How much memory does your MBP have? I imagine it's a 2GB machine and therefore is swapping like crazy. I have the same issue when trying to load modern web apps on my 2GB netbook. Setting up zswap improved performance a bit but then CPU became the bottleneck.
I have a 2008 C2Q Q9400/8G/SSD machine which is still used often, running Linux with Q45 IGPU. CPU load is low and it still has enough grunt to perform reasonably. I used it as a daily driver for many years and have never had an issue with web sites and basic office/dev work.
> But the real kicker is this: with Linux, I have the power to fix things.
This is one of the major reasons why I have switched to Linux and never looked back. Obviously this mindset is not for everyone, but for a technical user willing to put effort into it you can end up with a great experience. Even knowing that an issue you reported has been acknowledged or is also experienced by others (and being able to track its progress) is quite reassuring.
While it's true that developers are often frustrated with people asking stupid questions if you actually put the effort into writing a proper bug report and trying patches out they are often happy to help you out. The Linux community is a technical community and users are expected to pull some weight in most cases.
As stated by another user it's not true open source, the source is solely available for personal use and for the submission of patches back to the author.
Such a model can backfire though as it would appear to be legal for a third-party contributor to create a set of scripts that would compile and prepare the application (load all the dependencies in a container and so forth) and release those scripts. Those scripts could even become accepted by a Linux distro's package manager, similar to how package managers package freeware prop software by using a script to legally grab the binary from the developer's site and installing it.
I had a friend tell me recently that he had to teach a (high school) intern how to navigate the Windows taskbar and use the Control-C and Control-V shortcuts on the keyboard. I thought he was joking until he mentioned that the student mostly used mobile devices at home and school and rarely used a PC. Apparently schools nowadays are replacing their laptop fleets with iPads and all that.
I've seen a lot of people complaining that their 100M+ connections are "slow" for that reason, and they upgrade to 1G and they complain again. It's not like they're doing much on that 1G line either, just say a Steam game download at full speed followed with a stuttering Zoom call. You'll be surprised how far you can push a 10M DSL connection with good QOS (assuming you don't have multiple users streaming video and such).
There's something the "old hackers" know that many CS students don't learn from the start (in the introductory classes), and that is actually how a computer operates. Don't spend a lot of time on this unless he's really interested, but it's a good idea to sit down with him for a few hours and teach him what really goes on inside a computer.
I'm talking about the concept of instructions, registers, addressable memory, etc. - with block diagrams, not with full circuits unless he's into that kind of stuff.
Then when he moves onto one of the high level languages that the other commenters are talking about the concepts will naturally stick. E.g. a variable is stored in memory, when we add two variables in the HLL we are copying those values to registers and using an ADD instruction, then we are writing the result back to memory. When there is an IF statement the computer will jump to either block of code depending on the conditional operation. Pointers become intuitive. And so on.
I've explained this to laymen and people who are interested in computers and have gotten a pretty positive reaction from them - so it's worth a shot. For a programmer who generally focuses on HLL it also allows them to get some idea of how their code is executed in the real world under all that abstraction.
The course had a machine solely for benchmarking. It would only compile and benchmark one program at a time and the students had to queue up.
It worked well for the course and the results were very consistent between runs, but that kind of setup doesn't scale well.
There may be a (slow) option though, and that would be benchmarking the code using an simulated processor. The runtime would be measured relative to the simulated processor as opposed to the computer hosting the simulator.
As an aside, it would be fun to see a programming challenge website focused on performance and optimizations, rather than code golf (shortest program) or edge case correctness (interview type sites). I took a course like this in uni where we learned low-level optimization and got to compete with other classmates to see who had the fastest program - a fun experience that I don't really see much of online.