6 ms·

> you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast. Maybe the HN crowd can but not your average or median computer users >

by mfer 7y ago

> you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast. Maybe the HN crowd can but not your average or median computer users > I remember turning on the computer and waiting for the motherboard company logo to finish flashing I still have computers that take some time to boot. Issue is, I just rarely power off/on. Instead the computers go to sleep which if much faster to come out of. Of all the tasks this is an uncommon one.

TheRealPomax 7y ago
Nah, I still can't set up a linux that's both graphical and feels snappy to this day.
- serverQuestion 7y ago
  could you do that in the past though?
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    I've been using Linux since... oh, 1999 or 2000, and I've never seen a Linux GUI desktop I'd describe as snappy and responsive. The best I've ever achieved is "not incredibly clunky" and that only by ensuring the graphical interface basically did nothing but run the current application or two I had open. I've seen BeOS, QNX, and (Apple) iOS graphical operating systems/environments that were consistently, remarkably snappy and responsive relative to comparable peers. That's... pretty much the entire list. CDE on a wonderfully powerful Solaris machine is close to making the cut. Never used Amiga but I hear it was good. Wanna talk about stability, not responsiveness and snappiness, you can add OSX/macOS to that list in addition to the above. It's not great but it's vastly better than anything else not on the above list. I've never, in 20 years, had a Linux GUI system that wasn't fairly crashy. "Oh it was just an app crash" or "oh X just quit but the OS is still up and you can restart it" or "oh some KDE daemon just shit the bed, restart X or do [arcane invocation] to put KDE back in a good state and it'll be fine" yeah OK well it's still a crash and I still lost stuff so it may as well have BSOD'd for all I care. Before I switched to macOS I was kinda blind to how bad it was because it was just normal. Modern Windows seems to be getting better on that front but I only use it for gaming so IDK. [EDIT] to be fair, if I hadn't experienced BeOS and QNX (on shitty hardware, mind you, even by the standards of the time when I ran them) then super-minimalist Linux GUIs might be what I'd consider "snappy and responsive". Those were just in a whole other league, and really reset my understanding of what was possible (but rarely achieved)
    - webmobdev 7y ago
      Your point about Linux GUIs is quite true. I've found DEs like Gnome and KDE to be more resource intensive and klunky. Some 8 years back, there was only one distro (I forget the name) that used FluxBox that was blazingly responsive but lacked intuitiveness. (I've heard i3 is also very fast, but I have never used it as I don't like tiling WM). Before corporates entered the Linux market (e.g., Red Hat and Canonical), Linux actually used to be faster than Windows. Today, I find Ubuntu (and most Ubuntu based distros) to be equal or sometimes worse than Windows on the same hardware. It just feels as "weighed down" as Windows. And yeah, you are absolutely right about BeOS - it felt revolutionary to run two sessions of a movie player on a 200Mhz powered system with 16 MB ram!
      - karatestomp 7y ago
        I'd love to know what BeOS did to achieve those magical-feeling results, and why it hasn't been copied by everyone else. I reckon it's gotta have a lot to do with process scheduling and how UI events are dispatched, but if it's mostly those couple things, why isn't every modern OS doing what BeOS did? There must have been trade-offs I guess but from the user's perspective it seemed to be 100% an improvement over everything else—it's not like multimedia took a backseat to user interaction, or parts of the UI lagged so others could feel fast, everything felt smoother, quicker, and more responsive. On single core machines with 1/16 the memory it takes to start Slack, too!
    - LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
