I pretty much agree with you except I don’t consider 6G or 8G machines as low end. There are three aspects of “low end” that each are a factor.
The pure age of the CPU > 7 or 8 years especially the low end Atom / Pentium based machines.
The amount of memory being 4G or less
HDD instead of SDD.
If you have all three or in some cases two out of three you might have performance issues with Lubuntu.
So for example my mom’s TigerLake Low-end 2020 laptop only has 4G but runs great with snaps. The CPU and SSD are very recent. Low-end TigerLake machines are a huge performance jump than prior CPU generations.
And old 2010 CPU, SSD and 8Gig is also likely going to run pretty well. Take that down to 4G with an old HDD and you’ll have performance issues.
I stole 4GB (half) the RAM from this old d780-c2q at one stage as I needed the RAM for testing of another box, not expecting to see any difference with how I then used the box, but BOY was I wrong… (I’ve written about this before). In that case I could restore my speed via swap config.
I much prefer the old c2q-q9400 boxes even with spinning rust drives over things like thinkpad x201 (i5-m520 with HDD), vaio ultrabook (i5-9400u & SSD), or samsung 700t1c (i5-3317u & SSD) and no doubt RAM is part of why as they all only have 4GB RAM. (I do like desktop form factor, but I could connect an old IBM Model M keyboard up to a laptop too)
CPU plays a large part too; I recall one box where Lubuntu significantly outperformed Debian in live QA testing, but that box had a different (lower-end) CPU to other boxes I used… I recall noting how MATE (Ubuntu-MATE) slowed down rather markedly on some CPUs as it ported from GTK2 to GTK3, yet on other later CPUs I couldn’t see any difference. My old c2q’s were not sold as low-end products.
Exactly right. My Chromebox with a dual core 1.4Ghz processor but upgraded with 16gig of RAM and more SSD storage runs everything great and is really responsive.
Very inexpensive and low power draw was another bonus.
Thank you very much for your insight. I am a bit wary of snaps, but knowing you like to test Lubuntu on old hardware makes me believe you guys care actually a lot about performance, and that’s really refreshing to hear.
“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)”
Using an swap file with RAM low memory size can slowdown and ZRAM in an machine with less of 768 MB without an disk swap not is possible run some softwares.
All replies bad or good features about snap.
I not use snap thus I not reply any detail about it.
However not any user saying about IGP or video cards.
Really an good video card help in performance in browsers and also browsers can use video ram. Have users saying is dangerous using video card acceleration in browsers and is recommend to disable it. Perhaps is possible an internet access using your video card ?
Regarding ZRAM vs swap file, yes, a Swap file is slower on HDDs than ZRAM, but ZRAM already consumes RAM and (more importantly for lowend PCs) CPU cycles (ZRAM is compressed RAM). I prefer a swap file, honestly, for lowend PCs.
Regarding video hardware acceleration, I don’t think there are differences between Fedora LxQT and Lubuntu.
Regarding snaps, yes, they’re way worse than Flatpaks, which themselves are already way worse than traditional packages.
Seems snaps are more responsive now than a half year ago. I don’t know what has been changed under the hood, but FF will now start in a matter of seconds (less than three) on my budget laptop. A half year ago it used to be six seconds which was really annoying. Less than three is OK for me.
As I understand it now, snaps and their snap-store are characterised by the following;
snaps work everywhere, or at least almost everywhere
the process of baking a snap is secret and opaque
there is only one place to shop for snaps
Since mankind has started to work with software in libraries (not so long ago from an evolutionary point of view) there has been an ongoing debate about static or dynamically linked libraries.
Statically linked libraries where considered by some as a a quick win solution, technical inferiour and not very future proof.
That opinion is changing. Nowadays you see ‘tin can’ solutions in new programming languages and OS-es.
I am not against it per se, but oppose the closed nature and the uniqueness of the community that bake snaps.
For the record: Lubuntu works as a charm. It offers us the nicest implementation of LXQt of all the distros that I’ve tested. On different machines (with different purposes).
I use Debian and EndeavourOS with the OOTB, vanilla LXQt desktop, and Lubuntu. These distros are not true comparable. Each has its own merits and purpose or audiance. Until now I use Debian for servers, and Lubuntu for desktops. However, EndeavourOS is a serious candidate for beating Lubuntu.
