On Thursday 18. July 2019 09.54.59 Michael Kesper wrote:
On 17.07.19 13:30, Paul Boddie wrote:
And obviously, with everybody loading up the "modern" Web with superfluous gadgetry, Firefox will gladly saturate the CPU, I/O channels and take lots of RAM. Unfortunately, more lightweight browsers like NetSurf [3] are likely to struggle with today's mainstream sites infused with surveillance capitalism, reaching out to dozens of other sites serving their own JavaScript payloads on every page load.
I run some old machines too with xfce, will try MATE too. :)
In the warmer weather, I switched to using the CI20 as my main working machine and can share a few more experiences. In summary, I can say that silent computing, without a fan making a noise like a turboprop aircraft on the runway and without the constant stream of hot air through the rear of the machine, is probably something I will be doing more of.
Also - maybe most importantly - it saves energy and will be generally better for the environment: a MIPS-based SoC is always going to need less power than a Pentium 4 from possibly Intel's most wasteful generation of CPUs. Sadly, "more is better" continues to be the dominant theme of the technology industry: power consumption benefits (due to more efficient circuitry) are typically overturned by vastly increased consumption.
Anyway, while there are some things that MATE, being a continuation of GNOME 2, doesn't do well - a lack of keyboard shortcuts for switching virtual desktops, for instance - the environment seems decent enough for my purposes. The terminal can show colours that I like, mostly performs as well as Konsole (on KDE), and only lacks the Shift-Up/Down shortcuts for line-by-line scrolling.
On machines like the CI20 where the proprietary GPU is disabled, you need to have software rendering/compositing/whatever enabled. MATE supports this, but other environments may not (or not obviously). Scrolling and navigation in the terminal can be slower (although I also experienced this after a Debian upgrade on my Intel machine), but vi/vim permit convenient jumping around by multiples of lines, so it isn't a huge problem.
While normal sites are usable when uBlock Origin takes care of filtering out most crap, more "active" sites (heavy use of JS/CSS) become really sluggy, though and turn otherwise silent machines into noisy monsters because their fans will run at full throttle.
So, my solution to this is to open the network monitoring development tool in Firefox, load a page with a lot of surveillance scripts, save the log as a "HAR" format file, and then I have a script which dumps the hosts from the log. With that output, after editing to preserve the sites providing genuine content, I have another script which assigns the hosts with unrouteable IP addresses, and this then gets deployed in /etc/hosts.
It is remarkable how much difference this makes and how many script/image/tracking hosts are involved in serving even those sites that have something to say about the ethics of surveillance. I guess it is easy to criticise a habit but harder to actually break it. Again, leadership from organisations like the FSFE on such matters is rather lacking, but that is another topic.
Paul