18.04 is slow in VirtualBox—how to make is usable?

Question

I run Ubuntu in VirtualBox. 18.04 is considerably less responsive than 16.04, with exactly the same VM settings (3D acceleration, 3 cores, 4 GB RAM, guest additions installed, host: macOS, VirtualBox 5.2.18).

18.04 is often slow to respond to clicks and even typing. It is borderline unusable. 16.04, on the other hand, works perfectly fine. The 18.04 is a fresh install.

Is this considerable performance drop an inevitable consequence of switching to Gnome 3? Are there any simple settings I can try to make it usable? I do not need animations or fancy visual effects—this in an OS in a VM so it gets only occasional use, and I mostly just need the terminal.

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More details:

• Right after boot, performance is satisfactory

• After opening a Terminal, and maximizing it, performance becomes awful. It does not recover even after unmaximizing the Terminal window, or closing it.

• Turning off 3D acceleration in VirtualBox makes is more sluggish after startup (e.g. moving window on the screen is choppy), but it never gets unusably slow after maximizing a window.

Answer 1

You can install different desktop environments on Ubuntu. Xfce or Mate are pretty fast. Or even better install fresh Ubuntu Mate or Xubuntu 18.04.

Answer 2

You could install the virtual box guest additions, that optimizes the virtual machine because I have one installed with 512MB RAM and it runs quite well with it.

Answer 3

Check your boot logs:

sudo journalctl --boot > boot.log

Sometimes there is stuff that broke (but does not prevent normal booting) which can add to delays. You will be looking for lines that contain "error", "warning" etc