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I always refrain from talking in Firefox threads because my use case is so different from the HN crowd, but still... I have a netbook with 1Gb RAM. It was a ha

I always refrain from talking in Firefox threads because my use case is so different from the HN crowd, but still... I have a netbook with 1Gb RAM. It was a handout from the owner, as it was painfully slow even after cleaning and tweaking the Win 7 install. Eventually, the owner got a new beefier laptop and I got the netbook. Long story short: I put Xubuntu on it, and it's still my daily driver and main computer 6 years in. I have always used Firefox and, believe this 1Gb RAM multitasker, it's getting noticeably better year after year. Thank you mozillians! edit: i mean ubuntians, debianists, xfcers, fossers, hners, party people!

quickthrower2 8y ago
Do you do any coding on that machine? If so, very cool.
- isostatic 8y ago
  If it can run something as hungry as a webbrowser, of course you can do coding. The resources to run vim (or even emacs) are tiny in today's world. You probably wont be doing any 3D work or massive amounts of video manipulation, but even in the latter case it will be more than powerful enough.
  - quickthrower2 8y ago
    I was thinking more of compilation times, but of course if you write JS for example in VIM then this is not an issue (given that it can run a browser).
    - severine 8y ago
      Yeah, when I've tried, those kind of things seemed like could get really annoying, but for those I have a Proxmox install in another handout (4Gb RAM laptop with broken screen) :) The netbook runs Sublime Text nicely.
    - isostatic 8y ago
      Do people write compiled programs any more? (en-mass) Especially large ones? I remember compiling a 2.4 kernel on a 486 once, only kernel to suppose the PCMCIA network card. It didn't go quickly. If you really want to compile the program, vou can always do the compilation on a server.
      - kbart 8y ago
        Of course they do. Where do you think you get your kernels, drivers, firmware for various IoT from etc.? Compiling a small (~100 MB), custom OS purely (as much as it's possible) from source code can still take hours even on modern laptop.
        isostatic 8y ago
        Well yes, of course, however as a percentage of people writing code, how many write in a traditional compile-once run-many language which are large enough projects they take a significant amount of time to compile. When dkms recompiles one custome module I use on an 8 year old laptop it takes a few seconds. Even when you're working on projects that take a long time (say on ffmpeg), you're not typically recompiling the entire thing each time. On the other hand doing a full build for all architectures takes hours on a desktop, so is far more sensible to ship off to a build service running elsewhere on the network. Large scale compiling on a desktop machine feels like a fairly niche problem compared with the vast majority of "code" written today.
      - 0xfeba 8y ago
        c/c++ are still very much alive and now we have rust, golang, etc. So yeah. Even JS is "compiled" now with webpack.
- severine 8y ago
  No, I don't, but as isostatic says, I think I could. Of course there are tradeoffs when using such a machine but the point is that "modern" web browsing is a resources hog and GNU/Linux+Firefox makes it possible for everyone.
wilsonnb2 8y ago
I'm curious as to why you haven't replaced it with something with better performance. It just seems masochistic to use a netbook with such a pathetic amount of RAM on it as your main computer.
- severine 8y ago
  You should see my bike :) More seriously, both personal and economic issues make this a reasonable tradeoff for me. I assure you it has nothing of masochistic, though maybe it has a stoic streak. edit: Again, to not derail the point, Firefox works great, even multitasking, in a low-powered netbook.

quickthrower2 8y ago

Do you do any coding on that machine? If so, very cool.

isostatic 8y ago
If it can run something as hungry as a webbrowser, of course you can do coding. The resources to run vim (or even emacs) are tiny in today's world. You probably wont be doing any 3D work or massive amounts of video manipulation, but even in the latter case it will be more than powerful enough.
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  I was thinking more of compilation times, but of course if you write JS for example in VIM then this is not an issue (given that it can run a browser).
  - severine 8y ago
    Yeah, when I've tried, those kind of things seemed like could get really annoying, but for those I have a Proxmox install in another handout (4Gb RAM laptop with broken screen) :) The netbook runs Sublime Text nicely.
  - isostatic 8y ago
    Do people write compiled programs any more? (en-mass) Especially large ones? I remember compiling a 2.4 kernel on a 486 once, only kernel to suppose the PCMCIA network card. It didn't go quickly. If you really want to compile the program, vou can always do the compilation on a server.
    - kbart 8y ago
      Of course they do. Where do you think you get your kernels, drivers, firmware for various IoT from etc.? Compiling a small (~100 MB), custom OS purely (as much as it's possible) from source code can still take hours even on modern laptop.
      - isostatic 8y ago
        Well yes, of course, however as a percentage of people writing code, how many write in a traditional compile-once run-many language which are large enough projects they take a significant amount of time to compile. When dkms recompiles one custome module I use on an 8 year old laptop it takes a few seconds. Even when you're working on projects that take a long time (say on ffmpeg), you're not typically recompiling the entire thing each time. On the other hand doing a full build for all architectures takes hours on a desktop, so is far more sensible to ship off to a build service running elsewhere on the network. Large scale compiling on a desktop machine feels like a fairly niche problem compared with the vast majority of "code" written today.
    - 0xfeba 8y ago
      c/c++ are still very much alive and now we have rust, golang, etc. So yeah. Even JS is "compiled" now with webpack.
severine 8y ago
No, I don't, but as isostatic says, I think I could. Of course there are tradeoffs when using such a machine but the point is that "modern" web browsing is a resources hog and GNU/Linux+Firefox makes it possible for everyone.

wilsonnb2 8y ago

I'm curious as to why you haven't replaced it with something with better performance. It just seems masochistic to use a netbook with such a pathetic amount of RAM on it as your main computer.

severine 8y ago
You should see my bike :) More seriously, both personal and economic issues make this a reasonable tradeoff for me. I assure you it has nothing of masochistic, though maybe it has a stoic streak. edit: Again, to not derail the point, Firefox works great, even multitasking, in a low-powered netbook.