Greetings my excellent friends,
are there any “tricks” or tips to make my distro faster ?
I used to install “preload” in Debian based distros.
And add vm.swappiness=10 in this file /etc/sysctl.conf
In MX Linux I tried Liquorix kernel.
But I can’t say that I felt anything with these…my laptop is a little old.
A SSD is the biggest speed boost for an old laptop. I have a laptop with a 3rd gen Intel CPU (11 years old) and 8 GB running under plasma and it works like a charm. I even use it from time to time to compile software…
Liquorix kernel is some kind of snakeoil with drawbacks…
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“snappy” is a relative term - so I think my system runs great, but in your eyes maybe not.
It’s very dependent on what apps you’re running. Text editor and browser is one thing, video editing and game playing completely different.
It is also dependent on hardware, most especially the type of hard drive and amount of RAM. If you skimp on those, esp both, no doubt it’ll not be snappy.
You didn’t offer any of that information, so it’s all a guess for everyone out here.
Well my system is a Intel® Core™ i5-4210U CPU @ 1.70GHz, 8GB, SSD, I use integrated Intel card.
I know gaming is a different story.
I was talking in general, to make programs start faster. Sometimes Firefox for example when I watch a lot of Youtube clips it becomes slow, I have to close it and relaunch it.
The snappy feeling I had only with XFCE 
But I alwasy had a soft spot for KDE and Cinnamon.
Two months ago I switched my 15.5 from 3.0GHz i3-4150T (2 core, 4 thread) with Intel Haswell graphics and 32G DDR3 to 3 years newer 3.4GHz I3-7100T (2 core, 4 thread) with Intel Kaby Lake graphics and 32G DDR4, both initially with same disks, but latter switched from SATA SSD for OS to NVME, while data stayed on HDD RAID. Any actual difference is hard to discern, even though glmark2 score more than doubled from 626 to 1304. On same PC, TW somehow manages to nearly double the doubling at 2160.
You could try to switch to Wayland.
There are some things that do not work on Wayland yet, but at least some people report it seems to run smoother.
Would be good to monitor your memory usage (System → system Monitor → History or “top”, or “free -h”), with Youtube + Firefox I am running 4.2 Gi, you do not want to have this to come close to you 8GB.
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Yes, unfortunately top, htop, and System Monitor always show 3 different values of free memory … and the values are not even close
Plasma 6 is currently planned to release in February.
A few weeks back some apparently significant improvement in terms of latency for the cursor and in general landed for the Wayland session. Basically, if the system is having a tough time drawing frames, it will always draw the newest frame available, instead of the first that was submitted, iirc.
Of course, February is still a few months away…