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Date: 2020-06-17
Status: Done
I am no retrogrouch. I enjoy my graphical browsers. I have mixed feelings about the levels of indirection present in apps that emit instructions for an emulated terminal that itself uses a widget toolkit (usually X11 on free platforms, but could be Wayland et al) which wraps graphics primitives; the way most TUI apps are written these days.
That said, the other day I found myself in the last five minutes of a work meeting, where some folks on adjacent teams were discussing something not completely relevant to my team or I. My work computer is slow. I've doggedly held onto an older (~5 years) Macbook Pro because I like the ports available on the device, and because I don't really feel like my work would benefit that much from a more modern machine. Zoom, our company's meeting software, however, *loves* to hog the entire system. The CPU used to decode multiple video streams is no joke, and my laptop has a hard time with this. Trying to idly use my web browser during these meetings is often fruitless (the OS scheduler tries to prioritize the video decoding, so the browser either just hangs or requests time out).
Gemini and Gopher on the other hand? Easy. Even with my CPU pegged, I can browse Gemini and Gopher in both graphical text clients without breaking a sweat. And that's exactly what I did.