Below, there are few steps to tweak Default Ubuntu's Unity2D environment little lighter. This will give some speed up, at a cost of simplifying desktop's visual style.
Window manager is an application responsible for window decoration drawing, e.g. buttons, title, borders etc.
Openbox is a small, fast, lightweight window manager.
Metacity is gnome's default window manager (nice, yet sometimes choppy and slow).
Unity 2d -- is lightweight alternative for Ubuntu's default desktop environment.
Preconditions:
Unity 2d installed.
Steps:
- Install openbox:
sudo apt-get install openbox
- Optionally install additional packages (in my case these were installed as dependencies):
sudo apt-get install obconf openbox-themes
- Edit /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/2d-ubuntu.session file and replace:
DefaultProvider-windowmanager=metacity
withDefaultProvider-windowmanager=openbox
- Logout, login (with Unity 2d session).
- Run obconf, choose some nice theme (my was found on box-look.org and changed a little) and configure buttons position.
