[tomxor]

> > Alt-tabbing between Firefox and a terminal takes one second, as does switching between Firefox tabs.

> This is not my experience at all. I do not notice undue delays switching between applications (do not use slack).

I do wonder how much of his experience might be slack + gnome or KDE, some desktop apps are just horribly bloated because they can get away with it. Also modern DEs are just massive, most people don't realise how much resources they take up because compared to 25 years ago we all have x86 super computers.

I find slack to be absurdly slow for what is fundamentally just a text based web app and yet I'm using a 1yr old XPS with an 8th gen intel CPU... i run i3wm and keep things very minimal, yet I still find myself waiting seconds for slack to do stuff.

[pantaloony]

Gnome is crashy, gobbles resources, incredibly laggy, and drops frames on my beast of a newish hex-core machine. I've switched to KDE in a VM on Win10 (some of the crashes were Linux graphics drivers, not entirely Gnome's fault, though some were Gnome—running in a VM makes them go away entirely, and also all my bluetooth stuff stays paired much better since Linux doesn't even know it's bluetooth) and it feels 4x as responsive on literally half the hardware, and under virtualization, as Gnome did.

I recently trialed a 2GB memory (!) dual-core Celeron minipc as a workstation, and if I could have solved all the 4k 2x scaling issues without spending hours (more) on it or resorting to a too-heavy-for-the-hardware DE, and gotten 60hz out of it rather than 30, I'd probably have upgraded the RAM to its max of 8GB and been totally happy on it. Void Linux with suckless tools made it feel blazing fast, as long as I avoided webshit (so, Sublime over VSCode, keep Slack the hell away from it, use a real email client rather than a webpage, that kind of thing). All browsers felt too slow to even launch except Surf and qute, and the latter was a tad slower and jankier than Surf so I settled on that, but it was fine as long as I avoided the kind of pages that eat a couple hundred MB and burn cycles for no clear reason (which is lots of them, sadly). I bet I could have made it work even better if I'd looked into adding a disable/enable JS toggle, defaulting to off, and maybe some kind of click-to-load-media thing, but it was surprisingly usable as it was. FF and Chromium were far too heavy to launch with no page loaded, of course. Man I miss pre-2.0 Firefox, when it was light and fast.

[blihp]

That's a big part of the issue. Just running a desktop browser like Firefox on these ARM devices is an exercise in pain. While they technically run, they would be described as sluggish on a good day. Then trying to visit a 'heavy' desktop-oriented website will just bring everything to a grinding halt.

[CameronNemo]

Exactly. IME HN or text.npr.org will fly, old reddit / readthedocs / other light js does fine, and SPAs like new reddit and Slack crawl.

[nyanpasu64]

I recently discovered that i.reddit.com or reddit.com/.compact is the "old mobile interface" and a lot lighter than even old Reddit.

[KozmoNau7]

I recently set up a new HTPC/server/NAS for the living room. It runs FTP, SMB/NFS shares, a DLNA server and a few other assorted things, and a Btrfs RAID1 storage pool. For HTPC duties, I just use the standard KDE desktop in openSUSE and SMPlayer/mpv with some tweaks (I'm not a huge fan of how Kodi works).

As is, right now sitting at the KDE desktop with default settings, total memory usage is 613MB.

This myth that KDE is bloated and heavy really needs to die out. It may have been true in the early KDE4 versions, but that's a long time ago.