If by “baking Snaps” you mean the process of creating them, that’s not necessarily true. I believe you just need a snapcraft.yaml file and then you can build a Snap. Now not all software makers make that file available, but in some cases (I suspect many case), it is available (for instance, for at least some, I think all, of the KDE Snaps, the snapcraft.yaml files are available).
From what I’ve read, you can build a Snap locally. The only thing that’s really proprietary about Snaps is the server, and even then theoretically one could make their own server and their own Snap client that could download files from it.
Isn’t EndeavourOS an Arch derivative? I’ve never used it before and so can’t really say much about it, but from my experience, Arch is really fragile. So is Manjaro, according to stuff I’ve read, and Manjaro is another Arch derivative. Unless the Endeavour folks have done something fancy, I can’t help but think EndeavourOS will suffer the same fate. Not that it’s necessarily a bad distro, just, it might not be worth it for non-experienced users.
There are two sides of the medal, as always. The one I refer to here:
Is the process of making ‘the’ snap for Firefox an open and transparant thing, auditable by others?
It is also nice to know that individuals (like me) are able to provide a snap. But where to place it?
I know what you mean with fragile. EndeavourOS had me made suspicious too, for exact the reasons you mention. It seems very polished, with an agile community, and my experiences so far (only a month) are very positive. The LXQt is OK too. I still miss apt, but learning quicly how to get around with pacman.
I always go for stability, specially for servers, and my main laptop. But a month ago I really needed a recent, but not too recent version of some software package. That was not available for Debian (as expected), but also not on L.22.04, to my surprise. I was hasty, and grabbed a distro which aims to be upstream. So, I lost my religion (going away from Debian-alike) and ended up with EndeavourOS.
I have been using Lubuntu since 10.10, and I don’t think I will stop using and praising it.
However, on 22.04 I still have an issue with LXQt 0.17 (not Lubuntu). Powermanagement is not working as it should on my personal laptop (that is the laptop I tend to use the most because it is small and handy). Still a nuisance, which hopefully will be mitigated when I move to 23.04, soon
Nice to know that EndeavourOS is working. I do still use Arch every so often for certain projects, so I get that it can be quite good for some stuff. I just personally prefer stability and reliability over newness, and I have yet to need the newest software (and the rare instances I do want it, I just compile from source ). I might give it a try. Might be nice to have an easy Arch alternative for the times I use Arch.
Stability comes first. The ability to run an alternative, which offers just that extra bit you need - at that moment - is good. There is no account about taste. My taste is apt and LXQt. The rest doesn’t matter too much.
Maybe my deployments will be as follows in the future:
stability: Debian for servers, Lubuntu for desktops
upstream: EndeavourOS, not for the GUI, for software that is not yet on stable Ubuntu.
Before Lubuntu 10.10 I have been using Windows for ten years. Before the new millennium I used to build my own Stage 1 Gentoo. I always had problems with the driver for my semi-professional soundcard, so I gave up on Gentoo, and moved happily to Windows. Only for the soundcard
I tried that last September, but I did not get it working. I can’t remember exactly, but apt gave some information that some packages were withheld. Maybe I got that one solved, but it did not work for me. See below.
I am a bit reluctant to try it again, now. 1) as I understand upgrades from 22.04 to higher become problematic, and besides that 2) a side-effect appeared with some developer tooling. Also forget exactly what, but some incompatibility, or should I say: the backporting was not 100% tested / confirmed for my edge case. For Joe Average, who only browses and reads mail in the browser as well, I am sure it will work.
Thanks for the hint, anyway. Appreciated! Probably I regain recollection about which software was giving me problems with the backport. Maybe I will try the procedure in a VM first, before I run it on my laptop.
Snaps have improved, but if you have 3gb or less, you’re better off removing them. Tar firefox takes 10 seconds less to launch compared to snap firefox on my 2gb ram intel tablet with kubuntu. On an 8gb ram machine with vanilla ubuntu, the snap takes the same time to launch as the binary(deb).
So, let me explain this: While lubuntu is still a good distro for old hardware, they have changed their priorities. In my own experience, it runs fine on an hdd and emmc. On old hardware, remove snap to have the best experience.
from me when I read that…
). I might give it a try. Might be nice to have an easy Arch alternative for the times I use Arch.
