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[–] 36 points 5 months ago
[–] 23 points 5 months ago

This is an absolutely bottom of the barrel machine nowadays. You'll be able to run Linux on it, but nothing is going to run "fast". Especially not a webbrowser with modern websites.

If you're actually considering using this machine, the two most important upgrades you can make are SSD instead of HDD, and a bit more RAM (8GB if possible). With the ~2011-2012 CPU (judging by the release date of the iGPU listed) and the mentioned upgrades, you should have a usable (although slow) workstation for light tasks. Without the upgrades, be prepared to wait for things to load.

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  • [–] 22 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Even with a tiny OS and desktop, 2GB RAM is gonna fill up super fast. Modern websites are bloated af, there's no browser in the world that can fix that

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_lightweight_web_browsers

    I'd recommend Falkon/qutebrowser, or else NetSurf, Dillo, Links.

    Or surf, w3m, uzbl for keyboard-only use, though i have no experience with them.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago

    Disable javascript by using ublock origin. I also suggest using a lightweight UI like Xfce or LXQT and 32-bit Linux OS

    I am sorry if my english is bad

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    none. 15 year old apu, slow laptop hdd, 2gb ram (some consumed by the graphics). cpu performance of the earliest s939 dual core athlons.

    put a puppy or antix on it, i guess, and hope for the best. with the 8gb max and a small sata ssd it could run something more mainstream.

    update to add: i just reinstalled the latest antix-full over the top of my old one that runs on an old athlon dual core (am2+ 4gb and hdd). creeps a bit over 1gb ram used once you load a page up in firefox. it'll be 'usable', i guess, running one thing at a time and not going crazy with open tabs and windows. still gonna go back on the recycle pile though. i have too many of this era desktop, no takers for them, and not enough room to store 'em.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah, none are going to be fast. Browsing is going to be slow no matter what, unless you use something like lynx. The best I can give you is Falkon, but don't open many tabs.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago (16 children)

    To be real, this Maschine with HDD and 2gig RAM isnt going to be lightning fast at all

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago* (15 children)

    Sure is, if you use the right tooling.

    Heck, my old Xcover phone runs fast GUI on 148 MB RAM and 120 MB storage.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago (14 children)

    And it is "lighting fast" when using modern bloated java script websites? I doubt it

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (13 children)

    Lol no, they are never lightning fast, no matter the hardware.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (12 children)
  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (11 children)

    OP will look for alternative sites quickly, if that's their main device.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (7 children)

    So what site do you use with this Setup to watch HD Videos fast, responsive and without Stutter, lag oder tearing? Cant be youtube

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (6 children)

    Who said anything about video? That's it's own can of worms.

    Peertube or whatever, maybe maximal in FHD. Maybe with mpv, that one supports yt-dlp and has extensive support for low-level adjustments. Also, there's slim native Youtube browsing clients.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    Could you suggest a couple of those slim native youtube browsing clients ?

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    I'm currently sorting the AUR clients out, but a few in the official repos:

    • audiotube: KDE Client for YouTube Music
    • plasmatube: Kirigami YouTube video player based on QtMultimedia and youtube-dl
    • streamlink: a plugin-based streaming utility with support for various popular players
    • ytfzf: A POSIX script to find and watch youtube videos from the terminal

    Edit: i've given up; there's around 300 clients / downloaders in the AUR

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (3 children)

    He didnt explicitly, but watching media is one of the main things people do in browsers no?

    When someone asks about a lighting fast browser experience for his specs, and you say "no problem" one would expect one can use websites, including ones that serve videos no?

    Saying yeah, fast browser? no problem! But then referring to yt-dlp for videos is a little misleading no?

    I'd don't think you find most videos on peertube at this point of time, and I'm hesitant if it will run fast with those specs, even considering peertube is less bloated than YouTube.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)

    I think you mistake this for a competition? One of the most JS-bloated sites in existence is no benchmark for a amenic system, no matter the webbrowser. There are native youtube browsers & viewers for this.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    Dude there is someone asking for a "lighting fast browser experience" on specs which will not deliver that for most websites most people use.

