[roryirvine]

Browsers and anything electron-based are your enemy.

Firefox is actually pretty good in low-memory situations, silently discarding tabs when under memory pressure, but the main benefit comes from being able to run proper adblocking. Chromium-based browsers just can't compete these days.

Otherwise, a bog standard Gnome-based Debian Trixie desktop should be pretty doable. I'm currently using an 8 GB machine with 3.7 GB RAM free - Firefox, evolution, gnome-calendar, and gnome-software are the only apps that using more than 100 MB, and none of them are obligatory.

[spijdar]

I haven't carefully profiled memory use, but in my experience, Chromium is so much more performant than Firefox on ARM devices that any difference isn't worth it. If you're using a lot of tabs, it might lean in Firefox's favor, but overall performance so strongly favors Chromium that I've given up trying to use Firefox on anything but my high performance machines. I'm not sure where the performance delta is coming from, but the whole UI and JavaScript anything are much more responsive on e.g. A73 cores with 4GB RAM.

[parlortricks]

Have you tried a firefox fork like Librewolf? Not saying it makes a difference but it feels faster on my desktop compared to regular firefox.

[fwip]

Seconding ad-blocking. I have a low-end phone (4GB ram, and a mediatek processor from 2018), and setting up DNS-based ad-blocking made a lot of sites go from unusable to usable.

[ge96]

Funny I'm using Ubuntu 24 i3 with vs code on a black 2008 Macbook

[sciencejerk]

How?

[ge96]

Just am, granted my app is basic JavaScript/Electron but yeah, I get these compulsions to buy old tech and use em. Like I bought 3 different ASUS Eee PC laptops and got pydantic ai to run on em with Python. It took hours to build the python wheels.

The 2008 MacBook has a weird smell, it has a new battery but yeah. thought it was perfume from the old owner but I guess it's a thing with these laptops.

I do have to use i3 though, Ubuntu's desktop freezes for a few seconds then continues on the Macbook.

[ge96]

Zooming a picture can crash the UI/make VS code go blank

[NooneAtAll3]

it's probably the "you only notice when it doesn't work" situation, but my experience with firefox on ram limit has been a lot about tabs forgetting the url in them

as in, I click "open in new tab", some time later I switch to them... only to get hit with "new tab", even though a moment ago it displayed tab name and I could right click -> bookmark to preemptively copy the address

[nine_k]

Try the "Auto tab discard" extension. It allows me to have hundreds of tabs "open" and (in combination with Tree Style Tabs) largely blur the line between "browser sessions" and "bookmarks".

[srean]

Far better than bookmarks.

Bookmarks do not store click history, the trajectory you took to arrive at the page. With tabs, the contexts is a backbutton away.

[roryirvine]

Yeah, agreed. The built-in tab discarder only kicks in when there's actual memory pressure, so can sometimes be a bit precarious. Auto tab discard happens way before that, so tends not to be affected in the same way. I guess it uses more i/o in total, but it's not noticeable on a system with a fast-ish SSD.

It can still be a bit iffy when memory's really tight, but even then a simple tab reload is usually enough to fix things.

[jolmg]

Haven't had that happen, but what I have had happen is that I open in a new tab, and it just displays this spinner in the middle of the window while on the tab. It never loads. I take the URL from the address bar and drag it into yet a newer tab and there it loads. Then I close the original new tab. Sometimes I gotta do that a few times for the thing to load. I tend to open in new tab with middle click, if it makes a difference.

[NooneAtAll3]

> I open in a new tab, and it just displays this spinner in the middle of the window while on the tab

oh, that happens too, all the time - I just got so used to immediately do "right click -> duplicate tab" in that case that it stopped bothering me

but tabs forgetting url causes this trick to fail (and yours too, there is no url to copy!) - so that's a pain point

[newsoftheday]

We use $200 inexpensive Lenovo laptops with 4 gigs of RAM and run KDE Plasma and Chrome as our streaming devices in the LR and MBR using air mouse device to control them. I also installed ZRAM on them. We could use Chromebooks but I like the idea of being in control of the OS in control of the machine.

[Barbing]

>[Firefox runs] proper adblocking. Chromium-based browsers just can't compete

Any familiarity with Safari and blocking performance? uBlock Origin Lite is a simple option, AdGuard can do more (injection?) though uBO feels more trustworthy still…

[epiecs]

A free option worth checking out: https://github.com/0xCUB3/wBlock . I have been using it on my mac and my mobile devices and it syncs up nicely and seems to perform well :)

[SoftTalker]

I prefer Firefox as well, I use it with a SOCKS v5 proxy over SSH to access internal sites at work from home.

I never have more than 4-6 tabs open so that would not be an issue.

[donw]

... I haven't seen an ad in years, thanks to Brave, which is as of the last time I checked Chromium-based.

[void-star]

I was thinking about Brave too while reading this thread. I’m not on a memory constrained system exactly but Brave seems to be tons snappier due to its as blocking. I wonder too if Brave is a case where you can pull it off and still take advantage of chromium based.