I have 22.04 Lubuntu installed on an ancient 2011 era laptop with only 3GB of memory. It has dual core AMD Bobcat 1 Ghz C50 processor with Radeon 6250 iGPU. It works great. With some Chrome tweaking it works well playing 1080p you tube videos with hardware acceleration. Just amazing!
Below are the performance tweaks I did for acceptable performance:
Removed all snap apps, apt holding snapd
Enable 40% zswap
Change to a reasonable swappiness of 25
Disable the mlocate indexing
Disable wifi power management as battery is dead anyway
Blacklist bluetooth drivers as I don’t need it and it actually slows Wifi on this laptop. I have since disabled bluetooth in the BIOS.
Most of the above changes I tried based on this post as I also run Linux Mint newer machines:
Are there any other suggestions from any experts/users here for Lubuntu performance improvements for extremely slow processors with extremely low memory ?
Thanks for the swappiness 10 recommendation. I was very hesitant to set it any lower than 25, but I’ll try 10 now.
Yea I have love-hate relationship when it comes to snaps. They are extremely convenient if thoroughly tested and you have a Ryzen or Tiger Lake with 16 GB! When you have 1 Ghz processor with 3 GB memory snaps are well just not even a possibility.
This laptop is just a toy and my test machine. Not a big deal if suddenly an update corrupts the Linux distro because I removed snaps and disabled/holding snapd. If I can get it working to point I’m not cursing at the poor performance then I know a distro is good for other much more capable machines.
I also have an even older 2000 era ThinkPad T40 with a 32-bit processor . I was forced to switch to Debian 11 for a modern distro because all the other major distro dropped 32-bit awhile back.
If needed this 2011 era laptop might have to switch to Debian 11+ if snaps become a requirement.
Yeah unfortunately Lubuntu 22.04 does seem to require quite a bit of system resources when compared to previous Lubuntu 20.04 version.
Here’s a good read about Lubuntu “Taking a new direction”.
Can you give us an example of that? I have only noticed a slight increase in RAM usage. For the most part it seems the same.
They are not a requirement, it is your system after all. We only ship 1 snap, Firefox, and there are many different alternatives available. I explained the Firefox snap here along with the reasoning why we switched. It is not a hard set requirement that we continue to use that but for now it is what we have decided on. If we do make a change it has to be something we can support with our small team.
I think you have done a good job at making your Lubuntu installation quite lean. I only have 2 other things that I would add as possibilities.
1.) You can disable qlipper if you don’t need a clipboard manager. Cut and paste operations will continue to function, you just won’t be able to look back through the previous clipboard items.
2.) You can disable the print applet if you don’t plan to do any printing.
Both of those things can be disabled in the LXQt session settings.
Overall feel and performance is slow and sluggish.
I don’t know how to explain it it just ain’t the same imo.
I’ll more than likely dump Lubuntu 22.04 I’m just not impressed and TBH find it to be a disappointment.
I thought it may be my desktop but when I tried a Debian based LXQT Linux distro it blows Lubuntu 22.04 out of the water.
Once 20.04 reaches EOL I believe my Ubuntu and it’s official flavors are done to many other distros that work much better.
My computers are old and outdated but when other Linux distros run fast and are not slow and sluggish and 22.04 Linux distros are enough said and you don’t need to be a Linux guru to figure that out.
Zswap makes a night and day difference on my old laptop. Default 22.04 Lubuntu install is a pretty heavy load for 10+ year old machines.
I use Debian 11 with only openbox on 32-bit Thinkpad T40 and it is very snappy. Only web browsers are painfully slow which I think is more likely due to 2000 era original Radeon R100 that does not support Glamor. Shockingly modern LibraOffice with java disabled runs ok for basic office file editing/viewing.
Yep when ram is low zswap can make all the difference.
I guess load heavy pretty much explains the 22.04 Ubuntu official flavors.
The Ubuntu 22.04 mainstream flagship you expect to be a system resource hog that’s a given with Gnome DE but not the official Ubuntu flavors imo.
Yeah I guess I’m going to have to remove all of the Snap software from Lubuntu 22.04 and see if that makes any difference in performance.
It’s a bummer that there is not just a plain base version or core version iso that allows the user to install what is wanted and needed.
I always used an Ubuntu flavor (Mint is an unofficial Ubuntu flavor in my opinion) because the install was smoother and Debian base is always missing lots of base apps I would expect. Also all the polish with Ubuntu/Ubuntu flavors is sadly missing with Debian.
