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Both machines are capable of running GNOME, playing videos, and launching multiple applications at the same time. The only things that make a difference are the amount of RAM in the machine, so we can open multiple applications without swapping, and whether the storage device is a spinning hard disk, or a faster Flash drive.
I use Fedora Workstation on an EndlessPC. It's not a particularly powerful machine, but it's sold with an GS-based system, and I wouldn't call it a smooth experience even without any apps opened.
The problem on those machines is probably something else. There's performance problems with every BayTrail and CherryTrail devices out there when using gnome-shell. The perceived performance is worse than on those 10 year-old machines I was telling you about which tells you that something else is wrong. The GPU is at least 10x faster than it was 10 years ago and yet, it struggles.
The problem could be memory bandwidth. I know that Carlos Garnacho's mutter patches in 3.24 already sped things up greatly.
My mom's T400 is at the edge.
With a conventional hard drive? A 40€/40$ SSD, and some 2nd-hand RAM would probably make a world of difference.
Being able to disable animations could still be an accessibility setting, but it will have no impact on people's ability to run GNOME and applications on older machines.
That's correct, I must admit after some testing. Maybe people just confuse it with the low-graphics mode (or whatever they call it) from Ubuntu/Unity which is tuned to work on less powerful computers and where the effects are disabled and think that disabling effects in GS would have the same impact on performance.
This is the problem with providing whatever medicine is requested when the patient self-diagnoses :)