| I have mostly old hardware (the best computers I have is a smartphone and a macmini from 2012). I'm disappointed when I load newer Linux distros and they appear slower. Even though I now have SSDs. Browsers are really greedy. I have a machine with 2GB of ram and a single core CPU. It's a low power rig. But cannot run Windows 10, it just about did when I first installed it. Debian runs better, but a browser kills it. It's a one app only. We had someone donate us a Windows 3.1 rig once, at the time we had 600MHZ Windows 2000 machines and ME. And we were gob smacked at how fast the 3.1 machine was on some ancient hardware. Windows always used to have that fresh lightweight install vibe. But as soon as it started indexing, doing updates, and virus scanning it would drag to nothing. Along with all those system tray apps that would take an age to fire up. Partial suspend to disk made things boot faster. Like not doing the whole driver scan thing on boot. I don't know if Linux has ever taken this on board. It's a blessing and a curse as Windows doesn't like being ported to another machine, whereas my Debian disks I can swap between some desktops and laptops without much issue. There's also that weird delayed animation thing, that is meant to feel like polish. But slows down desktops. Weird animation effects and what not. I tend to run XFCE and turn off any thing like that. I'm using a Chromebook right now and this is an old machine, but still feels pretty snappy. Certainly weird and wonderful experiences between hardware. I have High Sierra on an SSD on my Mac Mini, and that's slower by far to boot than my Linux Arch box on the same age hardware. Having said that the UI always feels more responsive as it's tailored for that. Linux suffers lots for me with kcompactd or whatever it is. Some weird memory disk swap stuff. If I accidentally code an infinite loop my machine turns to complete mud, and takes about 5 minutes to recover. Whereas it boots to the browser in under 1minute. Weird huh? |
I put Alpine Linux on my laptop that has 1 GB of RAM and I can actually have a lot of stuff running at once, especially in the terminal (Emacs, SBCL, w3m, Deno).
But yes, opening Firefox consumes all available RAM until I have to power off the machine, sadly. The lightest weight, but functional browser, I've found is Midori, but I probably wouldn't trust it for, say, accessing my bank account.
It's depressing because I was initially blown away at how fast (and productive) old hardware can be... until I tried to use the web.