Sparky and MX Linux are options but they just don’t have all the available packages that are available with Ubuntu/Debian/Mint.
I think my only other option is Fedora, but they are just a little too Workstation / high end hardware elitists for my taste. Red Hat says all the right things about open source, contributes tons of code and emphasizes the importance of the community, but IBM stepped in and killed CentOS without honoring agreed support timelines. The community was scarred and will not forget. Fedora has already abandoned X11 and the BIOS is next. Otherwise technology wise Fedora delivers a quality product.
If you’re talking about the MinimalCD, it was never officially supported & produced as a by-product of a no longer used procedure, ie.
Canonical and the Ubuntu project never officially supported the mini.iso ; it was produced as a by-product of building the debian-installer. As the Ubuntu Server image now uses subiquity, the build process that built mini.iso is no longer used, thus why this installation media is now old.
People are yelling at canonical for pushing snaps while fedora is doing an identical thing.
People don’t seem to mind when Red Hat does something bad, but if Canonical or any other linux company does even a slight mishap, the community yells and throws a fit. An example is when Suse partnered with Microsoft. Another example is when ubuntu collected hardware info.
I could care less what Red Hat does I’m not using Red Hat.
I have every right to complain about what Canonical does as I have donated money to Canonical.
I used to be the one on forums under many different user names that always would be optimistic about Snaps and say give Snaps a chance because Snaps were new and the bugs haven’t been fixed yet.
I ran Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) on an old desktop with Firefox as a Snap and had no complaints when a lot of others were complaining about Snaps.
Yeah Okay Ubuntu 22.04 and it’s Ubuntu 22.04 official flavors are out.
I’ve installed and used Ubuntu 22.04 and Lubuntu 22.04 Snap version.
Both of them OOTB are sluggish and slow system resource hogs.
At least I actually installed them and tried them on bare metal where a lot of the Snap complainers are just armchair users and complainers.
Okay with that out of the way today being a new day I decided to de- Snap Lubuntu 22.04 and also remove every bit of default software I have no use for.
Installed the Firefox-99.0.1.tar.bz2 as per @BasilCat post.
OH by the way Thanks @BasilCat Firefox works like a charm.
Also since I de-Snapd Lubuntu 22.04 it also works like a charm.
Yeah Okay I complained about the new 22.04 Ubuntu distros and with good reason because they are a POC OOTB from the git-go.
Anyway If I have donated money to a project and I don’t like it you bet I’m going to complain.
I’m not one who is just going to bend over and go with the flow never have been and ain’t about to start now.
So if you ain’t got a high powered newfangled computer with 16 core processor and 32 GB of memory than you better de-Snap the 22.04 Ubuntu’s and 22.04 Ubuntu official flavors.
So it appears that Snaps are a long way from being ready for the user desktop or at least my desktops.
Good day or evening to all depending on what part of the planet earth you call home.
My employer gives Red Hat millions every year even though we never had to use the support for over two decades, so I like to think I can complain about Red Hat / IBM. Flatpacks / snaps are a business decision and that is fine. Businesses have to make money. What bothers me is Red Hat / IBM dropping CentOS support years before the promised support timeline.
I have not donated a single cent to Canonical and I don’t have anything bad to say about Canonical or their snap related business decisions. I will call a turd a turd and the default 22.04 Ubuntu and official flavors are a VERY BAD user experience due to the firefox snap. Debian is in my near future… likely Debian 12.
@Bartman you’re welcome! Canonical should work on improving snaps because not everyone has a high-spec computer in this world. Millions can only afford low-spec devices and many people I’ve met have pc’s with only 4gb of ram.
Am currently looking at openSUSE tumbleweed if this worsens. @thetick why not take a look at OpenSUSE Leap for work?
Just for point of reference as someone who condemns both Red Hat and Canonical for their bad practices: my decade old laptop running a mobile dual core i5 and 8GB ram runs current Lubuntu just fine. Snaps do run sluggish but that’s the price we pay for good security. They still run though.
I would like to point out for those forgoing snaps all together in favor of just the regular deb package… you can still setup some extra security after installing Firefox with Ubuntu’s access control solution, AppArmor.
This will not do everything snaps do but it will at least add another layer of security that shouldn’t impact performance. I think a lot of what bogs down snaps is the container creation and sandbox config but AppArmor is simply a way of altering what permissions Firefox gets to run with (i.e. extra security).
For those interested, feel free to check out the following resource:
Canonical should work on improving snaps because not everyone has a high-spec computer in this world. Millions can only afford low-spec devices and many people I’ve met have pc’s with only 4gb of ram.