How do you make KB perform better?

[jacatone]

I'm running KB on an old ASUS laptop with max ram of 4GB. Tried to optimize performance with some Ubuntu tweaks which has helped. Couldn't get the swap file increase to work I guess because of KDE. Is there one for this distro?

[Schwarzer Kater]

What have you already done and what do you want to do - and why?
There are different methods of optimization for different purposes…

[claydoh]

I thought you were looking for keyboard tweaks, not Kubuntu or general Plasma/Linux ones

Couldn't get the swap file increase to work I guess because of KDE. Is there one for this distro?

I don't know what you mean here. The desktop environment has nothing to do with swap, that is a system level thing.

Maybe point us to whatever tutorials or pages you used, and what specific things you have tried, exactly?
What CPU and Graphics do you have? If Nvidia, you may need to install their proprietary drivers -- but this depends on the card, older ones may not be supported by the current ones from Nvidia.

What specifically isn't performing well?

4Gb of ram is OK, for general purpose desktop stuff. More is always better, but if you are at the max, I am thinking your system is quite old/lower-spec?

1) One thing to do is to turn off desktop search. That will reduce the drive 'churn' as it indexes your files. The system is known to be a huge resource hog on some systems.
if your graphics are weak, you might try disabling some desktop effects, though KDE will at least some of that on its own.

2) The amount of swap may not be a thing you need to increase, but you may want to decrease your system's tendency to start using it too early or aggressively.

There is a tweak you can use to reduce this co-called 'swappiness' value:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq#What_is_swappiness_and_how_do_I_change_it. 3F

You can follow the instructions there to test and set the value.
Don't use a value of 0, it doesn't help at all, 10 is a very good value.

But you don't need to use the command line to edit the file, and you won't have gedit installed anyway. That is the text editor in Gnome.
Just open the file /etc/sysctl.conf with Kate (no sudo required), edit it to add this line to the bottom: vm.swappiness=10
Save, and enter your password when prompted.
This will keep you from accessing swap too early, and slowing your drive down.