KWin had a very long standing bug report about bad performance of the Wayland session on older Intel integrated graphics. There have been many investigations into what’s causing this, with a lot of more specific performance issues being found and fixed, but none of them managed to fully fix the issue… until now.
Xaver Hugl
An excellent deep dive into a very annoying problem KWin on Wayland running on older Intel hardware was facing. It turns out the issue was related to display timings, and older Intel hardware simply not being powerful enough to render frames within the timing window. The solution consisted of a various smaller solutions, and one bigger one: triple-buffering. The end result is a massive performance improvement for KWin on Wayland on older Intel hardware.
This detailed post underlines just how difficult it is to simply render a bunch of windows and UI elements on time, without stutters or tearing, while taking into account the wide variety of hardware a project like KDE Plasma intends to run on. It’s great to see them paying attention to the older, less powerful systems too, instead of only focusing on the latest and greatest like Apple, and recently Microsoft as well, do.
Very interesting work, shows what can really be done if someone with a bit knowledge takes an interest instead of just being a Wayland apparatchik who demands change based on development completed on massively powerful AMD workstation.
On Apple and Win I agree, most recently they are only interested in performance platforms, but contrary to Thom’s claim I actually found that for a lot of our companies older hardware Win 10 was a massive performance improvement over Win 8.1 (Win 8 was a dead loss). Not Win 11 though, it’s at the moment a backward step. Apple abandoned legacy hardware users years ago, the only way forward for Apple is hardware upgrades, which is why our Apple inventory has now shrunk from 25% of systems down to a single machine.
What would you consider to be legacy hardware for Apple? I’m not an Apple die hard but I have replaced the few mac systems I’ve had once they hit 7 years or so. I don’t think that’s too bad really.
I would agree if it was purely my private decision, but in business it’s not so straight forward as the hardware deprecation and upgrade cycle comes in waves if at all. It’s true I have some genuine legacy hardware, hand me down systems running in hospitals. labs and R&D facilities, but in general I’m talking about hardware less than 10 years of age.
The really long long term stuff is mostly systems used in R&D, equipment used to reference long established baselines. You be shocked at how hard it is to make this stuff obsolete.
I daily drive a 2012 MacBook Pro. Up until recently, I did a surprising amount of my work on a 2008 iMac. In both cases, they are running Linux.
My wife has both a 2013 iMac ( running macOS Sonoma ) and an M2 MacBook Air. She uses them about equally and for a similar range of tasks. She is a college professor and all her online courses ( Teams mostly ) are done on the iMac. The iMac is home to the printer and scanner which see a lot of use.
None of these systems are running LLMs or doing much video editing of course. That said, my wife also submits quite a few auditions. Most of the simple video editing for that is done on her phone ( mostly because that is where the videos are ) though the iMac sees some use as well. The M2 may be used if we are travelling.
Somewhat absurdly, all our computers have 16 GB of RAM except the M2 which only has 8. I have a 2013 Mac Pro with 64 GB that runs Proxmox and I run a few remote desktops off of that. I also have a fairly new Lenovo laptop but it actually sees less use than the 2012 MacBook.
We have no problem buying newer hardware but, if older hardware is still meeting our needs, I do not want to HAVE to replace it.
7 years of support is reasonable. I certainly do not expect Apple to make new versions of macOS available for Intel longer than that. It annoys me more that they artificially remove support for hardware that still works fine without their intervention. They clearly break their software on purpose ( eg. not allowing AirPlay on hardware that can handle it just fine ). Apple is a hardware company of course. It makes sense. I just don’t love it.
Windows 10 runs fairly well. on older hardware if you remove the bloat. It runs as well as any 64 bit Windows ever did anyway. The complaint against Microsoft is clearly their decision to only support newer hardware with Windows 11.
We will see what happens when they try to retire Windows 10. Non-corporate types will probably just disable the hardware checks as Windows 11 runs about as well as Windows 10 once you do. Extended support options are already starting to appear from businesses.
Companies are less likely to want to run old hardware than individuals are ( in my experience ). If they want to run old versions of the OS, it is to support older applications or to provide software context stability. They are probably running those old OS versions on newer hardware, in virtualization, or in the cloud.
It would be good to know this “older” hardware is. Very unspecific.
Is it because the proportion of older systems is higher in the linux land? No appleboy (or applegirl, or applethem or whatever) I know uses powerpc machines anymore, and intel ones are getting rarer and rarer.
Recent Win11 -> Linux convert here. I’m currently running KDE-Neon (Plasma 6.1.1) on my 2013 Macbook Pro (w. Intel Iris GPU). It runs amazingly smooth and fast, considering the age of the hardware and the amount of bling the desktop has. I’m very impressed!
Unrelated side notes:
This aging laptop seems to work really hard playing YouTube videos. I’m guessing because the CPU is actually doing all the decompression of these latest codecs (since the Intel GPU doesn’t have native support?)
Firefox runs pretty choppy compared to Chronium. Being a long time Firefox supporter, I had to throw in the towel and switch over to Chronium when using this laptop.
Coding without Visual Studio (switched over to Visual Code) has been kind of refreshing! Coding in general on Linux has been pretty nice of an experience!
I am not running Intel Iris and I do not know what distro you are using but you should be getting hardware acceleration.
Perhaps this will help:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox#Hardware_video_acceleration
Linux runs great on old hardware is a joy to code in. We agree.
The issue with triple-buffering is that it adds lag. But I guess this is really the only way in that case.