Gnome shell improvements?

[Omar_Jair]

So on my long journey to find my ideal Ubuntu flavour i came across ubuntu gnome since gnome is the desktop ive used more but i know less of (Yes, as ironic as it sounds). So, my computer is not beefy but its pretty decent if we call it a laptop, the only problem is that i cannot have chromium, clementine or firefox open all in the same because it starts to get very very slow, i already decreased my swappy-thing value, i did manage to make Unity shell faster by disabling animations and special things with Compiz, is there any way to do something similar just to give GNOME shell a little more speed?:confused:

[ajgreeny]

Tell us more about the spec of that computer or we are all shooting in the dark.

Ubuntu-gnome needs approximately the same resources as Ubuntu with unity as far as I can make out, so depending on what spec you have you may find a lighter desktop is better for you.

[RobGoss]

Yes I think Ajgreeny, is correct lighter versions of Ubuntu might be the better option for your desktop. Here are just a few Lubuntu (http://lubuntu.net/) or Kubuntu (http://kubuntu.org/) that comes to mind they use less resources

[Omar_Jair]

My computer has 4GB ram, using 3.7GB. 2 intel celeron processors of 2.16GHz, an Intel Bay Trail Graphics and 488GB free space, i dont know if you require more specs or how can i get more detailed results

About Kubuntu, i didn't knew that KDE desktop used less resources, ive had a bad trip with XFCE and KDE is way too slow for me.

[Omar_Jair]

So, is there anything i can do rather than switching desktops? i chose gnome shell because it ran pretty good on Debian and rarely gave me speed troubles.

[RobGoss]

At this point I would say try a lighter distribution and see how it goes.


My computer has 4GB ram, using 3.7GB. 2 intel celeron processors of 2.16GHz, an Intel Bay Trail Graphics and 488GB free space, i dont know if you require more specs or how can i get more detailed results

Are you saying you're using 3.7GB of Ram out of 4GB?

[Omar_Jair]

Yes, 3.7 usable ram, i don't know how to change it to full use or if it is possible, any other light desktop environment that is not LXDE or XFCE? i know those are the lightest but i already use lxde on a very old computer and little mouse guy did not like me at all with wine apps, maybe mate?

[RobGoss]

Seeing you're having so much trouble with slowness this may be related to the Intel Bay Graphics card. Most of the time with low end graphics card these problems will arise. If I'm correct reading your #4 post you're also using most of your Ram but on what?

If you are wanting to do a clean install with Lubuntu or Kubuntu, I don't see any reason why the OS will not preform as it should

[ajgreeny]

I think the amount of ram shown is because the integrated graphics are using the 0.3GB of ram that is missing; I suspect that is the available amount, not the amount used, but show us the output of
free -mto check that in detail.

[Omar_Jair]

Did the command, here is the output

omar@Phantom:~$ free -m
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 3839 1542 271 231 2025 1833
Intercambio: 3981 0 3981

, by now the most useful thing i can do is switch to my gnome flashback desktop to get a nice performance, as for the intel graphics card, is there anything that i can do to improve performance a little?

[vasa1]

I think the amount of ram shown is because the integrated graphics are using the 0.3GB of ram that is missing; I suspect that is the available amount, not the amount used, but show us the output of
free -mto check that in detail.
I too have Intel integrated graphics:

$ lspci | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)
$ grep -i chipset /var/log/Xorg.0.log
[ 41.254] (II) intel: Driver for Intel(R) Integrated Graphics Chipsets:
[ 41.254] (II) VESA: driver for VESA chipsets: vesa
[ 41.469] (--) intel(0): Integrated Graphics Chipset: Intel(R) GM45
$


$ free -m
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 3914 532 2530 49 851 3112
Swap: 4056 0 4056
$
This with Lubuntu's Openbox session with Firefox and LibreOffice Writer open.

