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Comment by sullichin | Hacker News Reader

Crazy that the people posting here would have a computer from 2010 with 4GB of RAM.

I have such a machine. It's a netbook. It does a great job running Arch Linux. It dual-boots Windows 7, but Windows 7 long since became unbearably slow and I've stopped using it. Sway and urxvt are very snappy, however. Kakoune never lags -- I see my keystrokes right away, even with syntax highlighting turned on. It also starts instantly. Even emacs runs pretty fast, although it feels a little heavier. But Atom? Forget it. It starts five electron processes and pegs the CPU. pacman -Rsc atom.

The thinking espoused by the article is rooted firmly in the last decade: "Moore's law will allow us to invest no effort in writing efficient software."

It's off topic, but how is sway? I have an old netbook with an Intel i3 processor, which I'm setting up with arch (because it's the only thing that the computer can support, thanks to the blatant neglect of efficiency from the ideas of this article). Think it's worth a shot?

Sway is good, and constantly improving! I'm mostly to the point where I forget I'm not running i3. There are a couple of things that might keep you on i3, however:

* Nvidia. I have not had the best of luck running sway on nvidia systems, even using nouveau. This situation is evolving, so things may have gotten better. I've had no problems with amd or intel graphics.

* Your display manager. I boot to the console and type "sway" if I want a graphical session. I've seen display managers get a bit confused by sway -- the display manager's cursor hangs around for the duration of the sway session, or the display manager crashes when sway exits. I haven't tried all of the options, but I've had issues with both gdm and sddm. Hard to blame sway for this, but at the same time it means you have to take your pick between sway and your display manager.

Huh, a shame about the display manager issues, and thanks for the gdm & sddm warning, I was about to go use them since they apparently recognized sway (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sway#Using_a_display_ma...), but I'll keep looking. As for Nvidia, no worries with the little old netbook, it's integrated Intel graphics.

I wouldn't totally dismiss gdm and sddm -- my issues could be peculiar to my hardware, the versions available at the time, and so on. As long as you've got a fast internet connection, it's only 10-15 minutes to try each one. YMMV, as they say! Just be ready to hold down the power switch if things go badly. (For reference, I'm using sway on a netbook with one of AMD's integrated offerings, maybe Llano? I haven't tried a DM on that machine.)

My laptop is a 2008 MacBook Pro with a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo and 4G RAM. It's perfectly fine for running R Studio, Emacs, Python, Excel, Safari and VirtualBox with 1 or 2 VMs. Yet a trivial Electron app will make it crawl with the fan spinning like a jet about to take off.

MacBook Air (I think it's 2013) with 4GB is still chugging! Runs Electron apps fine.

Thanks to the very absence of Javascript from this site, people can post here even if they have 4MB of RAM. And that is a very good thing.

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