Wait... Debian does not do "cd" and "ls"? That would make it difficult to navigate.

(Just kidding!)

Uh...exactly what is AntiX supposed to be doing which Debian doesn't?

My point is about performance and support. Debian with XFCE4 will perform extremely well on the hardware described. We're talking a base RAM consumption on the order of 77MB, which is a drop in the bucket with 2GB of RAM available. Debian with XFCE4 runs fast and efficiently on hardware on that level; I use it every day with similar hardware so I know.

So, performance is plenty good enough.

Given that, the big thing is support effort. My attitude is that it's easiest to support the same stuff you use yourself. Based on haertig's user info, I had assumed he was already very familiar with Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, and Slackware. Turns out it's not that simple, so <shrug>.

I know I'm comparing systemd (which Debian uses by default) and sysvinit (which AntiX uses, big whoop). Systemd is what gets the best support and it performs well. Mint also uses systemd by default, so...better to support the stuff you use yourself, I think.

Bluntly, the OP's elderly mother could not possibly care less about the ideological flame war against systemd or sysvinit. What is easiest to support? What performs well? That's all that matters for this use case.

Anyway, for this use case the big thing is going to be optimizing browser performance and setup. The CPU upgrade could very well solve that just fine, actually. And the RAM upgrade makes it practical to just stick with Mint, I think (maybe install XFCE4, but it honestly makes little difference once the web browser is loaded up).

I stand by my earlier suggestion of installing two web browsers - chromium (without flash) and google-chrome (which includes flash). When logged into the same Google account, they will actually share many settings and will be aware of each other's browsing history.

My guess is that the CPU upgrade will make the point moot. But if even more performance is desired, this two browser solution could be what's best for this use case.

Initial look after upgrade is promising.

I can't judge boot times off of the SSD yet, as I'm still messing with grub to get that set up correctly, since Clonezilla didn't quite get that part correct. Even though I did a partition clone, there was a Clonezilla option to transfer the boot loader. But that didn't work, so maybe I misunderstood what it was supposed to do. I did a manual grub-install and I'm manually booting from the grub command line currently, so I can't time the boot sequence. I installed legacy grub (after booting from SysRescueCD), because I remember how to boot manually with that one. Later, I will reinstall grub2, since that's what LinuxMint uses by default. I've never been very good with grub2, just never took the time to learn it well. I constantly have to go back to manpages and tutorials to refresh my feeble grub2 memory.

Initial load time from Chromium browser dropped from 19 seconds to 8 seconds. I'm sure that is mostly due the SSD, not the CPU/memory. Second load time for Chromium remains largely unaffected, as expected, dropping from 8 seconds to 7 seconds (that could be user variation in my eyes watching my stopwatch!) Second load should be from RAM cache anyway, thus unaffected by the SSD. And by doubling the RAM, more things should stay in cache now. Other applications I tested had similar results - initial load times dropped to less than half, second load times were unaffected.

I also did not configure any swap with the higher 4Gb of RAM. In case I ever decide to add swap in the future, I set swappiness=0 in /etc/sysctl.conf as a reminder to myself so that swap would only be used in emergencies, thus allowing for fastest system performance.

The system is not connected to the network yet, so I can't test overall browser responsiveness while loading pages (my initial tests were testing only the load time, going to a cached homepage). I am hoping that as the web browser writes all it's bazillion small cache files during page loads, that the SSD will help performance there. I was never concerned about boot times, since this system stays up 24x7. And application initial load times were not a big issue either, however, they do tend to give you a mindset of how a system performs. If things load slowly initially, your brain tends to always watch for things to be slow later, and your mental perception is that the system is slow, even if it's not. Likewise, if your system boots fast as a scalded ape, due to an SSD, your mindset becomes, "Wow, this system is fast!" Even if it's not.

More testing to come later ... after I get grub whipped into shape. I dare say, my mom won't be happy if I give her instructions on how to boot manually from grubs command line. Gotta fix that first!

I got grub all sorted. Boot times improved from 55 seconds (HDD) to 27 seconds (SSD). Hooked computer up to internet and it was quite fast. Really snappy. I was surprised at how well it is doing actually. It seems to be very close to MY computer, which has a significantly faster CPU (actually, about the same MHz, but mine has six cores compared to mom's dual core). I don't know how well web browsers make use of multiple cores (my guess is "not very well"), so I'm sure the dual core is just fine for mom. I probably have never used all the cores in my CPU, except maybe doing some CAD stuff or possibly when transcoding videos. I'm not even sure if those operations will fully utilize the multiple cores the have access to.

