LIGHTER & FASTER

Tired of his laptop being slow off the mark, Mayank Sharma is on a crusade to make his distro airy and nimble…

Out of the box, most mainstream distros are bloated and chunky. In their quest to appeal to the tastes of a very large number of people, their developers stuff them with a long list of desktop productivity apps. The number of packages not only increases the size of the distro’s ISO image, but the bloat also taxes your computing resources. While it is true that on many recent computers the excess baggage wouldn’t make much of a difference, not everyone has machines with 8GB of RAM or an octa-core processor. That’s not to say that these hacks are only for older machines. They’ll be just as effective on modern machines and help you optimise your resource consumption for a much smoother desktop experience.

Back in the good ol’ days, when installation from DVDS was in vogue, package selection was an integral part of anchoring the distro to your disk. This allowed you the flexibility to tailor an installation to your requirements. But with the advent of Live installable mediums, it’s become common for distros to just offload all of the contents of the ISO image to the disk. Sure, these Live distros make for faster installs, but you end up with a system that’s chock full of utilities and libraries you’ll never use.

The good news is that Linux distros ship in a malleable state and enable you to customise them. In this feature, we’ll look at various ways to turn the default installation of your favourite distro into a galloping stallion. We’ll focus on the recent Ubuntu 19.10 release, but most of these hacks will on any Linux distro. The feature is staggered into stages based on your skill level, and to be successful on the latter stages you’ll need to be pretty familiar with Linux.