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 _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other: https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct
