3 ms·

I’m with you up through XMonad, Emacs, and XTerm but... Firefox? Right now I’m currently struggling with an attempt to use a circa 2015 Dell XPS 13 as a Linux-b

I’m with you up through XMonad, Emacs, and XTerm but... Firefox? Right now I’m currently struggling with an attempt to use a circa 2015 Dell XPS 13 as a Linux-based daily driver, and Firefox is nigh unusable with even only a few tabs, 4GB of RAM apparently doesn’t go far enough, swap degrades performance even with SSD but turning it off just means stuff dies. I’d love to find out I just set things up wrong but I’m shocked to discover I was getting better performance out of Windows.

generalizations 5y ago
I wonder what else you're running on that machine. I have an i5 X201 from 2010 with 2GB of ram (and an SSD), and I regularly push it with 50-ish Firefox tabs. However, I'm using i3 instead of gnome, and void instead of debian et. al.
- wwweston 5y ago
  It's Lubuntu, so I think the desktop is LXQt; I'd assume it's not that. About the only unusual thing I can think of is that I'm trying to use dropbox. It dies periodically, so maybe it's hungry, but even without it running, less than a dozen FF tabs can bog down the machine (and I gave up on Chromium entirely). Would totally welcome any tips from people confident I can do better.
  - generalizations 5y ago
    Honestly, I wouldn't discount the desktop or the OS. On a fresh reboot, htop shows my cpu usage across the four cores as 0, 0.7, 0, and 1.3%. That's not a lot of background activity. I won't claim to have late-model-Ryzen performance; there is an SSD performance hit when the machine uses some of the 16gb of swap I gave it. The website data has to go somewhere. But I haven't found it to become unusable, except when I restore and load all my tabs simultaneously. After it's all downloaded though, pulling web pages out of swap is pretty fast. Personally, I found the best things for performance were an SSD, i3+void, and a ton of swap space. Pretty much in that order. Edit: I looked up the processors of the two machines. Ironically, all else being equal, that X201 is a full 20% faster than yours (2.2 vs 2.66).

generalizations 5y ago

I wonder what else you're running on that machine. I have an i5 X201 from 2010 with 2GB of ram (and an SSD), and I regularly push it with 50-ish Firefox tabs. However, I'm using i3 instead of gnome, and void instead of debian et. al.

wwweston 5y ago
It's Lubuntu, so I think the desktop is LXQt; I'd assume it's not that. About the only unusual thing I can think of is that I'm trying to use dropbox. It dies periodically, so maybe it's hungry, but even without it running, less than a dozen FF tabs can bog down the machine (and I gave up on Chromium entirely). Would totally welcome any tips from people confident I can do better.
- generalizations 5y ago
  Honestly, I wouldn't discount the desktop or the OS. On a fresh reboot, htop shows my cpu usage across the four cores as 0, 0.7, 0, and 1.3%. That's not a lot of background activity. I won't claim to have late-model-Ryzen performance; there is an SSD performance hit when the machine uses some of the 16gb of swap I gave it. The website data has to go somewhere. But I haven't found it to become unusable, except when I restore and load all my tabs simultaneously. After it's all downloaded though, pulling web pages out of swap is pretty fast. Personally, I found the best things for performance were an SSD, i3+void, and a ton of swap space. Pretty much in that order. Edit: I looked up the processors of the two machines. Ironically, all else being equal, that X201 is a full 20% faster than yours (2.2 vs 2.66).