Category: Ubuntu

tweaking an ubuntu-based distribution for better performance

whbeebe

There’s an interesting feature that the latest Gnome UI Ubuntu-based distributions have enabled by default; UI animations. While it might look smooth and cool to most, there’s a performance price to be paid when it’s enabled. For VMs and for basic systems the need for this feature is questionable at best. While I’m talking about Pop!_OS 22.04 here, it also applies to regular Ubuntu, and if you hunt around a bit, it can also be turned off on other distributions. It is my strong belief this feature should be disabled. To disable it for Pop!_OS, you need to find the setting in Settings | Accessibility:

Figure 1: How to disable animations

The toggle outlined in red, Enable Animations, should be off.

What I discovered on my modest development system, a UM250 with an AMD Ryzen 5 2500U, is that every time I would open any window I would hear the UM250’s CPU fan spin up briefly then stop. Nothing loud, but I noticed it. When I ran btop in a window I’d see the CPU’s temperature spike, then fall quickly, every time a window would open. When I disabled animations, that all stopped. I’ve also noticed that the overall memory footprint is lower without animations, maybe 5% to 10% at the most. With 16GB of memory 10% might not seem much, but for more limited environments it would be noticeable, especially on a busy system.

Figure 2: My system’s basic statistics

On my systems I want every machine cycle and every byte devoted to real work. I don’t consider fancy GUI effects real work.

sampling zorin os core 16.1

whbeebe

I’ve been looking other Linux distributions for a development environment going forward. Tonight I decided to look at Zorin OS ( https://zorin.com/ ). I’ve read a number of positive remarks, usually in the same post with positive remakes about Linux Mint.

I downloaded and installed Zorin OS Core 16.1 inside another Parallels virtual machine. As with Linux Mint I successfully installed Parallel Tools inside the Zorin VM (in order to do that I had to execute sudo apt install build-essential to pick up the necessary build tools). A quick tour and a check of a few key item of interest to me showed it was a solid distribution, like Mint, but unique in its own way. This won’t be a review of any kind, more like a “proof of life” post.

I did a little checking and discovered that Zorin, like Mint, is based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Not a problem, as LTS means long term support. It makes no matter to me what version it’s based on, as I will install whatever current tools I need in parallel with the out-of-the-box tools. What I want is a distribution that is more developer friendly for the work I do. In particular brltty isn’t a part of the distribution. It is a part of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and is even more embedded in Pop!_OS. When brltty is installed and running it interferes with ESP32 devices that connect via USB and are mapped by the kernel to tty devices, causing the device to disconnect and making it impossible to program and debug ESP32 devices. The fact that Ubuntu 20.04 LTS does not have this installed is a strong plus in its favor, as well as any other current distributions still based on 20.04.

I was quite happy to see that the desktop defaults to Xorg, allowing Wayland to be an alternate. Not the surprise I discovered with Fedora 36 on a VM.

Overall I liked the look and feel of the installation. Zorin Core is complete enough for my work. I can install the bits I need and it will all work. Looks like I’ve two good distributions for my AMD development machine to mull over.