      I have to disagree. The comparison you make is unfair. I experienced QNX and Beos too. But what could you really do with it out of the box, compared to a full blown Linux-distro? The 'feeling' of snappiness is a matter of carefully choosen defaults IMO. Almost nobody does that anymore. So have this lowest common denominator, and mostly crappy tools to change them from within the GUI, or have to dive down in the cesspool of myriads of different config files in different formats and places, and in addition an explosion of complexity of subtle interactions of several subsystems. Regarding the shitty hardware... The f-ing fastest desktop experience i ever had was somewhere in the late days of KDE 3, across NetBSD, ArchLinux and Gentoo, on Pentium3@933Mhz with 512MB RAM, onboard I815 Intel graphics(edit: with the 'superspecial' 4MB VRAM Dimm-thingy), and some IBM Deathstars. With the same toned down look across all three systems, and toolkits, instead of the usual teletubbyfication. What can i say? When your KDE 3 crashed you were holding it wrong, or it was somehow miscompiled, be it the optimization , or some libraries. For me it was rock solid and lightingly fast, at least in my configurations. The same can be seen nowadays with systemd and pulseaudio. They can be used if configured right. The question is if one wants to be hassled with that, if it isn't. /endrant
  - TheAdamAndChe 7y ago
    You could with xfce. You still can with xfce though, it's just that most people use gnome or kde.
    - Zardoz84 7y ago
      You know that actually KDE it's light like xfce?
      - TheAdamAndChe 7y ago
        Not in my experience. I tend to use older computers with crappy GPUs though.
- ryanlol 7y ago
  I run xmonad on Debian bullseye with 5.5.3-grsec kernel, it’s definitely snappy. There’s no perceptible input lag, even when testing using the iPhone slo-mo thingy. I mostly use Chromium, electrum, signal-desktop and urxvt. Everything goes to shit as soon as you install one of those “desktop environments” though.
  - TheRealPomax 7y ago
    The thing is, the only thing that makes a computer pleasant to use, as opposed to merely functional, is that "desktop environment".
    - ryanlol 7y ago
      How come? All I see is loads of unnecessary fluff. I for one find xmonad & co extremely pleasant to use even if there’s a slight learning curve. I really don’t see what Cinnamon, Gnome & co. have to offer (except to users who aren’t very technically oriented, who’d probably be more productive on OS X or Windows anyway)
  - tom75 7y ago
    No one can get any more the grsec patch... Post grsecurity/kconfig file on github or pastebin for view...
    - ryanlol 7y ago
      Buy it. Perhaps your employer will pay for it?
      - tom75 7y ago
        He only sells to the company, not to an individual. That's what I thought, you didn't...
- nvesp 7y ago
  Try Manjaro w/ cinnamon. I think it looks pretty good graphically out of the box and the latest stable release is still blazing fast on my old hp 8440p laptop with an old dual core i5 from the early 2010s. I dont know but cinnamon on Manjaro feels pretty damn snappy to me even on older hardware.
- webmobdev 7y ago
  On recent distros, I've found MX (mxlinux.org) to be quite responsive. They are now also experimenting with FluxBox ( https://mxlinux.org/blog/mx-fluxbox-2-0-settings-now-available/ https://mxlinux.org/blog/mx-fluxbox-2-0-settings-now-availab... ) and that really makes it quite snappy as it is very light on resources. Another distro I like is "Linux Mint Debian Edition" ( https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php ) that feels more "light-weight" than its Ubuntu derived counterpart Linux Mint.
redm 7y ago
> Maybe the HN crowd can but not your average or median computer users The median computer user and use cases from 1983 to 2020 are very different.
- mfer 7y ago
  I wasn't writing software or using computers in 1983. But, my uses cases in 1990 were pretty close to my personal use cases today. 1990, I think, was the year I wrote my first word processor. So I could write, save, edit, and share documents.

