Disclaimer: this posting is not meant as criticism or bug report, it’s just for fun! I don’t think very old and slow hardware is really relevant.
After migrating my systems from Windows to Linux and getting an enormous performance boost on my hardware I started a little fun project and revived my old but still beautiful MacBook Air 11" from 2010. I replaced the dead battery with a new one, upgraded the old 128GB ssd to 1TB, bought a little USB-C-to-Magsafe adapter and installed Fedora 40 with KDE and Wayland on it. The display is still stuck at 1366x768, the RAM at 4GB (hey, at least half of the size of some Macs from 2024! ) and the wifi at 802.11n.
The overall performance is not great but surprisingly usable and much faster than the last supported macOS version.
Today I installed the browser Vivaldi that I use exclusively for all language learning stuff and tried out Bunpro.
The layout works really well on the tiny screen! I expected that I have to scroll a lot but the review screen fits just fine. Nice!
Performance is not great, animations like fading in and out run at maybe 10 fps. But they are fast and it’s no problem. Some pages take quite long to load but as soon as the reviews are running everything is usable and not annoying to use.
But the fan… oh boy… I didn’t knew how loud that MacBook Air can get, the fan must be running on maximum speed all the time and it still gets quite hot. The poor Core 2 Duo has quite a lot to do (the browser has between 120 and 150% load, 200% would be the maximum as it has two cores). Kind of interesting as I don’t have that problem on other websites (I’m writing this on the MacBook here in the forum and the fan is now nearly off). I also would have expected that the cpu load will settle down a bit when I’m stuck on a card and thinking about the 50 versions how you can negate a sentence and which one Bunpro wants from me but the load is staying high all the time without me doing anything.
Well, interesting experience, I’m now thinking about using that laptop for performance tests in my own projects.
And again, I don’t expect any improvements. That device is just really slow, my passively cooled and also quite slow Pentium N5000 laptop is blazingly fast in comparison and I will keep doing my reviews on it anyway.