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Any modern, major browser will bloat your install size & minimum system requirements (if you want to actually use the software you've got, that is). I recently

Any modern, major browser will bloat your install size & minimum system requirements (if you want to actually use the software you've got, that is). I recently used a very minimal install of Void on a machine that crushes what I had in, say, 2005, on a performance basis (2GB memory, dual-core Celeron clocked over 1Ghz, solid-state disk) and the whole system was slooooow and choppy even using mostly suckless software like dwm, including their Surf (webkit-based but otherwise as minimal as it gets) browser—if I opened even one "web app" or more than a couple lighter pages at once. If you remove the requirement for a modern Web experience, we used to fit pretty damn good GUI operating systems on single live-boot floppy disks (QNX had one of these, IIRC, and it was great—much better UI responsiveness under load than a Linux desktop, kinda like BeOS but even tinier)

morpheos137 5y ago
For my daily driver I run Openbsd 6.9 on a thinkpad from 2008 with a spinning disk drive. It runs lightning quick and I have a modern web browser (Firefox 88). Only thing that is non-stock is the ram size has been increased in capacity but I rarely use all of it (only if I have like 50+ browser tabs open) Just a guess but never counted it. I think the keys to a fast desktop experience is -stay away from linux. The kernel and most distros suffer from kitchensinkitis. -don't use a heavy window manager. I use a custom configuration of Motif (it works and does not get in the way). With quality software old tech is still more than competent today. I can watch HD youtube videos too if I want. Office suites and programs like inkscape work fine. This is a 2 core machine. If I need more compute power I can use the cloud.
- handrous 5y ago
  > -stay away from linux. The kernel and most distros suffer from kitchensinkitis. > -don't use a heavy window manager. I use a custom configuration of Motif (it works and does not get in the way). Yeah, that's why I picked Void. It's only a little fatter than Alpine, but better-suited to desktop use. Agreed that Linux generally has never (in the 20ish years I've used it, anyway) felt high-performance, exactly, on a workstation, but Void keeps out the garbage services Linux has accumulated over the years, unless you install them yourself, so gets it to a point where it's only slightly fatter than circa 2000 Linux (kernel's grown larger, no getting around that). Used dwm because it's extremely light. Certainly Gnome wouldn't have worked, to pick the worst possible option (resource-use wise). Overall, Linux continues to feel like it does very poorly (in a workstation/desktop context, anyway) any time there's any contention for resources whatsoever, including just multiple things needing CPU cycles. Which is... kinda a shitty way to be, for a multitasking operating system. Maybe I'd have had better luck with a BSD, I dunno. It felt OK to use, though, as long as I avoided the Web. I think that machine's going back to being a Lakka box under my TV, but next time I'm on something relatively weak maybe I'll cycle through a couple of the BSDs to see if any of them work better for me.

morpheos137 5y ago

For my daily driver I run Openbsd 6.9 on a thinkpad from 2008 with a spinning disk drive. It runs lightning quick and I have a modern web browser (Firefox 88). Only thing that is non-stock is the ram size has been increased in capacity but I rarely use all of it (only if I have like 50+ browser tabs open) Just a guess but never counted it. I think the keys to a fast desktop experience is -stay away from linux. The kernel and most distros suffer from kitchensinkitis. -don't use a heavy window manager. I use a custom configuration of Motif (it works and does not get in the way). With quality software old tech is still more than competent today. I can watch HD youtube videos too if I want. Office suites and programs like inkscape work fine. This is a 2 core machine. If I need more compute power I can use the cloud.

handrous 5y ago
> -stay away from linux. The kernel and most distros suffer from kitchensinkitis. > -don't use a heavy window manager. I use a custom configuration of Motif (it works and does not get in the way). Yeah, that's why I picked Void. It's only a little fatter than Alpine, but better-suited to desktop use. Agreed that Linux generally has never (in the 20ish years I've used it, anyway) felt high-performance, exactly, on a workstation, but Void keeps out the garbage services Linux has accumulated over the years, unless you install them yourself, so gets it to a point where it's only slightly fatter than circa 2000 Linux (kernel's grown larger, no getting around that). Used dwm because it's extremely light. Certainly Gnome wouldn't have worked, to pick the worst possible option (resource-use wise). Overall, Linux continues to feel like it does very poorly (in a workstation/desktop context, anyway) any time there's any contention for resources whatsoever, including just multiple things needing CPU cycles. Which is... kinda a shitty way to be, for a multitasking operating system. Maybe I'd have had better luck with a BSD, I dunno. It felt OK to use, though, as long as I avoided the Web. I think that machine's going back to being a Lakka box under my TV, but next time I'm on something relatively weak maybe I'll cycle through a couple of the BSDs to see if any of them work better for me.