I’m not sure who fixed it, or when, but somebody resolved the issue involving Firefox in Windows 10 laptops from HP and other manufacturers who use the Conexant audio hardware and software. What happened in my 2017 laptop was that running the Firefox browser would cause a Conexant program called Flow.exe to start using a whole lot of CPU, causing the laptop to run hot – and poorly. The “fix” at the time was to rename the Flow.

I’ve been intermittently struggling and totally forgetting about the best way to create cross-platform GUI applications. I’ve veered between Tk for Ruby or Python, JavaFX and Qt. I recently stumbled on GTK3 in Ruby, and I’ve been going through a couple of tutorials in an attempt to figure it out. Since I’m back on Debian Stable for 90 percent of my computing, I figured I’d give GTK3 a try. I knew that you could run GTK apps in Windows (and presumably also on MacOS), but maybe I’d have to resort to exotic packaging to make it happen.

I don’t know how much of it is Debian 10 and how much is swapping a 5400-RPM hard drive with an M.2 NVMe SSD, but my 2-year-old laptop is FLYING now that I’ve ditched Windows 10 and the 1 GB magnetic drive that came with it. And this is with GNOME 3. The stock or lightly/heavily-favored desktop environment in Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu looks great, runs with no hesitation (in constrast to Windows 10) and doesn’t have me thinking that I need anything else for speed-related reasons.

The problem for users of Windows laptops using the Conexant audio driver that makes Conexant’s Flow.exe program eat large amounts of CPU when the Firefox web browser is running has not been solved by “conventional” means. And in order to be part of the “solution,” should one ever come, I filed a bug with Mozilla on the issue. There have been many fixes proposed for this problem, which only seems to manifest itself on my HP Envy laptop while running Firefox.

I just found out that there’s already an rsync port to Windows called cwRsync that you can pay for, with a free command-line-only edition available for download.

I spent quite a bit of time running Google Chrome/Chromium on both Windows and Linux, but between feeling uncomfortable giving away so much data to Google (when logged in on Chrome) and how well Firefox performs on Linux (which is very well from what I can see), I now use Firefox about 99 percent of the time in Fedora 20.