I have just upgraded to a 5.3 kernel on Ubuntu, and it is very good to use. I tried the newest 4.15 kernel and my sound hardware was not detected, so I installed the 5.3 kernel instead. This is a great improvement. Removing the snapd service was a good way to speed up my Linux system, but the 5.3 kernel has good speed improvements as well. The only annoyance was that the kernel headers were not installed by default and I had to do this manually. But it does work now, after installing the kernel-headers package DKMS automatically built a NVidia kernel module and then it was installed properly. This is why Ubuntu is so good, the init system and associated scripts all work very well. I tried Venom Linux in a VMWare instance, but a package would not compile during a system upgrade and it was left in an unfinished state. Ubuntu or Debian are better alternatives. Or Gentoo, I mean it is no good if a simple system upgrade breaks due to one package not compiling. That should be fixed and not be a problem. But running an entire Linux distribution as one person is too much work.
It is better to use a distribution with more support. Even Gentoo has more reliability I am sure. The full system upgrade is quite involved, but it works. Venom Linux does boot absurdly fast and has no Systemd. But on Ubuntu 18.04, it is easy to install a newer kernel. Just run this command to install a nice new kernel.
sudo apt-get install linux-image-5.3.0-24-lowlatency linux-headers-5.3.0-24-lowlatency |
This will help with performance a tiny bit and give you newer kernel code and improvements. The MySQL and Docker services take the longest to start up on my system, and I do not even use them at all. Removing them is the best option, especially Docker. I have no use for that. I would rather run an LTS of Linux than Ubuntu 20.04, it is still supported for a while and I get updated packages when I upgrade with apt. How to completely remove the Docker service from Ubuntu. https://askubuntu.com/questions/935569/how-to-completely-uninstall-docker This really should help with your boot times on Ubuntu. And it is really not necessary for a modern Linux system.