I often use a Thinkpad X220 (which still works for a lot of my usage and I'm not too concerned about it being stolen or damaged) and the JS web is terrible to use on it. Mostly resulted in my preference of using native software (non-electron), which generally works perfectly fine and about as well as on my "more modern" computer.
Whenever I pull out old machines I’m a little shocked at how responsive they are running a modern OS (Win10 or Linux), so long as the modern web is avoided. Anything with a Core 2 Duo or better is adequate for a wide range of tasks if you can find non-bloated software to do them with.
Even going back so far that modern OS support is absent, snappiness can be found. My circa 2000 500Mhz PowerBook G3 running Mac OS 9.1 doesn’t feel appreciably slower than its modern day counterpart for more than one might expect, and some things like typing latency are actually better.
“True UNIX way” solution to this would be getting the data from the Web non-interactively and redirecting it into some regular expressions to produce the only thing you want. Random example:
I remember going trough a similar situation when using a netbook. At first they were ok for doing light work and even accessing websites, but as time went on websites and browsers became more and more heavy. Youtube was a struggle, even Google felt laggy. Want to browse a map? You are better off getting a physical one! But, no worry, it was still fine for other low intensity things and some programming projects I worked on. About two years later and both KDE and GNOME would struggle to run on it, it was painful. Maybe I should have switched to an all CLI/terminal workflow but eventually I bought a used thinkpad X220 which was like taking a breath of fresh air after holding it for years. But now I do see the same pattern emerging, much slower mind you, but it is surely happening. Some websites feel sluggish, some gnome apps also feel sluggish and I have to avoid electron apps like the plague. But at least it has enough brawn (16GB of RAM and an SSD) to cut trough the bullshit and work ok on most things. Maybe I should have embraced that terminal lifestyle after all...
I'm sure there's an odd parable with netbooks, around the time they first started appearing as a hacky project and early commercial products they were lean and mean. Lightweight local software to do things online, compact flash IDE converters versus HDDs (which seems like a precursor to SSDs by proving a market), bare bones linux and there was a new wave of web standards and performance which non-IE browsers were leading in.
Then after going mass market OEMs put full windows and client software on there, and the web became heavier so webmail or simple office/collaboration slowed down. After that mobile/tablets were in competition for the market, and has practically devoured non-professional usage for PCs outside of gaming.
What I keep coming back to is bundling versus unbundling - having one tool to do everything with likely inevitable compromises, versus splitting into a number of precise specialized ones. It's difficult to convince any decent number of people to take something that does less.
