Wondering about which ways to speed up your Ubuntu system?
It does not matter which operating system you are using, if you keep on using it for an extended period of time, the system tends to get slow. This is pretty common knowledge, and there are various reasons behind it.
As you keep on using your computer, more and more of its resources are used. Adding large amounts of data, installing applications, and carrying out tasks consume the system resources. Another downside of installing multiple applications is that most of them are loaded at boot time. This makes your system slower and slower.
Ubuntu and some other Linux distros are among the most popular operating system choices today, after Windows and macOS. Because of the reasons stated above, computers using Ubuntu also get slower after a period of time.
If you are using Ubuntu and are wondering about the ways to speed up your system, you are in the right place. This article will guide you through the different ways you can use to boost your system performance.
So, let’s jump right in!
Method 1. Reduce the Default Grub Load Time.
The grub loader package gives you the multiple boots option when you start your Ubuntu system. By default, grub gives you 10 seconds to select between booting the operating system or going into recovery, among other options. If you think the default time is long, you can change the load time by typing the following command on the terminal.
$ sudo gedit /etc/default/grub &
When you type and enter the command, you should see this on your screen.
You can see the “GRUB_TIMEOUT” value is 10. Change it to a number you want grub to take as the time in seconds to display the boot options. After changing the value, you need to update the grub settings to implement your changes. You can update using the following command.
$ sudo update-grub
Method 2. Managing the Startup Applications.
As you keep installing more applications, the number of apps that are loaded straight after you log in to your computer also increases. You may notice that as soon as you log in, multiple applications open up, and you can see it in the taskbar, this happens because they have been given permission to load at startup. This makes your system slow.
If you want to reduce the number of applications that are loaded at startup, go to a Ubuntu application called “Startup Application Preferences”. You can take the load at startup permission away from your choice of applications.
Method 3. Using apt-fast Instead of apt-get.
The common command to update applications is the “$apt-get update” command. If you constantly update your applications and you feel that the system takes a long time to update the applications, you can use the following command.
$ apt-fast update
$apt-fast is a shell script wrapper for $apt-get that performs the same tasks but just more efficiently and quickly. It uses multiple connections to install or update applications. To use $apt-fast, you need to first install it using the following set of commands.
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:apt-fast/stable $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install apt-fast
Method 4. Speeding Up Applications Using Preload.
Daemon is software that continuously runs in the background, ensuring the system is performing the tasks it is designed to do. Preload is a daemon that speeds up applications by analyzing user behavior. This means that the applications we use the most are sped up by Preload.
You can install Preload using the following command.
$ sudo apt install preload
After Preload is installed, you do not need to worry about it. It does its job and hopefully proves to be one of the ways to speed up your Ubuntu system.
Method 5. Installing an SSD.
We first looked at the changes you could make to the software. Now, let’s have a look at what you can do hardware-wise. Although the majority of newer computer systems are loaded with the SSD hard drive, there are still a lot of users who have HDD instead of SSD installed in their systems.
The SSD hard drives are faster, more durable, and consume less energy than HDDs. So, if you feel that your system has slowed down, installing an SSD should prove to be very helpful. You should see a considerable improvement in the performance of your Ubuntu system after doing so.
Method 6. Upgrading the System RAM.
It is common knowledge that having more RAM in your computer increases the speed and improves the system’s performance. So, upgrading your RAM will guarantee a faster computer system.
However, there is a thing that you need to be careful of. While installing new RAM, you need to check that the new RAM’s clock frequency matches the clock frequency of the previous RAM. If there is a difference in the clock frequencies, the overall effect may slow down your system even more instead of making it faster.
If you have installed and are using heavy graphic designing applications, why not look for a quicker and easy-to-use alternative? Figma is a web graphic designing application/tool that can help you make your prototypes and graphics on the web browser.
The advantage of using Figma is that you do not have to worry about it using a lot of system resources for it to work. It is a lightweight alternative, and it should make your system work faster.
So, if you want to install Figma on your system, click on the link mentioned above, and it will take you to a guide that tells you the ways you can install it on your Ubuntu system.
In this guide, we learned about the ways to speed up your Ubuntu system. A computer system slowing down can prove to be very annoying and frustrating. We understand your feelings, and thus, we hope that the ways we have mentioned in this guide help you out.
If there are any further queries, please let us know in the comments.
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