This answer seems optimistic. Unless you have a single execution state cpu bound, which has no parallelism, and no other tasks exist needing runtime, having more cores, even little ones, seems like a win.
Even just pedestrian clock processing for interrupts could exploit the other cores. Or keyboard and mouse processing, whatever. Playing an mp3 while you compile? That other core sure would stop context switching in the compiler...
My Ubuntu VM on my Mac Mini gets outstanding performance which validates the point that macOS isn't essential for the performance. I'm sure however that macOS is very helpful in ensuring the power efficiency on laptops.
Same here. For many years, a MacBook Air 11 was my daily driver. After some time, I wiped up Mac OS X and I ran a minimal Linux configuration: XMonad, Emacs, Firefox and XTerm.
With a few tweaks, mostly those suggested by powertop, my battery range was indistinguishable from Mac OS. Which is impressive, given that Safari is known to be very optimized towards low energy usage. I guess I compensated that with a simpler graphics stack that generated less CPU wakeups.
I’m with you up through XMonad, Emacs, and XTerm but... Firefox? Right now I’m currently struggling with an attempt to use a circa 2015 Dell XPS 13 as a Linux-based daily driver, and Firefox is nigh unusable with even only a few tabs, 4GB of RAM apparently doesn’t go far enough, swap degrades performance even with SSD but turning it off just means stuff dies. I’d love to find out I just set things up wrong but I’m shocked to discover I was getting better performance out of Windows.
I wonder what else you're running on that machine. I have an i5 X201 from 2010 with 2GB of ram (and an SSD), and I regularly push it with 50-ish Firefox tabs.
However, I'm using i3 instead of gnome, and void instead of debian et. al.
It's Lubuntu, so I think the desktop is LXQt; I'd assume it's not that.
About the only unusual thing I can think of is that I'm trying to use dropbox. It dies periodically, so maybe it's hungry, but even without it running, less than a dozen FF tabs can bog down the machine (and I gave up on Chromium entirely).
Would totally welcome any tips from people confident I can do better.
Honestly, I wouldn't discount the desktop or the OS. On a fresh reboot, htop shows my cpu usage across the four cores as 0, 0.7, 0, and 1.3%. That's not a lot of background activity.
I won't claim to have late-model-Ryzen performance; there is an SSD performance hit when the machine uses some of the 16gb of swap I gave it. The website data has to go somewhere. But I haven't found it to become unusable, except when I restore and load all my tabs simultaneously. After it's all downloaded though, pulling web pages out of swap is pretty fast.
Personally, I found the best things for performance were an SSD, i3+void, and a ton of swap space. Pretty much in that order.
Edit: I looked up the processors of the two machines. Ironically, all else being equal, that X201 is a full 20% faster than yours (2.2 vs 2.66).
Even just pedestrian clock processing for interrupts could exploit the other cores. Or keyboard and mouse processing, whatever. Playing an mp3 while you compile? That other core sure would stop context switching in the compiler...