How to disable animations in Ubuntu 16.04
From unity tweak tool go to General and switch off Windows animations as seen below:
If you don't have it, you can install it with sudo apt install unity-tweak-tool.
To super key animation you can try disable background blur, using the Unity Tweak Tool, disabling any suggestion, history, etc, can speed up the super key.
To alt-tab i don't know anything that can disable the effects, but in Unity Tweak Tool you can disable windows animation on the section Window Manager -> General, for me this is very significant to performance.
What you can do to is disable the shadows from windows.
It turned out I just needed to enable video acceleration in VirtualBox. This was more effective in speeding up my virtual Ubuntu than disabling animations.
- Shut down the guest OS.
- In VirtualBox Manager, right-click the VM.
- Go to Display.
- In the Screen tab, check "Enable 3D Acceleration."