Light distros performence cancelled out by modern Apps
  • hbdevelop1hbdevelop1
    PMPosts: 12
    Hi all,
    Not sure if this is the right forum for this. Please direct me to the right one if not.

    I've been using LXLE, for a few months now, on my 1.6Ghz CPU and 12Gb Ram laptop.
    The reason to choose this light distro was to get the most out of this old laptop and to focus all its resources on the task of recording streamed TV programs.
    Unfortunately, I have realized I can't do that. Not because of LXLE but certainly because of Chrome or Firefox hogging the CPU.
    These browsers seem to be the only browsers able to play encrypted streamed video.

    Also, I use vscode for my coding and text editing. And it does take some time to launch.

    So, my feeling is that :
    1- light distros on old laptops are only useful for simple tasks. As soon as we want to do video processing or use some modern software, chances are a more powerful computer is required.
    2- modern Apps are not optimized at all. The companies assume users will use powerful machines.

    What do you think ?
    Thank you  
  • Katie_BoundaryKatie_Boundary
    PMPosts: 8
    You're 100% correct. An operating system's lightness can only get you so far; a bloated, inefficient program will slow your computer down regardless of how good your OS is.

    However, not all is lost. Lighter browsers based on Firefox code do exist. Personally, I use Pale Moon.

    You also need to keep in mind that real-time encoding of video is an EXTREMELY CPU-intensive task, regardless of your browser. This isn't an optimization problem either. There's just a crazy amount of data to process. You can get around this somewhat by using faster, lower-quality codecs like MPEG-1, but I don't know how much flexibility vscode offers in terms of export codecs.

    You can do quite a lot of things on a 1.6 ghz CPU, but real-time video encoding isn't likely to be one of them.
  • lxlelxle
    PMPosts: 2,656
    Palemoon and Seamonkey both have their problems and those problems are nearly identical. However I still choose Seamonkey due to being developed by former firefox programmers and the utilities incorporated with it. Such as email for example which I use everyday. In fact their email client is essentially a lightweight version of thunderbird. The thunderbird team and the seamonkey coders also work very closely together.  

    That being said... you'll find no browsers that are as light and functional as Seamonkey. I've checked. Most browsers are now based on chromium. Even modern firefox is essentially a chrome clone. Modern browsers are resource/memory pigs.
    Thanked by 1trinity
  • trinitytrinity
    PMPosts: 20
    "I've been using LXLE, for a few months now, on my 1.6Ghz CPU and 12Gb Ram laptop.
    The
    reason to choose this light distro was to get the most out of this old
    laptop and to focus all its resources on the task of recording streamed
    TV program"

    addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/ can help with playback...

    What are you recording & how/which software?  Recording how, in other words?

    Just curious, your laptop does not sound too old if it has 12GB of RAM -which model is it?


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