Did you try changing backends in LXQt to see if there was a major difference?
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Enlightenment does the same work as OpenBox ?
What are the enlightenment features ?
The OS continue using LXQT when selecting enlightenment ?
Hmmm … is possible change backends for LXQT ? If yes as change backends ?
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How do you mean backend ?
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Do you find snaps slowing down old machines any more than flatpak does?
I know there’s a bootup overhead and it takes more RAM memory initially as it caches the snaps, but in situations of low memory, I believe snapd releases this memory. I wonder if having snaps installed is affecting the machine/whether flatpak would be a better alternative for older machines.
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It’s in Window Effects -> Other and you have the option for X-Render or GLX(OpenGL)
https://manual.lubuntu.me/stable/3/3.2/3.2.16/window_effects.html
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I’m using a 2008 dell now as my ‘primary’ PC and no I don’t worry about using snap packages; though tend to avoid them if I can easily, but this is not the sl510 you mentioned (this box has 8GB of RAM).
I can’t compare snap versus flatpak as I don’t use flatpaks normally thus have nothing valuable to offer sorry there.
On the sl510 with its 2GB of RAM, I’ll put more effort into avoiding snap packages than I do on boxes with more RAM, but my experiences are that
- snap packages are not slow to execute/run; they feel ~equal in speed
- snap packages can be slower to start; especially for some releases (this has been improved!)
- snap packages provide security benefits that I do consider in deciding if I replace them
- snap infrastructure does slow logins
I also consider the ease of what I call upgrade via re-install (or Lubuntu calls it Install using existing partition in the understanding checklist doc) and having non-deb packages complicates that. If I recall correctly; the only non-standard thing the sl510 has is encrypted home, which Ubuntu no longer offers at install time, but can be used by only adding a package pre-install. This allows me to change release & use it for QA on a different release, but still have my own files that exist on the device.
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I’ll just add that all portable package managers without shared libraries are always slower with machines with limited RAM. It does not matter if it is snap, AppImage or Flatpack as all are horrible for low RAM machines.
With that said Guiverc is correct these do offer much more security for many users as they block each application’s access. Honestly I only run snap, app image or flatpack on new machines with 16GB or more. If you have an old machine with 16GB you’ll be fine. A 10 year old netbook with 4G RAM or less will be painful.
In my opinion with the above stated package managers 4G RAM or less will always be a huge performance penalty with a modern browser to the point the machine is really not useful for web browsing. With 4-8 GB RAM they can be sluggish but bearable.
Note: I do run a Lunar Lubuntu based testing 2010 vintage netbook with various PPAs (Kernel / drm and mesa). It is an AMD dual core 1Gz with 3G of RAM. I only allow .deb files and have snap disabled. It runs great but horrible if I let snaps creep in during updates.
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This is exactly why I disable snaps for every install, the system feels sluggish when it’s enabled so I would rather hunt down native .deb packages, especially for something as important as a web browser which is an essential tool for any Os.
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I have installed and tested Enlightenment in an Lubuntu 20.04.5 with Kernel 6.0. The Enlightenment version (2019) is from Ubuntu repository. Not using the current up to date version.
Comparing between Enlightenment and LXQT :
- With Enlightenment the total OS RAM was less than 50 MB.
- Same 3D peformance between Enlightenment and LXQT.
- Enlightenment is more fast to start and others tasks related with window.
Really is very fast.
Enlightenment have much more options to tweak than LXQT and is more complex to configure.
Having conflicts with some others softwares and the menu are much little.
In moment not configured all options.
About “glmark2” score from 7392 and LxQt desktop to 9842.
Which are the tests used ?
glmark2 is an test in Phoronix Test Suite ?
I use Linux since 2020 at moment I not known one software allowing configure GTK settings.
GTK has an terrible problem with “pop up messages” because have few detaly to show it and even has an bug doing the pop up message window to be for an long time thus need move the mouse pointer over the same area where was done the “pop up message” to close it.
About flatpak I never had used any flatpak software.
