> Browser rendering engines are pretty mature at this point, with significant GPU acceleration, and over a decade stress-testing by bloated web apps.

They suck on older hardware. Old Chromebooks are a dime a dozen and are decently spec'd light use or purpose-use machines. Browsers run like crap on them.

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cosmic_cheese 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Web tech in general is responsible for a lot of unnecessary hardware turnover.

If you dig up an 18 year old Core 2 Duo box, upgrade its storage to a cheap SSD, and install Linux on it, it’s shocking how snappy and usable it is for most tasks… up until you open a web browser or Electron app. Then it all falls apart.

Had it not been for resource creep driven overwhelmingly by heavy web apps and Electron/CEF, there’d be little reason for most people to use anything more powerful than a Sandy Bridge machine and we could have laptops and smartphones with week-long battery life thanks to efficiency gains not needing to be consumed by performance increases.

	▲	Narishma 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> If you dig up an 18 year old Core 2 Duo box, upgrade its storage to a cheap SSD, and install Linux on it, it’s shocking how snappy and usable it is for most tasks… up until you open a web browser or Electron app. Then it all falls apart. Can confirm. I'm typing this on such an old Core 2 Duo laptop running Debian and even with only 4GB of RAM and a mechanical HDD, it's still very fast for everything I do on it that doesn't involve Web browsers. Windows 10 is practically unusable on it however. The gazillion background things it insists on running bring it to a crawl, mostly stuck on disk I/O.
	▲	tombert an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Agreed. I have a shitty laptop I bought at Micro Center a couple years ago for like $80. I bought it mostly out of curiosity since I wanted to see what an $80 laptop would be capable of. I installed NixOS minimal on there and a few apps to develop, and it was actually quite usable. Then I installed Skype on there and it was horrible and laggy.

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nolist_policy an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> Chromebooks

Have you tried with stock ChromeOS?