I recently did some experiments with “old” hardware – a Skylake i5-6500U mini pc running Debian 12 with KDE Plasma, configured so that I can use it either as a stand-in replacement for my home server, or a fully set up Linux desktop for myself in case I need it for something; I don’t know, if both Microsoft and Apple make their operating systems non-functional at the same time for some reason. I intentionally left the machine with 8GB RAM just to see if it’s enough, and it seems to be more than enough for the server, where it uses up 1.4GB, and barely sufficient for desktop, where it uses up almost all the RAM when I run all the things that I normally do. It’s all quite snappy, but I did notice one thing; when I play videos on YouTube on full screen, or even when I’m using one of the high-bandwidth modes such as 1080p@60, it frame drops like crazy and is as smooth as a country road in Siberia during the melt season. My first guess was that the Skylake iGPU doesn’t support the modern codecs used by YouTube for those high bandwidth modes, but then I thought more about it and decided it might be a Linux issue. I didn’t feel like installing Windows on that machine just to test my hypothesis, so I took out the second device I recently got on ebay, the Thinkpad T14 with i5-10310U, a Comet Lake CPU with support for all the modern codecs. Played that same 4k video test on Win11, with perfect results, zero frame drops. Then I rebooted into Ubuntu 24.04, same test, and it frame drops almost the same as the Skylake machine.

I did all the recommended stuff on Linux; tried different browsers, tried to toggle GPU acceleration on and off, and the only thing I managed to do is make it behave worse, not better.

Switch to Linux they say, you’ll solve all your Microsoft problems they say. Well it’s true, you’ll solve your Microsoft problems, and instead of Microsoft you’ll have problems caused by thousands of pimply masturbators with attitude issues who can’t agree on the colour of shit, which is why there are hundreds of Linux distros and they all have the same issues, because polishing the GPU drivers and the window manager is hard. But the important thing is that the Linux community is getting rid of “nazis” who think there are only two genders, and at the same time they get rid of Russian developers because “stand with Ukraine”.

Yeah. The frustrating thing about Linux is that so many things work well, and then you run into something important like this. Maybe Huawei will rework Linux into something that actually works well, and give it wider hardware support and localisation, doing for Linux desktop what Android did for mobile. Maybe. However then America is going to block it because they won’t be able to install their spyware.