[kwlug-disc] Ubuntu 18 Unity/GDM3 to LightDM/LXDE/OpenBox

[rmarksteffen at gmail.com]

Cheap Pentium/Celeron laptops were discussed a while back on the list
and I decided to go ahead and get myself one as Canada Computers still
had a sale on.

I purchased an Acer Swift 1 refurb for $350.  Great little laptop,
aluminum case, 13"ish 1080p IPS display.  64GB onboard SSD (but an M.2
slot available for expansion) and 4GB RAM (not upgradable).  Pentium
N4200 (quad core, non-hyperthread, quicksync, not a speed demon but
passive cooling and long battery life).  I can get about 8 hours of
typical use approximately (should be solid 8+ hours now).  I've got all
my regular apps loaded
(evolution/libreoffice/gimp/firefox/chrome/synced mail/documents/a
couple ISOs I use regularly) and I'm about 38% full disk, not bad (I
have not used the M.2 slot yet).

Anyway, I was finding the default Ubuntu 18 to be a little laggy (and
taking a lot of memory) so after doing a few basic things like
disabling animations and stuff, and still not being happy, I changed to
LightDM.  Still using Unity/gnome shell it was better, a little less
memory use, but still I felt there should be major room for
improvement.  So I switched over to LXDE/openbox/lubuntu.  WOW!!  Much
much faster, I can load into ram every app I normally use and then some
and still have 2GB of RAM free (not even touching swap).

The "lag" is completely gone and everything is very snappy.  (Web
browsing in Firefox was never laggy, just general window-managery type
functions).  Anyway, I'm sold, this unit is now a very acceptable daily
driver.

Mark