntu will accelerate quite a bit.
Step 4 to Speed Up Your Ubuntu: Change Swappiness
Swappiness is the memory process that handles our swap partition, if we have a high value, many files and processes will go to this memory which is usually slower than ram memory. If we minimize it, Ubuntu will allocate more processes to the system’s RAM which is faster. Then for that we will change the swap value. We open a terminal and write the following:
sudo bash -c "echo 'vm.swappiness = 10' >> /etc/sysctl.conf"
Step 5 to speed up your Ubuntu: Clean up unnecessary files
Also Ubuntu create temporary files or junk files of failed installations, old installations, etc … This makes Ubuntu also quite slow down. To fix this, the best option is to use Ubuntu Tweak, a great tool that in addition to customizing our Ubuntu, will clean our system of junk files and temporary files.
conclusion
It should be noted that these steps are basic but will not replace the new hardware nor an increase in RAM or anything like that. Keep this in mind because these steps will speed up your Ubuntu but will not work miracles, on the other hand there is the option to speed up your Ubuntu but other applications slow it down, especially Mozilla Firefox and LibreOffice, for these applications we write a special post that tells us how to speed them up. Take note if this is your case. I know there are many recipes to speed up your Ubuntu even more or less What methods do you use to accelerate?