I'm wondering if it would be useful if OP ran
top -n 1 -o %MEM occasionally and reported back on what's hogging memory. Here's the output I see currently (just the top few):
Tasks: 169 total, 1 running, 168 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 3.7 us, 0.7 sy, 0.0 ni, 92.6 id, 3.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
KiB Mem : 4008640 total, 2468308 free, 614984 used, 925348 buff/cache
KiB Swap: 4154364 total, 4154364 free, 0 used. 3075764 avail Mem

PID USER %CPU %MEM COMMAND
2422 vasa1 0.0 9.8 firefox
1675 vasa1 0.0 3.7 dropbox
3067 vasa1 0.0 3.3 soffice.bin
1684 vasa1 0.0 1.3 kupfer
918 root 6.2 1.1 Xorg
1707 vasa1 0.0 0.9 nm-applet
2976 vasa1 0.0 0.6 lxterminal
1580 vasa1 0.0 0.4 openbox
693 root 0.0 0.4 NetworkManager
1662 vasa1 0.0 0.4 tint2
703 whoopsie 0.0 0.3 whoopsie
1978 root 0.0 0.3 udisksd
768 colord 0.0 0.3 colord
1750 vasa1 0.0 0.3 xfce4-power-man
1668 vasa1 0.0 0.3 conky

[Omar_Jair]

Luckily i have a super DVD collection with most Ubuntu Flavours (Except Lubuntu & Kylin). @vasa did you manage to "Juice out" your intel card or my only hope is to switch to Lubuntu?

[vasa1]

Luckily i have a super DVD collection with most Ubuntu Flavours (Except Lubuntu & Kylin). @vasa did you manage to "Juice out" your intel card or my only hope is to switch to Lubuntu?
Depends.

Please post the output of top as requested :)

[Omar_Jair]

Here is the output

omar@Coffee:~$ top -n 1 -o %MEM

top - 16:27:35 up 1:20, 2 users, load average: 0.70, 0.98, 1.10
Tareas: 181 total, 1 ejecutar, 180 hibernar, 0 detener, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 27.1 usuario, 8.8 sist, 2.3 adecuado, 58.8 inact, 2.6 en espera, 0.
KiB Mem : 3931220 total, 541400 free, 1009876 used, 2379944 buff/cache
KiB Swap: 4077564 total, 4077564 free, 0 used. 2562868 avail Mem

PID USUARIO PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM HORA+ ORDEN
4093 omar 20 0 1536536 445864 109796 S 0.0 11.3 4:54.39 firefox
31548 omar 20 0 2002824 275188 39168 S 6.2 7.0 4:02.02 IMVUClient+
3757 root 20 0 465612 150352 73860 S 0.0 3.8 1:27.36 synaptic
1640 root 20 0 305548 69076 56496 S 0.0 1.8 5:15.21 Xorg
5387 omar 20 0 501980 68816 49924 S 0.0 1.8 0:02.54 plugin-con+
3057 omar 20 0 1213432 62308 37516 S 0.0 1.6 0:07.62 caja
3093 omar 20 0 854996 57740 36396 S 0.0 1.5 0:01.25 blueman-ap+
3130 omar 20 0 516872 38232 28548 S 0.0 1.0 0:00.83 tilda
3101 omar 20 0 666532 37004 30400 S 0.0 0.9 0:01.79 nm-applet
3038 omar 20 0 864380 36404 27724 S 0.0 0.9 0:04.28 mate-panel
3034 omar 20 0 1123372 33852 26140 S 0.0 0.9 0:03.97 mate-setti+
3273 omar 20 0 704312 33656 24916 S 6.2 0.9 0:50.50 marco
5406 omar 20 0 781316 31568 25728 S 0.0 0.8 0:00.32 mate-termi+
3137 omar 20 0 243860 31444 14844 S 0.0 0.8 0:00.75 applet.py
3062 omar 20 0 701700 31356 24740 S 0.0 0.8 0:05.41 wnck-applet
3098 omar 20 0 623928 30388 24812 S 0.0 0.8 0:00.67 polkit-mat+
3142 omar 20 0 526928 29580 24500 S 0.0 0.8 0:00.46 update-not+

[vasa1]

PID USUARIO PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM HORA+ ORDEN
4093 omar 20 0 1536536 445864 109796 S 0.0 11.3 4:54.39 firefox
31548 omar 20 0 2002824 275188 39168 S 6.2 7.0 4:02.02 IMVUClient+
So that's not too bad?

I don't bother about RAM usage until things go wonky. Are you using compositing? You seem to have quite a few Mate applications as well?

I don't know if you've seen http://www.linuxatemyram.com/ but it's worth a look.

[Omar_Jair]

Yeah im now in MATE, tried to do a Flavor Swap but did not go too well, had to reinstall Ubuntu but MATE seems pretty good, RAM never passes 2BG now, maybe i could stick to GNOME2, i just got notified it's Ubuntu MATE 2nd Birthday.