Since Ubuntu released version 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), there’ve been some complaints about it. It’s buggy and slow, perhaps it’s lost it’s way, and based on my own personal experience upgrading from 10.04 it is indeed a drag… I’ve always used Xubuntu, so my upgrade didn’t seem to switch me over to the gleaming new Unity desktop however I found myself suffering some pretty frustrating performance degradation – none of which seemed to burn the CPU or cause excessive IO wait. Puzzling.

I attempted to improve matters with some CompizConfig settings changes, although my 4 core desktop still felt like a Pentium 2. Then I found the following article on reverting from Unity Desktop to the Classic.

As an XUbuntu user the ‘Login Settings’ screen referred to in the last article isn’t hidden away much at all, but resides under System -> Login Screen. From there just pick ‘Xfce Session’ instead of ‘XUbuntu Session’.

Now it would seem I have my speedy old machine back.