I had tested one time to download an software. I not remember if was flatpak or snap.
The same software being download in deb file format was less than 20 MB.
Thus I had selected to download that software. Time passing and more than 350 MB downloaded an not any progress in software download percentage. I had canceled.
I use browsers Seamonkey and Waterfox in tar format.
After extract in /opt in an program folder being owner the username.
Seamonkey use much less RAM than Firefox even using some addons (Cookies Exterminator, Noscript and Ad Block).
Seamonkey was created by Netscape Navigator coders.
However has some problems not being exactly related with Seamonkey code.
Some sites are created with scripts to allow access to an list of browsers and Seamonkey not was added.
Thus the site not work correctly and in some sites is showed message to change or update the browser.
Here even not is possible login using Seamonkey, but using User Agent Switcher “fix” it.
In moment in my Seamonkey access experience the only problem is in Github.
Some links have in download area an “Asset” menu doing an animation scrolling an list of file to download. Seamonkey not show the list even if using User Agent Switcher.
That’s the because I have also Waterfox only for Github and other security sites.
Now in moment Lubuntu 20.04.5 Kernel 6 + file manager + Kate + Cherrytree + Seamonkey opened browser and mail windows + smplayer the total RAM is 1,36 even using tmpfs and Seamonkey using /tmp to temporary files.
My cousin have an notebook 2010 intel pentium dual core 2 GB … had “other OS 10” … OS loaded using more than 1,5 GB RAM … after of some updates several minutes to boot and almost impossible to run Firefox because of high slowdown. All time having disk access read and write (swap) ! Terrible.
Thus I had installed Lubuntu 20.04.5.
Now is as if using an “new” notebook.
Disk partitioned using GPT table using partitions.
1 = 8 MB unformatted for BIOS GRUB
2 = 600 MB ext2 for /boot
3 = 20 GB BTRFS for /
4 = 2 GB BTRFS for /home
5 = Using the total free disk space BTRFS for /opt
BTRFS using compress-force zlib:9 … much less written access in disk thus doing fast disk access. File I/O have better performance using BTRFS.
/opt for all softwares not installed using apt and also others type of software and data. Thus not need format /opt when re installing the OS.
Enabled zram 512 MB and tmpfs.
Now that notebook run softwares with much more performance speed.
Seamonkey and Firefox use the same settings.
Thus was disabled memory (ram) cache. Not disable disk cache and configure to use /tmp to temporary folder.
Using about:config
Browser.cache.memory.enable = false
Browser.cache.disk.enable = true
browser.cache.disk.parent_directory = string value > /tmp
browser.cache.disk.capacity = integer value > 262144 ( 256 MB)
Only avoid open much tabs at same time.
Have another distros using less RAM. LXDE use less RAM perhaps less than Enligthment.
I had done an search about it and trying see if is possible add any component to Lubuntu optimizing the RAM usage.
My experience searching was has few distros using less RAM, but not are exactly privacy secure.
Have an distro using less of 256 MB automatically creating favorites bookmarks to browsers about politics. The user remove and after the link return. The team is “anti” politics.
When changing from "other OS’ to Linux my choice was Ubuntu because is “more simple” to tweak and find softwares. High number of compiled softwares for Ubuntu.
I will continue using Lubuntu. Unhappiy LXQT have problems not allowing configure menu links.
MenuLibre is an solution. However the software has an bug allowing to be used only one time and after all options to configure links are missing.
I remember trying install Lubuntu 20.04 in an Phenom X4. The problem was the IGP Geforce 6100. The screen had problems with colors being rendered wrong colors in SDDM login (almost all using black color). The IGP was configured to use more than 64 MB.
In other hand if the video card or IGP run correctly will have much better performance and features than if using “other OS”.
An long reply. I want share some informations and experiences.
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This was my finding too. Snaps do slow logins, but the difference is negligible.
I tested Fedora LxQT vs Lubuntu 22.10 on two virtual machines, each with 768mb of ram (Lubuntu cannot boot with 512, Fedora can, though, but it’s unusable) and only 1 of my i5-11400h cores each.
