Make Ubuntu 18.04 lighter?
Refer to this article for making gnome desktop faster. To summarize the six steps in the article:
- Disable or Uninstall Extensions
- Turn Off Search Sources
- Disable File Indexing
- Turn Off Animations
- Install Lighter Alternative Apps
- Limit Startup Applications
The linked article above links to another article with steps you can try:
- Show Hidden Startup Applications
- Fix Bugs That Slow You Down
- Install Adaptive Readahead (Preload) Daemon
- Decrease Swappiness
- Upgrade Your Hardware
As said in comment you would probably have to choose a lighter desktop environment.
But you can try some tweaks, i have done this and get some improvement
Disable Search and disable windows animations
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-animations 'false'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.search-providers disable-external 'true'
OP in a comment stated:
@user535733 gnome-shell uses 15% on both cores at idle, and when clicking on the apps menu, the icons move very stuttery. Although, this is in the live cd. I'l try installing. – Tim Leijten
Performance when running on a live CD is going to be very different from when actually installed, simply because of where the system reads data from. Reading from a CD (or even a live USB) is painfully slow, and it will show in your system. Once you install it to a hard disk (even HDD, not necessarily SSD) you will have a much faster read speed, and the system will feel faster.