Remove Unity completely and exchange it with LXDE

Question

I have installed Ubuntu onto my old Windows Vista laptop but unfortunately it is running very slow. I also live in a region of Germany which has a very poor internet connection and I am unable to download any lightweight distribution as the Ubuntu download took me 6 hours.

I have tried many thing to get Ubuntu to run faster such as installing compizconfig-settings-manager and disabling the blur in Unity, I also decreased swappiness to ten, and installed the Preload Daemon. On my desktop performance was increased , however my laptop is still low after these changes. My idea is to remove Unity completely and change my desktop environment to LXDE but I don't know how to do that.

System Specifications:

• Manufacturer : HP
• Model : Compaq 6720s
• Processor : Intel Celeron 550M (Single Core 2.00 GHZ)
• RAM : 2 Gig
• HDD : 160 Gig
• Graphics : Intel Graphics Media Accelerator x3100 (8-359 MB Shared)

Solution

All you really need to do is install lxde is this:

sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop

The removal of the extra files can be done also if you're short on hard drive space, but if all you need is more speed, that will do if for you (see How can you remove Unity?). Be sure to choose LXDE when you login.

Comments

[Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy]

For lxde, you need sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop

[Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy]

Personally, I use openbox desktop environment , very minimalistic and fast. But this one needs a little bit of fine tuning. Let me know if you need information on this. There's also blackbox (which needs a config) and gnome.

[Firefoxkilla]

Thanks but will that Removal Guide for Unity work on 14.04.2 ? I only see instructions for 12 and below. I dont want to Damage anything.

[Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy]

There's another answer in that guide for 14.04, specifically this one.

[David Foerster]

@JaredRosenberg: Users with only 1 reputation cannot vote.

[David Foerster]

@Firefoxkilla: As you're a reputation 1 user: if this answers your question, don't forget to click the grey ☑ under the "0" at the left of this text to accept it, which means "yes, this answer is valid"!