Canonical’s latest version of Ubuntu (23.04) hit the mirrors back in April. And if you like to live on the edge, you might well already be running it. It’s an intermediate release (with only nine months of support as opposed to the five years provided to major releases), so if you’re running the last LTS release (22.04), you may well prefer to stick with that. Either way, we’re going to take this opportunity to look at how you can streamline and slimline your Ubuntu install.

We’ll start by swapping Gnome for a lighter desktop environment, such as Xfce or LXQt. If you’re running Ubuntu Server, this probably won’t be of much interest, as you’re likely already running the lightest desktop possible (ie none). So if you’d like to run Ubuntu Server, though, either at home or in the cloud. It’s a great way to make use of an old machine or cheap virtual private server (VPS), so we’ll look at setting that up and reducing its memory footprint.

Finally, we’ll combine the two tactics and explain how to run a remote desktop so smoothly you wouldn’t know it was remote. Except you would, ’cos we told you. Anyway, it works with Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) or the more traditional VNC. And it’s a good excuse for us to show off what’s new in the latest Ubuntu and to augur what might be coming in future versions.

Ubuntu Large Lobster

owards the end of the halcyon era of the LXFDVD, we started to get concerned. And not T just because of the growing threat of global annihilation (which, in hindsight, was much tamer in 2020 than it is now). No, rather by the growing sizes of the Desktop Ubuntu ISO images. In days of yore, we’d never hesitate to include a new Ubuntu release on the DVD, but where not so long ago they were around 2GB (less than half of the space on our optical media), the last LTS release weighed in at a hefty 3.4GB.

It’s not fair to dismiss all this as bloat. As the kernel supports ever more hardware, it grows out of necessity. Additional firmware is required, too. In general, it would be silly to expect individual package sizes to do anything but increase over time. And naturally to pull in more and more dependencies as they evolve. Love ’em or hate ’em, the inclusion of Snaps (Canonical’s preferred package format) have increased Ubuntu’s footprint quite markedly as well. It will come as no surprise, then, that the latest ISO is larger still – around 4.5GiB (or 4.8GB). Making it too bulky for a regular LXFDVD, if that were still at thing.

The selection of GUI applications included in a default install is already pretty minimal. And if you really don’t want and media players (placing you firmly in a minority camp), the Minimal Install option has been available since 18.04. This shaves around half a gigabyte off the standard install size (which we carefully measured to be 11GB in the latest Ubuntu 23.04). New in Lunar Lobster is