Reduce interface effects to improve performance on 18.04

Question

I've got an second hand notebook at work with low specs and installed Ubuntu 18.04. The GPU is very old and every effect makes the whole system lag. Is ther any way to reduce UI effects to improve performance?

Answer 1

A reasonable improvement you can make is disabling animations, and this can be done without a tool, directly from the command line:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-animations false

To reverse this, just:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-animations true

This can also be toggled from gnome-tweaks, referenced in the accepted answer.

Answer 2

I've found out that there's a Tweaks tool and in the Appearance tab is an option where you can turn off animations. Just that made the computer breathe again.

You can install Tweaks using:

sudo apt install gnome-tweaks

Answer 3

Although going manually through the gnome-tweaks tools and the dconf-editor works, the gsettings commands as in the other answers did not work for me, in a programmatic/CLI approach on Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa.

What did work for setting this up beforehand on VMs in the cloud with XRDP was:

dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/interface/enable-animations false