I’ve been running Ubuntu MATE on my old ThinkPad X220 for a while now, and I’m genuinely impressed by how lightweight and responsive it is. I’ve made a few tweaks like disabling unnecessary startup apps and switching to the Traditional panel layout, but I’m curious—what are your go-to tips for squeezing out more performance on aging hardware?
Also, side note I'm beginning to research for professional purposes and attempting to create a light-weight DevOps testing environment on this very same machine. Do you think Ubuntu MATE can run some of the Best DevOps Tools such as Jenkins, Docker, or Ansible without straining too much? Or would I be better off running those experiments on a newer system?
I'd greatly value any tips on performance tuning Ubuntu MATE along with your own experiences using it for light DevOps work. This community has always been really helpful, and I'm hoping to learn from you all!
Welcome to the Ubuntu MATE community! I think you've already started the best way, and that's by reaching out here for tips and advice. I've been using Ubuntu MATE for a number of years, powering a Dell r710 server, and I continue to this day learning new things, including software and troubleshooting. Stick around, and the real experts will be gladly coming to your assistance!
You've done what I would recommend, start up apps and Traditional Panel. I also un-check Enable animations in MATE Tweak.
If you're storage constrained you can go through the installed apps and prune out the ones that you don't need or want. Besides storage you also save from updating the apps.
If you want to go low level I recommend using htop. It's a program you run from the terminal. It gives you a list of running processes that you can sort by memory and cpu usage.
Most Linux optimisation guides suggest things like changing vm.swappiness, enabling zswap (if you have the CPU), or tweaking browser cache settings (e.g. Firefox memory vs storage cache) ... but I've honestly not noticed a difference. That could be because I'm running modern hardware.
Telling Firefox to clean itself up is helpful after a long uptime (go to about:memory and select Minimize memory).
Some applications are leaking (e.g. brisk-menu, I think), so after a long uptime, a mate-panel --replace & then exit in a terminal can help tidy up some lost memory (or just reboot the computer).
I've run Docker on my MATE laptop for GitLab CI/CD, but not much else. It seems to handle it, but obviously the more intense the DevOps task, the more it's going to eat cores and impact performance for other tasks.