Hello everyone,
I have a laptop with haswell cpu on the board (i5-4300U and Intel HD Graphics 4400). This is a Thinkpad x240. Yeah, it is old, but generally it still works well with KDE neon (xorg), until I try to have a video call or watch on youtube.
Maybe there are some kernel builds for old hardware, or video drivers for old graphic adapters to make this old man great again?
I have an HP laptop 17" with an i3-4030u, so a weaker cpu with the same graphics. It has 6b ram, iirc. I did replace the spinny HDD for a much smaller SATA ssd I had lying around, and that made a massive difference in performance.
I don’t have any issues on Neon with video playback at all, though it has been nearly a month since I last booted it. That was one if its few jobs, actually. I can’t say much about video calls, that could be taxing things on multiple fronts.
I don’t think there is much you can do software-wise to add much. You might consider that SSD, and as much ram as you can put in there.
I’ll check that laptop out later, and see if my memory is accurate on video playback with YouTube and my Jellyfin server, and check if there was any tweaking I did, other than setting Youtube to 720p. I am 95% positive it is running on Wayland, as well, though that likely is immaterial here.
Hm, I already have ssd and maximum for this model of ram amount.
Checking back, my HP does have the slightly different 4600 graphics, and a 4000m i3.
I can only suggest looking at browser tweaks for hardware acceleration,maybe?
This may take some about:config tweaks in your browser, but it should be enabled ootb in a Wayland session.
Not 100% sure if these configs are valid today in current versions of FF
I had no issues with video playback, even as I downloaded a month’s worth of updates. The wifi on it is not fast. Again, I use Wayland, and didn’t seem to change any configs for FF on my system.
You might also check out GitHub - erkserkserks/h264ify: A Chrome extension that makes YouTube stream H.264 videos instead of VP8/VP9 videos This browser extension should help with YouTube, sine their main codecs don’t play well with older graphics. This might be the first place to go, since it is easy., as well as testing a Wayland session, which is just as easy.
For video calls, the only thing that is going to help is to reduce the resolution, and hope for a strong wifi signal if you don’t have Ethernet, I think.