I have been using a Raspberry Pi 4 running Ubuntu as my desktop for almost a year now. I don’t use it for anything too heavy and it has been adequate. But just adequate. I started doing a bit of coding and became more and more frustrated with performance and instability. At first I blamed the Google Chrome browser, a known memory hog. I was seeing 80% of my memory used (I have 4 GB) and that seemed to be at the root of the problem. But I noticed lots of cycles and memory were being taken up by some built in calendar application. It seems this is part of the Ubuntu Evolution email / calendar default application. it also seems like it is difficult to remove (come on, Ubuntu). I did finally find a good way to remove Evolution and since then, memory use is half of what it was and performance is noticeably better.
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Steven A. Guccione 
Now that you have free memory, consume a bit of it by creating some RAM disks to avoid SD Flash wear-down. Move your high-access temporary directories to RAM. For example, modify your /etc/fstab with the following:
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs nodev,nosuid,size=5M 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nodev,nosuid,size=45M 0 0
tmpfs /var/log tmpfs nodev,nosuid,size=60M 0 0
By doing so, your Pi (flash) will live a long healthy life.
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Wow, you are hard core. Funny we are both Pi Heads now. We will have to compare notes. I run Ubuntu 20 on my desktop but decided Rasberian (or whatever it is called these days) was enough for little stuff on the Zero. I originally booted Ubuntu from a USB HDD but it was a bit clunky and I went back to OS on the flash and ./home and my media archive on HDD. I heard the boot from USB is fixed, but I sorta like my arrangement. Did worry about flash wear and will give the ram disk a look. Of course flash is cheap these days 😀
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