Ubuntu – Unity – Reduce RAM usage

You can easily install and try out different desktop environments (instead of the default, Unity). Once installed, you can switch between different desktop environments at the log-in screen (there is an icon near your name, which, when clicked, allows you to select).

Probably in your case, with 1GB ram, I would suggest the lubuntu desktop (based on LXDE). To install, open a terminal and type

sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop

If you don't want the whole environment, you can install LXDE by itself

sudo apt-get install lxde

Most everything will be the same but you'll have a new look that is less memory intensive (see many screenshots HERE). Firefox will be there, and the terminal will look a little different.

If you don't like the LXDE look, you can read about other desktop environments HERE. Options include Xfce (Xubuntu) and KDE (Kubuntu).

Be conscious that some system monitors don't factor in cache and buffering. The is where the system transparently uses RAM to store things from disk, to make their second access faster. The cache is automagically reduced in size if you need more RAM. See my free output:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         24110      19949       4161        366        900      14299
-/+ buffers/cache:       4749      19361
Swap:            0          0          0

At a glance it might look like I'm using almost 20GB of RAM, but 14GB of that is cache. It's the second line of values that show the actual system usage 4.5 used and 19.5 free.