5 ms·

A few years ago I doggedly tried to switch to Nyxt for everyday use. I really liked the concept, but at the time, it was too buggy, and constantly crashed on me

A few years ago I doggedly tried to switch to Nyxt for everyday use. I really liked the concept, but at the time, it was too buggy, and constantly crashed on me. I'm going give it another shot.

nextos 2y ago
Nyxt is very promising, and I hope it gains momentum. The obvious advantage of Nyxt is programmability and keyboard-driven workflows. However, I use old hardware, and it's a bit slow and laggy. Chromium behaves the same way, so I imagine this is due to WebKit and Blink being significantly heavier than Gecko. Firefox is really snappy on old hardware, at least when running Linux, and uses a modest amount of memory.
- dotancohen 2y ago
  What's considered old nowadays? My current desktop had some ~3Ghz AMD processor from ~2020, I don't even remember what it is. Maybe 16 GiB of memory. Runs Firefox and Jetbrains good enough that I've not had to consider upgrading. I use a Debian based distro.
  - olejorgenb 2y ago
    Not GP, but I have an i5 from around 2015. 4 cores, no hyper threading), 32GB ram. And it's still good enough for most things. Adding ram and a decent SDD gave it many extra years. In the prosess of switching it out completely now though.
    - chickenbigmac 2y ago
      What kind of work do you do with those specs? I have a machine from around the same period with similar upgrades and I feel that it really is good enough, especially if you don't play video games.
      - wafflemaker 2y ago
        I had a similar CPU (i5 4690k) and it would have been good for a few more years, if not the 3080 I once bought after a fight with my wife. Old CPU was just slowing it too much.
      - olejorgenb 2y ago
        It's actually the machine I use when working from home and it works fine. PyCharm IDE on a moderately big project. We've recently focused on moving towards fully type hinted code base, using pyright as the checker/LSP. Which means I use a good-enough-but-not-great plugin which makes pycharm use pyright instead of the buggy heuristic based built in type "engine". And this is noticeable slower, which is part of my motivation for upgrading. Other part is to be able to play a few games. I could probably just upgrade my GPU, but I'm not sure if it's even possible (outdated PCI port on my MB I think) without getting something second hand. Third part is that I want to play more with the new NLP technology which is rapidly reaching a point where it should be possible to do a lot of cool stuff. And I want as much as possible to run locally. My current old CPU is i5-3570 CPU @ 3.40GHz
  - nextos 2y ago
    OP here, running an i5-4250U. A 10-11 year old low-power CPU and a SATA SSD, definitely quite slow by current standards.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Hmm for me on BSD it's the opposite. But every release something breaks in Firefox' GPU acceleration so I've kinda stopped trying to fix it. I assume chromium handles that better. Though I don't use it much.
- stragies 2y ago
  Is this because Nyxt is an Electron App? (Is it?) The github commit log mentions it. Or is that just a "variant" of Nyxt?
  - k4rli 2y ago
    Fortunately GTK. Contributing manual only says that Electron support is experimental.
    - stragies 2y ago
      Cool, thanks. So there is the flatpak version, the Electron version, and the GTK version? Is there an easy way to install the native GTK version on recent Debian(+backports)? Or only "make && make install"?
      - nextos 2y ago
        Install Nix and you can launch Nyxt, and many other things, without even installing them in Debian. In case of Nyxt, once Nix is installed, just run nix run nixpkgs#nyxt.
- srid 2y ago
  > The obvious advantage of Nyxt is programmability and keyboard-driven workflows. Example real-world workflows that highlight the advantage of Nyxt over other browsers?
- aruggirello 2y ago
  Firefox with ViolentMonkey and uBlock Origin is my go to solution. I keep hundreds of tabs open, Chrome|ium is simply a memory hog.
  - nextos 2y ago
    I used Greasemonkey for some time. What do you find ViolentMonkey useful for these days?
    - aruggirello 2y ago
      You can find a quick comparison here: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e6e7m2/greasemonkey_tampermonkey_violentmonkey_which_one/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e6e7m2/greasemonk...
irthomasthomas 2y ago
It's been my default browser for about a year. Most bugs have been fixed. Only twitter still crashes it.

