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).
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).