Ubuntu – Reduce interface effects to improve performance on 18.04

I have the same nvidia card (GeForce 6150SE nForce 430) and experienced the exact same problem as WPBloyd (desktop effects were very slow, but it was otherwise fine) using the nvidia driver.

I followed the instructions on this page in order to use the "Nouveau" driver (open-source driver for nvidia cards).

Problem: Need to fully remove -nvidia and installing or reinstall -nouveau from scratch

Here is a recipe which removes all old video drivers, and reinstalls nouveau:

sudo nvidia-settings --uninstall
sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia*
sudo apt-get remove --purge  xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
sudo apt-get install nvidia-common
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
sudo apt-get install --reinstall  xserver-xorg-core
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

(I copied what I used; it is the same as on the last link, except that I suppressed server-xorg-video-nv, libgl1-mesa-glx and libgl1-mesa-dri because they did not seem to exist anymore)

It worked for me, I hope this can help somebody else :)

Same happened to me. Make sure:

1. You have less to no Gnome extensions. They can kill your computer. So, disable all Gnome extensions to see if that helps.
2. Disable animations from Gnome Tweak. That made my desktop super fast.
3. Nvidia 396 is really laggy for me as well so use the 960 one.