A few years ago I doggedly tried to switch to Nyxt for everyday use. I really liked the concept, but at the time, it was too buggy, and constantly crashed on me. I'm going give it another shot.

nextos 2y ago

Nyxt is very promising, and I hope it gains momentum. The obvious advantage of Nyxt is programmability and keyboard-driven workflows. However, I use old hardware, and it's a bit slow and laggy. Chromium behaves the same way, so I imagine this is due to WebKit and Blink being significantly heavier than Gecko. Firefox is really snappy on old hardware, at least when running Linux, and uses a modest amount of memory.

dotancohen 2y ago
What's considered old nowadays? My current desktop had some ~3Ghz AMD processor from ~2020, I don't even remember what it is. Maybe 16 GiB of memory. Runs Firefox and Jetbrains good enough that I've not had to consider upgrading. I use a Debian based distro.
- olejorgenb 2y ago
  Not GP, but I have an i5 from around 2015. 4 cores, no hyper threading), 32GB ram. And it's still good enough for most things. Adding ram and a decent SDD gave it many extra years. In the prosess of switching it out completely now though.
  - chickenbigmac 2y ago
    What kind of work do you do with those specs? I have a machine from around the same period with similar upgrades and I feel that it really is good enough, especially if you don't play video games.
    - wafflemaker 2y ago
      I had a similar CPU (i5 4690k) and it would have been good for a few more years, if not the 3080 I once bought after a fight with my wife. Old CPU was just slowing it too much.
    - olejorgenb 2y ago
      It's actually the machine I use when working from home and it works fine. PyCharm IDE on a moderately big project. We've recently focused on moving towards fully type hinted code base, using pyright as the checker/LSP. Which means I use a good-enough-but-not-great plugin which makes pycharm use pyright instead of the buggy heuristic based built in type "engine". And this is noticeable slower, which is part of my motivation for upgrading. Other part is to be able to play a few games. I could probably just upgrade my GPU, but I'm not sure if it's even possible (outdated PCI port on my MB I think) without getting something second hand. Third part is that I want to play more with the new NLP technology which is rapidly reaching a point where it should be possible to do a lot of cool stuff. And I want as much as possible to run locally. My current old CPU is i5-3570 CPU @ 3.40GHz
- nextos 2y ago
  OP here, running an i5-4250U. A 10-11 year old low-power CPU and a SATA SSD, definitely quite slow by current standards.
wkat4242 2y ago
Hmm for me on BSD it's the opposite. But every release something breaks in Firefox' GPU acceleration so I've kinda stopped trying to fix it. I assume chromium handles that better. Though I don't use it much.
stragies 2y ago
Is this because Nyxt is an Electron App? (Is it?) The github commit log mentions it. Or is that just a "variant" of Nyxt?
- k4rli 2y ago
  Fortunately GTK. Contributing manual only says that Electron support is experimental.
  - stragies 2y ago
    Cool, thanks. So there is the flatpak version, the Electron version, and the GTK version? Is there an easy way to install the native GTK version on recent Debian(+backports)? Or only "make && make install"?
    - nextos 2y ago
      Install Nix and you can launch Nyxt, and many other things, without even installing them in Debian. In case of Nyxt, once Nix is installed, just run nix run nixpkgs#nyxt.
srid 2y ago
> The obvious advantage of Nyxt is programmability and keyboard-driven workflows. Example real-world workflows that highlight the advantage of Nyxt over other browsers?
aruggirello 2y ago
Firefox with ViolentMonkey and uBlock Origin is my go to solution. I keep hundreds of tabs open, Chrome|ium is simply a memory hog.
- nextos 2y ago
  I used Greasemonkey for some time. What do you find ViolentMonkey useful for these days?
  - aruggirello 2y ago
    You can find a quick comparison here: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e6e7m2/greasemonkey_tampermonkey_violentmonkey_which_one/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e6e7m2/greasemonk...

irthomasthomas 2y ago

It's been my default browser for about a year. Most bugs have been fixed. Only twitter still crashes it.