3 ms·

I see a lot of people asking for a light distro and then they are disappointed because the performance is not what they expected. When you use a modern browser

I see a lot of people asking for a light distro and then they are disappointed because the performance is not what they expected. When you use a modern browser, your lightweight distro doesn't matter anymore. The web stack is heavy, even if sites are coded with performance in mind.

onlywicked 5y ago
Completely agree.
imensia 5y ago
Definitely this, htop shows the pain. I repurposed an old laptop for occasional video watching, running a small debian. Firefox or chrome are huge compared to everything else. The other factor is that high video resolution eats the machine. youtube-dl (480px) + mpv is much nicer than streaming in a browser.
DantesKite 5y ago
That's a good point. Maybe I'll try Mighty. Looks promising.
avl999 5y ago
OS/Desktop environment does matter. It is going to be the single biggest thing that competes for resource if you only intend to use the machine for what the OP wants. Most websites still work OK on slow machines (my travel laptop was one and it could handle 90% of the websites just fine). OS/Desktop env is often the biggest sink. That machine for example would hit 75% CPU on windows 10 just idling which didn't leave enough room for anything else. Wiped it with Ubuntu + Gnome and it went to ~25% CPU usage while idling. Switched to Ubuntu + XFCE less that 3% while idling. The only website I had a problem with was Patreon.