Re:The End of Windows
by squarefoot on Monday April 02, 2018 @03:13PM
(#16738140)
"I can barely conceive of the poor experience of running a modern web browser on 4 GB of memory at 1366x768."
I've used for years a CoreDuo system+4GB with Firefox then PaleMoon playing videos in FullHD on 23 and 27 inches monitors, and never got even close to hit the swap partition unless I was running virtual machines or heavy games. Now I'm on a i5 Debian+XFCE with 8gigs, one Waterfox (privacy oriented Firefox derivative, thanks to the HN user who pointed me at it) instance with 4 tabs opened and a shell with 2 tabs; here's free output:
~$ free
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 8037636 1194044 4182928 187332 2660664 6555172
Swap: 8249340 0 8249340
And this one while watching a 1080p Youtube video at fullscreen.
~$ free
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 8037636 1453204 3761776 280824 2822656 6202520
Swap: 8249340 0 8249340
The operating system probably makes a difference [1], but anyway Firefox runs perfectly
on 4 gigs or less. That RAM amount is plenty if well used.
[1] ~$ uname -svo
Linux #1 SMP PREEMPT RT Debian 4.9.30-2+deb9u5 (2017-09-19) GNU/Linux
(a bit older RT kernel needed for low latency audio)
I've used for years a CoreDuo system+4GB with Firefox then PaleMoon playing videos in FullHD on 23 and 27 inches monitors, and never got even close to hit the swap partition unless I was running virtual machines or heavy games. Now I'm on a i5 Debian+XFCE with 8gigs, one Waterfox (privacy oriented Firefox derivative, thanks to the HN user who pointed me at it) instance with 4 tabs opened and a shell with 2 tabs; here's free output:
And this one while watching a 1080p Youtube video at fullscreen. The operating system probably makes a difference [1], but anyway Firefox runs perfectly on 4 gigs or less. That RAM amount is plenty if well used.