    An honest reply IMHO is to state what will work and what will not.

    You set false expectations when basically telling him "yeah no problem".

    I try to differentiate this picture by showing what caviots there are.

    The reality is: if you are a tech savy person, only use a subset of websites, to which most of the popular websites (youtube, Netflix, prime, insta, etc.pp.) don't belong, you can get something to work. Do I use silicon-valley websites or think they are good? No! But someone who asks such questions is probably not someone who only thinks of HTML only websites and the like when wanting a fast browser.

    I try to give honest advise and show that a lighting fast browsing experience is not the same as "you can visit some websites with very light loads and need to close the browser, open terminal and yt dlp, download the video and watch it in a lightweight video player".

    Its not about competition it's about actually helping the person looking for advice.

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  • [–] 10 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    links. I ran firefox on a 4G RAM laptop until recently and it was painful and always swapping.

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  • Maybe Pale Moon, Basilisk or maybe some WebKit-based browser like LuaKit or similar, or Chawan if u want to go hardcore.

    Also please use a WM, not a DE, maybe PekWM if u're on X11 or something similar on Wayland.

    Try to use some tweaks such as Ananicy, Bpftune, gamemode (and use only one or two programs at once), try to get some disk swap, and use ZRAM or ZSwap to avoid overusing your (slow) disk swap.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (9 children)

    Why do people downvote this question?

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (8 children)

    Because the hardware is obviously underspecced for any browser. I doubt they could even run a modern OS with a light DE. You'd need to already know what you're doing if you willingly commit to specs this low.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago (6 children)

    Hmm. So the assumption is then this is a troll post? Maybe the person doesn't know and is new to this, got a free old laptop in example. You might be right that the system is underspecced for most normal usage and deeper knowledge to work with it might be required. But I don't get why the person is downvoted for asking the question. Unless its a troll off course, if that is the assumption.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    When you add the fact that the main question contains emojis it destroys any bit of seriousness in the question. Emojis have their places but not when you want to be taken seriously. This post could not be a clearer example of a shitpost/troll post.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    I guess I would be a terrible Moderator, lol. Thanks for taking the time to explain your view.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    I doubt they could even run a modern OS with a light DE.

    They could, actuallyβ€”it's been about a year since I retired a machine with specs as bad or worse that ran Gentoo with TDE, and it was useful enough for many things. Web browsing was not one of those things, however.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago
    [–] 4 points 5 months ago*

    try Waterfox, it is great for browsing the modern web on a low ram

    if it didn't work, i guess you have to sacrifice some usability by using Falkon or any much lighter browsers (not much good for modern web browsing)

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    Min Browser.

    I have two netbooks with Atom processors, 2 GB RAM and one of them has an HDD instead of an SSD. I tried plenty of graphical browsers and Min was the best by far. Neither Firefox, Chromium, Falkon, Midori or GNOME Web could work at least partially smoothly in those machines. Min was not a panacea, but it was definitely more usable.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago
    [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    Might need to make sacrifices such as disabling JS or loading images. Browsers and web pages are so bloated, you won't be able to get a modern experience with that hardware.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    CPU??? Only the most important spec is omitted?

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    Qutebrowser

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    I'd use Firefox with ublock origin and disable javascript (via ublock settings)

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (4 children)

    Maybe luakit, If you want gui. Dillo, if you don't care about the looks. And w3m for terminal.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    i find it terrifying how people spite things just for looking old. do people really like rounded corners???

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I think a bit of rounding can look good. But I feel most of the designs these days are overdoing it.

    Man, I really can't wait to put border-radius: 100% on my entire desktop for proper roundnessmaxxing. And add in liquid glass and blur to every sigle letter, button, window, icon, heck even my word processor, text editor and images displayed by my image viewer, ...

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    they aren't even doing liquid glass or blur, i'm thinking about google's ui that is like canned food that still manages to go stale
    just black, white, accent color, and antialiasing thereof... which would go so hard, if google wasn't such a nincompoop

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