TWEAKING SYSTEM COMPONENTS
So you’ve got rid of all the junk files and streamlined your boot-up process. You’ll have already noticed a leap in performance. If your appetite if whetted, roll up your sleeves and dive right in to make your installation even faster. Many of the default apps in distros ship with settings to suit most popular use cases. Several popular ones include tweakable parameters that you can use to make them run more quickly.
Gnome run
Gnome is arguably the most popular desktop environment for desktop distros, such as Ubuntu and Fedora. The desktop is bulky and although it has lost quite a bit of flab since v3 was released in 2011, there is still a lot of scope to make it lighter. Start by removing extensions you don’t need. They are Gnome’s biggest strength and one of its biggest reasons for bloat. The developers have made installing and enabling extensions a walk in the park, and you’ll be surprised to see the number of unused extensions you have enabled in your install. If your browser is equipped to manage extensions, you can head to https://extensions. gnome.org to turn them on, or install the GNOME
Tweaks app with sudo apt install gnome-tweaks and switch to the Extensions tab.
Next up, prune Gnome’s search sources. When you type in the Activities Overview, the desktop searches more than just software. But if you’ve never used the feature to install software from repositories or searched for the term on the internet or elsewhere, you can safely disable this feature. Head to Settings > Search, which brings up a list of enabled targets for the search term in the Activities Overview. You can save yourself some resources and make the desktop more responsive by turning off any of the sources that you’ve never used.
If you are on an underpowered machine, it’s a good idea to disable the Files option. This shuts off the fileindexing service that keeps track of all files on your computer. It’s a useful option to have if you search for files using the Activities Overview; if not, it’s one of the major reasons for your computer’s lethargic performance. Another aspect of Gnome that slows computers are its various desktop animations. While they will appear quite smooth on a newer installation, there will be a noticeable change in their behaviour after a while. If you don’t care for the fancy effects, fire up the GNOME Tweaks app and toggle off the Animations option that’s listed under the General tab.
Fast apps
In addition to the desktop environment, various desktop apps also have tweakable parameters and settings that can help speed up launch times. One such app that you’ll find in virtually all mainstream desktop distros is
Libreoffice. Although the full-fledged office suite has lost much of its appetite, there’s still scope for some more reduction.
For instance, if you don’t use Libreoffice Base you don’t really need the Java runtime. To disable it head to Tools > Option and select Advanced from the sidebar on the left. In the options it brings up, toggle off the Java runtime environment option, this will have a noticeable effect on Libreoffice launch times, especially on underpowered computers.
If you use documents with lots of embedded objects, you can earmark more memory for its Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) setting. Head to Tools > Options > Libreoffice > Advanced and click the Open Expert Configuration button. Here expand the ‘org.openoffice. Office.common’ setting and scroll down to the Cache
settings. Remember however that increasing the amount of RAM will not have any impact on the performance of the office suite unless you are working on a document with loads of objects.
Another frequently used app is Firefox and one of the most common reasons for its bloat are add-ons. Addons slow the browser and a malfunction in one can also adversely affect the browser as well. So review the number of add-ons you have installed and deactivate or better still uninstall any add-ons you don’t need.
The browser also caches data to the disk by default, which reduces its speed. You can increase its performance by asking Firefox to save data to RAM instead. In the URL bar type about:config and accept the warning to view all the advanced settings. In the Search bar type browser.cache.disk.enable and double-click it to change its value to false . This stops
Firefox from writing the cache to disk. Next, type browser.cache.memory.enable in the Search bar and make sure the value is true to ensure that the browser saves cache to RAM.
You’ll also have to make sure the feature has enough RAM to cache effectively. Right-click a blank area and head to New > Integer. Name the variable browser. cache.memory.capacity and add an adequate cache in kilobytes. We advise a value of 300000 (which equals 300MB), which is usually more than enough. Note that if you don’t have much memory in the first place, getting Firefox to grab a chunk of it for caching might actually slow things down in the long run.
Streamlining Evolution
Another internet app that can help you save some resources is Evolution. This email client is so tightly integrated into some distros like Ubuntu that you’ll find several running processes for the app, even when you use something else like Thunderbird! Take a look yourself. Fire up the System Monitor app, switch to the Processes tab and search for evolution , which will return a bunch of processes that are unnecessarily gorging on the computer’s resources.
However, because these processes are so tightly coupled with the desktop, uninstalling them will break your installation. Instead a clever workaround is to take away their execution privileges with: sudo chmod -x /usr/lib/evolution/evolutionaddressbook-factory sudo chmod -x /usr/lib/evolution/evolution-calendarfactory sudo chmod -x /usr/lib/evolution/evolution-sourceregistry If you’re feeling a little adventurous, you can tweak the underlying filesystem to make your distro run faster. A majority of distros use the ext4 filesystem, which can be tweaked for performance. The journalling file system supports three modes, with most distros defaulting to the ordered mode that offers the best safety-to-speed ratio. However, the Writeback mode is the fastest, because it does the least amount of journalling (keeping track of what file is where). This also means that it comes with a risk of data loss in the case of a power failure, for instance. If performance is more important to you, then assuming your root partition is /dev/sda1, change its mode with: sudo tune2fs -O has_journal -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sda1
You’ll then have to edit /etc/fstab to add a boot option to use writeback mode. While we’re here, we’ll add some more options to increase the performance of the filesystem. Open the file in a text editor and find the line that corresponds to the / partition and add the following boot options: data=writeback,noatime,barrier=0
We use the data=writeback option since we’ve just changed it into the writeback journalling mode. The noatime asks the filesystem to not log access of files and directories. The barrier=0 option disables the write barriers. These enforce proper on-disk ordering of journal commits, but come at the cost of a performance hit. Save the file and restart your computer for the filesystem changes to take effect.
WHAT’S SLOWING YOU DOWN? “If you are on an underpowered machine, it’s a good idea to disable the file-indexing service.”