My laptop is 5 years old and I updated it to Ubuntu 12.10 recently, well Unity is cool to use, it integrates better with the keyboard and other stuff, but one nagging issue remained. SPEED. For some reason it was too slow. When ever I pressed the super key the dash took too long to load, when I search for a file or APP I have to wait for eons. I really got frustrated.

Its then when I fired up the terminal and typed sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop , so that I can get rid of unity and put on xfce. When I switched between desktops whola! Wow, what a speed!!

Well, the Gnome as well as Unity desktop is a really inefficient system When ever its fired, it created 15 or so processes which I don’t know what its used for. It uses more than 50% of my Celeron M’s power and more than 600 MB of my 1024 MB of RAM. that’s a lot. On top of that my applications should work that needs more processor power and memory. That is Unity cuts my systems capacity by 50%.

In modern core i series of Intel processors, this occupation may be very less say only about 20% s rest 80% is available to run you apps, but in my laptop resources are low. When running xubuntu desktop it occupies 350 MB or so RAM and below 15% of my processing power, I have got lot of space and computing power for my apps. That’s great!.

So if you have got a low power system, switch to xfce, be greener and save planet! Don’t dump off your old computers, use it as long as you can.