For my personal computing needs I recently upgraded from the combination of an ancient i7 920 quad core desktop and a quad core Haswell laptop to a Ryzen 2700X

For my personal computing needs I recently upgraded from the combination of an ancient i7 920 quad core desktop and a quad core Haswell laptop to a Ryzen 2700X desktop and a pile of lovely disposable X220 Thinkpads. On the one hand, for software that's not complete garbage in terms of optimization (scientific software, video/audio software, games, my own code) the difference is staggering, I hadn't felt a change this drastic since I moved from Pentium 1 to Pentium 3. On the other hand, I now know that there is no amount of resources that will make a modern web browser or Electron app run well. The good news is that now that I feel I deserve good performance I've made an effort to get rid of most of the crap. Apart from disabling JS etc. by default and blocking everything I possibly can I have no solution for the browsers, sadly, but everything else is gone. The Thinkpads all run minimalistic Arch Linux setups and mostly work as thin clients, so overall every system I use is snappy and responsive, for the first time in a decade. I shouldn't have needed a hardware upgrade to return to common sense in computing, but it is good to know that with some discipline and a low tolerance for garbage it is still (mostly) possible to have a reasonable computing experience. Now, if only there was a usable browser out there...