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Comment by swiley | Hacker News Reader

The nice thing about GNU/Linux is that the you can almost completely avoid all of the "desktop applications." I only ever start X when I need Firefox or mupdf. Everything else is a nice lightweight TTY app that I run in tmux. My 1.3 GHz celleron netbook is incredibly responsive set up this way.

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Similar but with XFCE, it rarely feels sluggish and I nearly always know why.

I had a laptop celeron 600mhz running xfce and abiword (I think it was xubuntu 14.04 or something) with no networking (only a dialup modem was available). It was a great, responsive typewriter with formatting and backspace!

Aye, for me XFCE is the sweet spot of does what I want without getting in the way and speed.

It's funny really because I mostly use it on an 8 core 32GB Ryzen 1700 desktop.

Expect Firefox to demand a potent GPU just to load soon enough, thanks to GTK3...

Isn't the current version of firefox GTK3? I run it on my laptop with just the EFI framebufer and while it's /the/ most sluggish app installed it's still usable.

It is, and it may work for now. But as i become familiar with the mentality of the GTK devs i worry how long that will be an option.

Gtk3 literally uses the exact same rendering API as Gtk2, Cairo, which is accelerated by your Xorg driver the same as it has been for decades.

None of this even matters because Firefox isn't a traditional application and renders most thing itself using Skia.

Same, but I don't want to play text adventures for the rest of my life either. Graphics are a Good Thing.

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