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0 pointscosmic_cheese1mo ago0 comments

Web tech in general is responsible for a lot of unnecessary hardware turnover.

If you dig up an 18 year old Core 2 Duo box, upgrade its storage to a cheap SSD, and install Linux on it, it’s shocking how snappy and usable it is for most tasks… up until you open a web browser or Electron app. Then it all falls apart.

Had it not been for resource creep driven overwhelmingly by heavy web apps and Electron/CEF, there’d be little reason for most people to use anything more powerful than a Sandy Bridge machine and we could have laptops and smartphones with week-long battery life thanks to efficiency gains not needing to be consumed by performance increases.

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4 comments · 3 top-level

spockz1mo ago· 1 in thread

I was of this conviction as well. However, since I installed CachyOS on my old desktop (6800k+32gib DDR4, SSDs) I have comparison material with my AMD 5900X and the difference is night and day.

Booting to the password prompt for the encrypted drive alone takes 10+s versus 1-2s. Then booting into desktop is also considerably slower (but oddly not 5x).

Then performance compiling is miles apart with 20x at minimum.

Yes, the “native” apps are still snappy but at any time you require compute you will feel the lack of power. Funnily enough it doesn’t seem to matter too much for the games that I play.

cosmic_cheeseOP1mo ago

Of course there’s a speed difference, but boot times are only occasionally dealt with and only the tiny handful of people capable of developing software will ever need to compile anything.

Also worth noting that if computers had been frozen at Skylake speeds for the past decade, it’s almost a certainty that more attention would’ve been paid to performance since that would’ve been the only way to make computers faster. Countless bits of low hanging fruit in optimization have been ignored because power increases have papered over them, and cumulatively their impact is significant.

Narishma1mo ago

> If you dig up an 18 year old Core 2 Duo box, upgrade its storage to a cheap SSD, and install Linux on it, it’s shocking how snappy and usable it is for most tasks… up until you open a web browser or Electron app. Then it all falls apart.

Can confirm. I'm typing this on such an old Core 2 Duo laptop running Debian and even with only 4GB of RAM and a mechanical HDD, it's still very fast for everything I do on it that doesn't involve Web browsers. Windows 10 is practically unusable on it however. The gazillion background things it insists on running bring it to a crawl, mostly stuck on disk I/O.

tombert1mo ago

Agreed. I have a shitty laptop I bought at Micro Center a couple years ago for like $80. I bought it mostly out of curiosity since I wanted to see what an $80 laptop would be capable of.

I installed NixOS minimal on there and a few apps to develop, and it was actually quite usable. Then I installed Skype on there and it was horrible and laggy.

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