The constant struggle with web bloat: The Arch Linux Forums
I recently reblogged a post about how many websites today are borderline unusable if you have lower-end, even recent lower-end hardware—which is true of the majority of online users in the Global South, and even some of us in North America and Europe. Twitter was one of the worst offenders, with the website taking nearly 3 seconds to load anything usable even on a high-end laptop with internet better than what most people in the U.S. have.
Unfortunately, the Arch Linux forums, if current plans come to fruition, will be yet another victim of people who have absolutely no idea what average hardware actually looks like.
A caveat: this is old news. But I think it isn't widely known, and if you've ever looked for help on the Arch forums, this will eventually affect you.
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One specific example the site brings up is Discourse. Discourse is a modern and increasingly popular software package for internet forums. The Fedora forums are just one example (see also screenshot below), but most tech support forums seem to use it now.
A notable exception of course is Arch. If you've ever been on the Arch Linux forums, they definitely don't resemble 2025 web design—they still use fluxBB, an older package that has its roots in the desire to make a more minimalist version of the better-known phpBB, which is already very minimal and fast by today's standards.
Well, the Arch forums, as announced about two years ago, are moving to Discourse, against the advice of basically everyone involved in their day-to-day administration. It may not be set in stone, and progress has been going at a glacial pace—but that is the current line. You can read the open Gitlab issue on the topic at the link here.
I will say that the reasons for a migration away from the current fluxBB are valid. The software is not maintained. Concerns were also brought up about compliance with certain laws (mainly the EU's "right to be forgotten"). Arch should indeed be working on a move. But Discourse is not a good choice.
Now I don't think Discourse looks bad, and it's certainly more "modern" in appearance. However it has terrible performance, especially on low-end hardware, and above all, it has a team who is utterly, rudely uninterested in attempting to optimize it whatsoever.
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You can click on the first link in this post for more, as Discourse's attitude towards its poor performance is a repeated theme. I will include just a few data points from there:
On a Tecno Spark 8C phone—a $100 phone from 3 years ago, very typical among what people in less wealthy countries are currently using—Xenforo and phpBB sites load in under 2 seconds. MyBB loads in less than 1. vBulletin is slow, over 4 seconds. Discourse takes FIFTEEN SECONDS.
Even on an M3 Max—a high-end laptop by any standard—Discourse takes more than a second to load, compared to a ½ second or less for all the other named forum sites.
Discourse co-founder Jeff Atwood: "we've been trending towards infinite CPU speed for decades now... optimize for the things that matter."
Also from Atwood: Q: "Are 100% of users on iOS?" A: "The influential users who spend money tend to be, I’ll tell you that … Pointless to worry about cpu."
Again, click the link above for more on this, it is utterly damning.
Of course, the Arch forum staff said as much during the linked discussion, and it was like talking to a brick wall. There's also the fact that Discourse doesn't work very well with Javascript disabled, as many Arch users choose to do in their browsers, and that it has many "anti-features" like infinite scroll, voting, and so on.
I will also add a personal anecdote. The article I reblogged focuses on CPU constraints, but network access is also important.
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I lived in Madagascar for nearly two years of my life. In Madagascar, there is no such thing as unlimited data. Rather, you buy scratch-off cards with money, and then use those to buy temporary "data plans". The cheapest plan, the one you buy in an emergency when your bus gets stuck in the mountains and you have to let your boss know somehow, would get you 20 MB of data usable for just one day.
Some of the websites studied will burn through a quarter of that just loading their home pages. Threads, which I admittedly have never used, burns through nearly a half. I wound up never, ever using certain apps while I lived there because they would eat my entire data allowance in no time. By refusing to optimize, web developers are locking out a huge part of the world.
This is somewhat understandable, though infuriating, for commercial websites that want to attract wealthy users. But it's nonsense when you are a Free and Open Source Software project that delights in being able to bring old hardware back to life.
