Mastodawn

Thoughts from my 14-year-old backup Thinkpad T430 after the main laptop died:

* Github's javascript UI is SO SLOW
* Most of the rest of the web is actually not terrible (at least with adblock)
* It drives a 4K screen surprisingly well
* Video playback is bad
* How is this thing running out of RAM, it has 12GB...
* The keyboard is a delight

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Russ Garrett Mar 3

So it turns out that Ubuntu's Firefox Snap blocks Firefox from reading the system memory pressure, which it uses to work out when to reclaim memory by hibernating unused tabs.

Nobody thought to check why this kept getting blocked by AppArmor until someone pointed it out, and it still hasn't been fixed.

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Richard Mar 4

@russss The entire snap thing is extremely dumb and it's the reason I switched to a mac. I am completely over fundamental stuff not working properly for stupid reasons and not getting fixed either.

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Russ Garrett Mar 4

@m0rpk I haven't had much experience with snaps so I approached it with an open mind but unfortunately I have been disappointed.

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Richard

@russss My experience of snaps was that I didn’t know they existed until I updated Ubuntu (routinely) and Firefox (1) lost its profile; (2) could no longer access the file system.

This was apparently desirable behaviour and not a usability catastrophe (where are all my bookmarks, plugins and settings, and why can’t I download anything?!)

Once I realised they’d containerised everything and it was going to be my problem to deal with that whole mess, I nuked from orbit and never looked back.