That being said, I'm not clear on what the real difference between Lubuntu and Kubuntu will be now.
Not really for GPUs though. AMD progressed a lot and all the new features are landing in amdgpu, not in radeon. That's important especially for Vulkan support. Older GPUs are locked out of that completely.
CPU progress is less rapid, but something like Ryzen is quite a breakthrough.
It's cool to see LXQt in a state where lubuntu is adopting it as it's primary environment.
It's terrible that we can't count on computers getting twice as fast every year any more. I guess it couldn't last for ever...
This miiiiight be just you. Even sublime text (forget vim or another cli editor) runs fine on ancient hardware.
What type of files are you editing?
> Or use entire sticks of RAM at rest.
I'd hope my text editors would use as much ram as it needs in order to give me the smoothest experience. If possible, that means storing the whole file in RAM (up to a set limit).
For those kinds of hard problems, the advances seem to be coming in massively parallel computing of the kind that is advancing (the GPGPU has transformed ML, for example).
You must not throw much at it
It can play absolutely every single modern game, with the only component upgrade in its 8 year life being the GPU.
I cannot think of any modern, graphically demanding game which is bottlenecked by the CPU. I imagine you are harming your GPU performance to some degree with such an old CPU though. Not sure I buy what you're saying here. What settings are you using?
Yeah, me neither.
As an aside to answer your question:, I can run pretty much any game on its highest settings just fine with this machine: which is a gtx1070, 2600k, and 16gb of RAM driving a 120hz 1080p display. It was originally built with two HD5990s in crossfire.
Either my cpu is slower than it should be, your cpu is faster than it should be, or you don't check out one of the poster child's aaa game series.
If the purpose of the device is to play games, and it it incapable of doing so without this component, I'd think of it as a bit more than an "add on card"
For 90% of computers, merely putting an SSD in it (no matter how old it is, as long as it has, or can fit, at least 2GB of RAM, as to deal with piggy "modern" Electron/CEF/etc apps and similar idiocy in webapps in browsers) can make it seem sometimes a decade newer.
For those who game, more often than not, just upgrading the GPU helps.
I have a i7-4771 @ 3.9ghz /w 32GB of DDR3-2133. This is not a new system, but no one has made anything newer that really would improve actual performance for me... what holds me back is a similarly old GPU that I've finally decided to swap out with a GTX 1180 when they come out next month.
My 7970 served me for many many years and games are finally starting to punish it at 1080p. Still won't need to update my CPU, however.
I think for the purposes of OEM software licensing, they use CPU + motherboard as the defining hardware but I'm not sure.
Even then, you're going to have issues with the motherboard and probably the CPU bottlenecking you as well.
Also, issues with CPU throttling are not too bad, unless you are already pushing the limits of your GPU, which gets more and more difficult each year.