Switched from Unity to LXDE on Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail)

published Jun 04, 2013 11:24 by admin ( last modified Jun 04, 2013 11:24 )

SInce upgrading to Ubuntu 13.04 from 12.04 and continuing running Unity on it, my laptop has become very sluggish. There is disk activity going on all the time, and it takes seconds for the computer to respond to the GUI.

The sluggishness isn't here all the time, but often enough for it to be a problem. A friend recommended me to try Unity 2D, but that does not exist as an option anymore on the newer Ubuntus. I have been trying to use htop to see where the problem is, both as root and as a normal user but I cannot seem to locate it. Firefox and Chrome feature prominently but I do not think both of them got buggy at the same time just because of a newer Ubuntu.

I have been looking at LXDE for some time as the GUI on virtual machines for my pupils and today I decided to switch to it on my own laptop. So far so good!

LXDE is isgnificantly less polished than e.g. Unity: Panels in LXDE overlap in the corners, sometimes the settings dialogs go bonkers, e.g. when picking applications in the Application Launch Bar. But so far disk activity has gone to virtually zero!

The "Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment" is an extremely fast-performing and energy-saving desktop environment.