Using Chromium OldStable in Jessie

[bester69]

Whouldn't it be a great idea??

I was using chromium35 because new chromium versions are very slow and heavy (for old computers), then i checked releases history (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ch ... se_history) and i could see v36 and v37 gets quicker and more stable, so now i've installed Chromium Oldstable (v37) and i can see is an litle faster than v35 , and i get LTS wheezy which is cool, I dont see the point to install chromium 50 and every two days upgrade again, its kind of dinosaur, such a beast.

Id recommend you to do the same until 2018, then we can buy a newone computer (until 2018 security bugs are available with LTS wheezy )

by the way, chromium 37 feels so smooth and quicker ...(even Hardware acceleration seems to work better than new versions with Jessie and old computers.)
My gpu flags all in green:

Graphics Feature Status
Canvas: Hardware accelerated
Flash: Hardware accelerated
Flash Stage3D: Hardware accelerated
Flash Stage3D Baseline profile: Hardware accelerated
Compositing: Hardware accelerated and threaded
Rasterization: Hardware accelerated
Threaded Rasterization: Enabled
Video Decode: Hardware accelerated
Video Encode: Hardware accelerated
WebGL: Hardware accelerated

[edbarx]

If your hardware is so 'antique', I would suggest to use other browser alternatives depending on your task. Google Chrome has been known to be a beast where resources are involved for ages.

There are many options for anyone using old hardware. Some of them are to disable all animations, images and script. For really antique hardware there is lynx-cur but notwithstanding it being very light on antique hardware you didn't advertise it. I can understand you prefer graphical programs, but don't you realise you are expecting modern multimedia performance out of hardware that may not have been designed to support it the way you want it?

At first, I too used to believe GNU/Linux did miracles on old hardware, but experience has repersuaded me that this impression was wrong: GNU/Linux is an OS that loves to run on powerful hardware just like all other operating systems. This is becoming more noticeable with GNOME and KDE. Even XFCE is taking the path of the latter two. I remember when XFCE used to load instantaneously, but these days are now gone. It is now like MS Windows taking several seconds to load.

[bester69]

If your hardware is so 'antique', I would suggest to use other browser alternatives depending on your task. Google Chrome has been known to be a beast where resources are involved for ages.

..., but don't you realise you are expecting modern multimedia performance out of hardware that may not have been designed to support it the way you want it?

At first, I too used to believe GNU/Linux did miracles on old hardware, ..... It is now like MS Windows taking several seconds to load.

Hi edbarx,

my laptop is from 2008, and its just 2G RAM, 2G CPU 1 core, and its going stilll younger and stronger, im suppose that in one or two year it will go backwards, but hey!, its a 2008 laptop's and run as if it was a new computer thanks to linux, and Windows 10 cant run on it propertly. I can watch 1080p h264 movies on it , and KDE 4.2 runs increduble good on it, smooth and very fast responsive

Im not agree about DE getting more demant with ages, KDE 4.2 is very light, almost same as MATE ,it just Akonadi framework which rise consume memory in kde,but kde works great with just 2G RAM. Mate, Unity,XFCE, all of them are more or less the same as kde about demanding cpu/ram. New Kernel's up to date has been improving performance with my computer (4.5bpo kernel runs faster than 3.16), and ive seen that KDE 5 is lighter than KDE 4.2 (i tested it), so the whole thing it still getting quicker, and lighter up to date. In one or two years or maybe right now things will start to changing cos , as you said, developers start to use new recently hardwares methods.

Right now Firefox is still going in the right direction with my hardware (keeping consume ram and still going quicker ), cant say the same about chromium (i had to stucked in v37)
the good thing,is that most of the open source apps availabe requiere very litle demanding hardware, so they wont get harder soon. And the SO goes on getting faster and powerfull.(exception about booting time increased and size installation, linux size is growing quicker)

This is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

[bester69]

If your hardware is so 'antique', I would suggest .. for anyone using old hardware. Some of them are to disable all animations, images and script.

jejej Thats very fair trick, I do it with chromium when using movil adsl, Can survive one month with 1Gb data by disabling javascript and images , i think this is betther tha use lynx

[gradinaruvasile]

About the gpu flags... Unfortunately they are not consistent with reality (not all of them). You see hardware decoding but in fact it does not work (so you might have doubts about the others too...).
I tested the hardware decoding that was supposedly activated on my desktop and its not working. I have an AMD APU and use its IGP that can do HW decoding for h264 just fine in mpv/kodi/vlc/etc but youtube for example is not using HW decoding at all. It is actually really close to software-decoded players CPU usage wise, but no hw decoding - i monitored the GPU profiles and it changes to uvd when using hw decoding in other programs but not in Chrome playback (i use h264ify and made sure i receive the h264 stream by checking the "stats for nerds" output).
The same goes for the 4600 Intel GPU i have in my work laptop, with the difference that i had to actually check cpu usage for comparison as i dont know how to check if it uses the hw decode engine.
Googling for it i found some threads in the Chromium bug tracker that pointed to the fact that HW decoding is not activated/implemented on Linux.