[Users] 32bit Linux recommendation to run Claws on an old laptop

[Michal Suchánek]

On Sat, Sep 19, 2020 at 01:02:53PM -0700, lists wrote:
> I ended up abandoning my old Dell laptop due to bugs in the Intel GPU driver. This was on 64 bit Linux opensuse. It is usable if you force the OS to use the open-source graphics. Basically uninstall the Intel driver.
You probably mean software rendering instead of the hardware-specific
driver.
> 
> When I got a new notebook I made it a point not to have Intel anything since I was so mad they screwed up the GPU driver. Intel also screwed up the DRM code though I didn't care. I just uninstalled it because it locked up the notebook. 
The Intel GPU drivers are actually quite interesting. While most
'accelerated' GPU drivers only accelerate large scale operations like
wobbling your windows smaller updates suffer due to the rundtrip to the
GPU and back. At some point somebody blogged they are amazed that the
Intel driver actually acceleretes or at least does not decelerate
pretty much everything. That is because of contributions from Intel
engineers that have access to Intel internal documentation and the staff
that designed the hardware. To get there thy play some very tricky games
with memory coherency settings, and they do not always get it right on
every revision of every chiset, especially the older and less tested
ones. If you use the software rendering most opertaions are actually
faster but the cost is that they run on the CPU which is already weak on
such old laptop.

The AMD integrated GPUs have their issues as well, and any integrated
GPU steals memory bandwidth from the rest of the system but on a laptop
it also saves power to not have a separate graphics memory and GPU chip.
> 
> Claws and a few programs that were light on graphics was about all it could run. I switched to XFCE. I got a good four or five years out of it. It was a Dell e6400 ATG I bought as a refurb. That is the ruggedized version of the Latitude with an incredibly bright screen. I really hate to give it up but it made the modern internet unusable. I keep it around since it could be a backup but not a daily. 
Typically the most limiting part is memory. Some sites would render
slower as well - I am using a rpi3 as backup and I think memory is
really the worst part.

So a Dell with 2GHz Pentium M and 4GB RAM should be sort of usable. If
the CPU is single-core then CPU performance may become a problem, too.

And yes, 32bit x86 support is not great in openSUSE - only the
Tumbleweed distribution which is similar to Debian testing supports it.
The stable Leap releases support 64bit only.

Thanks

Michal
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>   Original Message  
> 
> 
> From: sylpheed at 911networks.com
> Sent: September 19, 2020 12:35 PM
> To: users at lists.claws-mail.org
> Subject: Re: [Users] 32bit Linux recommendation to run Claws on an old laptop
> 
> 
> On Fri, 18 Sep 2020 18:12:34 -0700
> sylpheed at 911networks.com wrote:
> 
> >I have a really old Dell laptop with a Pentium M 2Ghz processor, 4Gb
> >RAM and 128Gb drive
> >
> >It needs to run Claws-Mail and some kind of browser.
> 
> Thank you to everybody. I will try debian 10 straight (I've wanted
> to try debian in anyway) and see how it goes...
> 
> --
> sknahT
> 
> vyS
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