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by swiley 2158 days ago
Firefox is definitely slow on some of these smaller machines. Although a delay between app switches sounds like some virtual memory got paged out (either swap or executable pages got evicted to make room for FS cache.)

EDIT: apparently they’re shipping with plasma as the DE? Yeah that’s going to be slow.
2 comments
hedora 2157 days ago
Firefox is unbearably slow on everything including high-end Xeons if you don’t have a video accelerator (think headless VNC).

Perhaps the video driver or compositing is misconfigured?

Firefox is my default browser, and I’ve found Firefox to be fine on low end machines as long as it can use the video card properly.

Chrome tends to have better compatibility with chomebook-class hardware for obvious reasons.

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swiley 2157 days ago
The experience is a few years old now but I spent a year in college running Firefox on a celeron netbook with just the EFI framebuffer (anything else would crash on boot) and it was totally usable unless you opened google sheets. On my ryzen desktop that I built during the lockdown (after baking some bread heh) it’s very snappy. IME chrome (on GNU/Linux anyway) is usually much worse than Firefox unless you’re in the habit of opening hundreds (at least) of tabs.
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KozmoNau7 2157 days ago
>EDIT: apparently they’re shipping with plasma as the DE? Yeah that’s going to be slow.

KDE Plasma feels snappy even on a Core 2 Duo with Intel graphics, in my experience.

This myth of KDE as some kind of bloated lumbering beast really needs to die out. Install KDE Neon or openSUSE and give it a spin. You'll be surprised.

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swiley 2157 days ago
I think most people who say it’s slow are comparing it to xterm+cwm (or xterm+fvwm or whatever) which it will probably never beat. I installed dolphin the other day so my girlfriend can use my computers and that still does a lot of stuff which can be pretty slow depending on the hardware.
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KozmoNau7 2157 days ago
Anything's going to be slow in comparison to a minimalist X for people who really just want to have a bunch of terminals on screen at once and barely anything else.

KDE (and the other DEs) offer a whole lot more than that, obviously :-) Dolphin does do thumbnails and all of type of stuff, but it's not really a heavy application in itself, it just does a lot of disk-intensive tasks.

Obviously generating thumbnails for a whole folder of photos is going to take a little while on an eMMC drive, just like it takes a little while to get a list of all the shared folders on a network.

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