by mfer 7y ago

TheRealPomax 7y ago

Nah, I still can't set up a linux that's both graphical and feels snappy to this day.

serverQuestion 7y ago
could you do that in the past though?
- karatestomp 7y ago
  I've been using Linux since... oh, 1999 or 2000, and I've never seen a Linux GUI desktop I'd describe as snappy and responsive. The best I've ever achieved is "not incredibly clunky" and that only by ensuring the graphical interface basically did nothing but run the current application or two I had open. I've seen BeOS, QNX, and (Apple) iOS graphical operating systems/environments that were consistently, remarkably snappy and responsive relative to comparable peers. That's... pretty much the entire list. CDE on a wonderfully powerful Solaris machine is close to making the cut. Never used Amiga but I hear it was good. Wanna talk about stability, not responsiveness and snappiness, you can add OSX/macOS to that list in addition to the above. It's not great but it's vastly better than anything else not on the above list. I've never, in 20 years, had a Linux GUI system that wasn't fairly crashy. "Oh it was just an app crash" or "oh X just quit but the OS is still up and you can restart it" or "oh some KDE daemon just shit the bed, restart X or do [arcane invocation] to put KDE back in a good state and it'll be fine" yeah OK well it's still a crash and I still lost stuff so it may as well have BSOD'd for all I care. Before I switched to macOS I was kinda blind to how bad it was because it was just normal. Modern Windows seems to be getting better on that front but I only use it for gaming so IDK. [EDIT] to be fair, if I hadn't experienced BeOS and QNX (on shitty hardware, mind you, even by the standards of the time when I ran them) then super-minimalist Linux GUIs might be what I'd consider "snappy and responsive". Those were just in a whole other league, and really reset my understanding of what was possible (but rarely achieved)
  - webmobdev 7y ago
    Your point about Linux GUIs is quite true. I've found DEs like Gnome and KDE to be more resource intensive and klunky. Some 8 years back, there was only one distro (I forget the name) that used FluxBox that was blazingly responsive but lacked intuitiveness. (I've heard i3 is also very fast, but I have never used it as I don't like tiling WM). Before corporates entered the Linux market (e.g., Red Hat and Canonical), Linux actually used to be faster than Windows. Today, I find Ubuntu (and most Ubuntu based distros) to be equal or sometimes worse than Windows on the same hardware. It just feels as "weighed down" as Windows. And yeah, you are absolutely right about BeOS - it felt revolutionary to run two sessions of a movie player on a 200Mhz powered system with 16 MB ram!
    - karatestomp 7y ago
      I'd love to know what BeOS did to achieve those magical-feeling results, and why it hasn't been copied by everyone else. I reckon it's gotta have a lot to do with process scheduling and how UI events are dispatched, but if it's mostly those couple things, why isn't every modern OS doing what BeOS did? There must have been trade-offs I guess but from the user's perspective it seemed to be 100% an improvement over everything else—it's not like multimedia took a backseat to user interaction, or parts of the UI lagged so others could feel fast, everything felt smoother, quicker, and more responsive. On single core machines with 1/16 the memory it takes to start Slack, too!
  - LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
    I have to disagree. The comparison you make is unfair. I experienced QNX and Beos too. But what could you really do with it out of the box, compared to a full blown Linux-distro? The 'feeling' of snappiness is a matter of carefully choosen defaults IMO. Almost nobody does that anymore. So have this lowest common denominator, and mostly crappy tools to change them from within the GUI, or have to dive down in the cesspool of myriads of different config files in different formats and places, and in addition an explosion of complexity of subtle interactions of several subsystems. Regarding the shitty hardware... The f-ing fastest desktop experience i ever had was somewhere in the late days of KDE 3, across NetBSD, ArchLinux and Gentoo, on Pentium3@933Mhz with 512MB RAM, onboard I815 Intel graphics(edit: with the 'superspecial' 4MB VRAM Dimm-thingy), and some IBM Deathstars. With the same toned down look across all three systems, and toolkits, instead of the usual teletubbyfication. What can i say? When your KDE 3 crashed you were holding it wrong, or it was somehow miscompiled, be it the optimization , or some libraries. For me it was rock solid and lightingly fast, at least in my configurations. The same can be seen nowadays with systemd and pulseaudio. They can be used if configured right. The question is if one wants to be hassled with that, if it isn't. /endrant
- TheAdamAndChe 7y ago
  You could with xfce. You still can with xfce though, it's just that most people use gnome or kde.
  - Zardoz84 7y ago
    You know that actually KDE it's light like xfce?
    - TheAdamAndChe 7y ago
      Not in my experience. I tend to use older computers with crappy GPUs though.
ryanlol 7y ago
I run xmonad on Debian bullseye with 5.5.3-grsec kernel, it’s definitely snappy. There’s no perceptible input lag, even when testing using the iPhone slo-mo thingy. I mostly use Chromium, electrum, signal-desktop and urxvt. Everything goes to shit as soon as you install one of those “desktop environments” though.
- TheRealPomax 7y ago
  The thing is, the only thing that makes a computer pleasant to use, as opposed to merely functional, is that "desktop environment".
  - ryanlol 7y ago
    How come? All I see is loads of unnecessary fluff. I for one find xmonad & co extremely pleasant to use even if there’s a slight learning curve. I really don’t see what Cinnamon, Gnome & co. have to offer (except to users who aren’t very technically oriented, who’d probably be more productive on OS X or Windows anyway)
- tom75 7y ago
  No one can get any more the grsec patch... Post grsecurity/kconfig file on github or pastebin for view...
  - ryanlol 7y ago
    Buy it. Perhaps your employer will pay for it?
    - tom75 7y ago
      He only sells to the company, not to an individual. That's what I thought, you didn't...
nvesp 7y ago
Try Manjaro w/ cinnamon. I think it looks pretty good graphically out of the box and the latest stable release is still blazing fast on my old hp 8440p laptop with an old dual core i5 from the early 2010s. I dont know but cinnamon on Manjaro feels pretty damn snappy to me even on older hardware.
webmobdev 7y ago
On recent distros, I've found MX (mxlinux.org) to be quite responsive. They are now also experimenting with FluxBox ( https://mxlinux.org/blog/mx-fluxbox-2-0-settings-now-available/ https://mxlinux.org/blog/mx-fluxbox-2-0-settings-now-availab... ) and that really makes it quite snappy as it is very light on resources. Another distro I like is "Linux Mint Debian Edition" ( https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php ) that feels more "light-weight" than its Ubuntu derived counterpart Linux Mint.

redm 7y ago

> Maybe the HN crowd can but not your average or median computer users The median computer user and use cases from 1983 to 2020 are very different.

mfer 7y ago
I wasn't writing software or using computers in 1983. But, my uses cases in 1990 were pretty close to my personal use cases today. 1990, I think, was the year I wrote my first word processor. So I could write, save, edit, and share documents.