I'll have to test how things go on mom's internet connection next, once I deliver the computer back to her. Mine internet here at home is 200Mbps down, and mom's is more like 10Mbps (on a good day). Her's is also quite variable in performance whereas mine is rock solid. So at this point, I judge this upgraded computer "more than fast enough". It definitely feels snappier all the way around. If it's slow over at her place, I'll have to investigate her internet as the probable cause, and ask more detailed questions about exactly what she's doing when it's slow. Maybe have her stop what she's doing, call me, and I can VNC in and snoop around.

Thanks for all the help and suggestions! IMHO, this has been a good and informative thread.

Browsers tend to hit the HDD/SSD pretty hard on cache. So your CPU isn't really the bottleneck. I used a really slow USB stick once on a much more beefier machine than mine and it would buffer 360p youtube videos waiting on disk I/O. I made a ramdisk and moved the $HOME/.cache and related stuffs for the browser there and it was snappy again. Not really an option if you have < 4GB ram though. And not a default or easy thing to do for newbies. But it was part of my motivation for my latest machine with 8GB ram (7.6GB according to /proc/meminfo). Running nmon and pressing "l" for the cpu meter and the blue is a waiting state, probably waiting on disk I/O if it's a significant percentage of usage.

Found a great tool for analyzing system performance. I had heard of it, but for some reason never tried it. "nmon". Much easier than using separate commands: top, vmstat, iostat, etc. And it can collect data samples over a time period for graphing. This tool looks to be VERY useful for performance analysis and tuning!

http://nmon.sourceforge.net/pmwiki.php?n=Main.HomePage

Found another excellent tool for system performance monitoring. "glances" This one I had never heard of, but I tried it out and it looks very good.

https://nicolargo.github.io/glances/
http://glances.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

Also, another one ... "iftop". I was familiar with top, atop, htop and iotop, but had not heard of iftop. Another tool to add to the toolbox.

Now that my mom's computer is running nice and fast and she's happy, I don't need all these tools at the moment. But it's always good to find and learn new things ... for the NEXT time you need to troubleshoot a system!

2 members found this post helpful.

haertig,

Thanks for the links about Glances.

Please go to your original post, click on the Thread Tools tab at the top and then click on Mark this thread as solved.

Hey haertig,

I admit to having skipped over most of the posts here, but I'll chime in to second frank_bell's recommendation for LXDE instead of XFCE4 as a desktop environment (if you haven't already switched). It's about as light and fast as you can get without taking the step down to a simple Window Manager. It's definitely quite a bit lighter and faster than XFCE4.

Cheers !

I'm a little surprised an 88 year old would notice any performance problem on that machine as it was prior to the upgrades. Most of my PCs are Dells, but my only functional HP has the exact same E2180 CPU as the OP, and 2GB RAM. With Plasma on Fedora 24/25/26, openSUSE 42.1/42.2/42.3/TW and Plasma or TDE or KDE3, and KDE4 on Mageia 5, it seems to provide perfectly reasonable performance no matter how many Firefox windows or tabs I open. Maybe the root problem in her's was that the third generation GMA3100 was quite a slouch compared to 4th generation GMA, which if I understand the interplay between Intel CPU and Intel chipset of a decade ago, is what she got from that $13.50 upgrade to E8400?

My guess is that the performance increase came from the SSD and additional memory more than from the CPU. One other thing I noted - Thunderbird always opened links from email using Firefox, totally ignoring the system "default browser" being set to Chromium. This would result in my mom having a Firefox window open, with a couple of tabs and ALSO a Chromium window open when she manually accessed the internet from the Chromium icon on her desktop. Each one of these is a big memory hog. Run them together, and you have a massive memory hog.

I researched how to make Thunderbird use the default browser - many reported this same issue of it ignoring settings and automatically using Firefox every time. Proposed solutions to this bad behavior were not exactly straightforward, and left a bad taste in my mouth regarding Thunderbird. In the end, I just went the simple way, and removed Firefox. Now Thunderbird has no choice but to use Chromium, which it now does. The GUI differences between Chromium and Firefox are indistinguishable to my mom, she doesn't recognize which one she is using. I believe the GUI differences between Thunderbird and some other email client I might have chosen to install would be more pronounced, and with the old folks, you don't want to rock the boat unnecessarily, with a new GUI to learn unless you absolutely have to.

BTW, on my system (running LinuxMint 18 vs mom's 18.1), Thunderbird honors my default browser setting and uses Chromium rather than Firefox, which I also have installed. I didn't do anything special to make that work on my system except set the default browser. Weird that this worked on my system, but not on my mom's. Possibly different versions of Thunderbird coming from different repos? I don't know if 18 and 18.1 use different repos. Whatever - Firefox is now gone from my mom's system, and that fixed things.

1 members found this post helpful.

Yes, the easiest solution for applications opening up the wrong browser is simply to remove all other browsers.