[CoolGuySteve]

I'm not sure why, but my Ubuntu image with unity always thinks it should run at 10fps. I had to hard set the frame rate in compizConfig at 60 fps to get it to run smoothly.

Putting it here because it took me quite a while to figure out why it was 3D accelerated but still so slow.

[cptskippy]

Any VM I provision seems to be setup by default with 1mb of video memory and 3D Acceleration off. The option to enable 2D Acceleration is greyed out.

The funny thing is that VB complains about this configuration whenever you load the console.

Have you tried increasing the video memory for the VM or enabling acceleration?

[Siecje]

Not sure if it is related (could be a Cinnamon problem) but when I run the Cinnamon desktop environment in a VirtualBox VM it says it is using software rendering.

[jeffbr13]

Changing the pointing device from default touch mode to PS/2 mouse in Machine>Settings>System fixed that for me. Seems to be the default for Ubuntu machines in recent versions.

[ctrlrsf]

I don't think mine ran at 10fps, but definitely felt laggy. Especially rendering Firefox.

[zouhair]

i3wm all the way