My finding was, basically, monitoring the ram consumption between Firefox native (Fedora) and Firefox snap (Lubuntu) which now that I come to think, is not fair, that there was no difference. Both performed equally well and had similar RAM consumption (slightly lower for Lubuntu most of the times, except when freshly booted-up, when it was slightly higher, I understand because of snap caching), and both went OOM at the same time mostly…
Of course this was with 1 snap, only, and snapd tends to precache all snaps, so I wonder what would happen if I had more installed. But the truth is, at least 1 snap doesn’t seem to be causing trouble performance-wise.
And BTW, for Fedora I had to disable ZRAM and enable a swap-on-file of similar size as Lubuntu had, because otherwise Fedora LxQT was noticeably slower, so if you want to try testing, make sure you do disable ZRAM and enable regular swap.
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I appreciate your input, but based on my experience, you’re being too harsh on snaps.
There’s no way with 3 GB of ram you are having trouble by letting snaps creep in (which I understand means letting Firefox be installed as a snap, only 1 snap).
Maybe login in is slower due to the processor and a poor IO? But I don’t think you should have any problems otherwise. More so with Lunar, which should mean you already would have been installing the fast Firefox snap.
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People have different things that they expect out of their systems. Case in point, I used to run Ubuntu Desktop 20.04 (GNOME) on an old modded Chromebook with 4 GB RAM. The experience was, for me at the time, acceptable. Yeah, typing lagged in some apps, yeah, web pages took a while to load, yeah, sometimes I ran out of memory or nearly so, but I could live with it. A bit of RAM compression helped things a lot. Fast forward to today, I’m typing on a lightning-fast laptop with 32 GB of RAM, and looking back at my old Chromebook experience, I can say that it was awful in comparison. What you consider horrible may be different than what he considers horrible. Perhaps you’re used to stuff that’s slower, and he’s used to stuff that’s faster. Or maybe his use case is different.
TL;DR: Slowness is subjective. What’s perfectly fine for one user may be unusable for another.
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Agreed. In my experience Ubuntu (regular Ubuntu) on 4GB of ram is acceptable.
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Glmark2 is in the ubuntu repositories and runs it’s own set of graphical stress tests to determine it’s score at the end. With or without compositing LxQt still had a lot lower score than Enlightenment which just felt more snappy to use.
I personally use LIbreWolf (firefox) but have disabled the disk and memory cache, set browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to 0 and disabled prefetch which uses a lot less memory and doesn’t hit the drive as much 
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, … It runs great but horrible if I let snaps creep in during updates.
If you have not un-installed it, you can hold updates;
sudo apt-mark hold snapd
(‘unhold’ will reverse it).
If you already uninstalled, just create a file at;
/etc/apt/preferences.d/nosnap.pref
Package: snapd
Pin: release a=*
Pin-Priority: -10
(ref). - negative pin priorities prevent installation.
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I am talking about a netbook 1Ghz machine from 2010 running Chrome web browser (Lubuntu/Ubuntu by default switches to snap). It has absolutely terrible IO as it has an old physical hard drive. I use this machine as my slowest test model for my software development. It does a great job finding inefficiencies with my code.
Anyway you stated a i5-11400h !
If I use a virtualized modern processor with 768MB, one core and NO browser of course it runs smooth.
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Really depends on your workload. For casual web browsing users with less than 7 year old machine 4GB is plenty.
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Yes, I understand what you mean. But snaps shouldn’t have any theoretical effect on performance except when booting up/login in and when updating, so that’s why I’m fairly surprised.
And just to be clear, I used Firefox native in Fedora LxQt vs Lubuntu snap and I found no differences, but my processor is significantly faster even if only with 1 core.
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I completely disagree. Snaps have static libraries NOT shared libraries. This can be a HUGE memory resource difference. This is again is not an average normal user case with a modern machine but for a memory constrained decade old laptop this makes a HUGE difference.
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