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> Well yeah, for writing code you might as well use decade old CPU and it wouldn't really matter. Only compile times would suffer. 2007 is the era of the Core

> Well yeah, for writing code you might as well use decade old CPU and it wouldn't really matter. Only compile times would suffer. 2007 is the era of the Core 2 Duo, which really are dated and slow compared to today processors. 5 years is reasonable, the evolution has been kinda slow lately.

and0 10y ago
I'll be going on 5 years this fall, which is my planned update period. Aside from some newer games, though, everything is great. Compilation times okay, heavy web browsing feels fine.
- user5994461 10y ago
  It's been a few years since games can't run on core 2 duo. I had to processor because of that. (running at 10fps isn't running fine).
simias 10y ago
Does it matter for writing code though? I have an old crappy 32bit celeron laptop with 1GB of RAM that's about 10 years old and runs Debian. I still use it from time to time when I want to code on the go, it runs Emacs and Firefox just fine. If I were to change something I'd probably replace the crappy HDD with an SSD before I touch the CPU. And the screen resolution is pretty poor too. But performance-wise it just works. I guess the key element for me is that I basically use the same software stack now that I did 10 years ago. Same shell, same window manager, same OS, same editor, same compiler. Only the web browser has significantly evolved in this time span.
- user5994461 10y ago
  1GB of ram won't run eclipse or visual studio smoothly. It's definitely not gonna run any test VM.
  - hedora 10y ago
    It should be ok for light docker usage. Builds might become memory bound. C++ compilers use lots of ram, and you might not be able to run one per core in parallel (assuming this machine has 2+ cores). I suspect some other languages are similar.
    - lultimouomo 10y ago
      It's only the linking stage that uses a lot of RAM and if you're building a single binary that's single threaded anyway. But if you need swap to link, it's going to take forever, and nowadays plenty of things need more than 1G to link (especially if you enable LTO)
  - flukus 10y ago
    I remember when I first got Visual Studio, it used so much memory that it was the justification i used to get dad to spring for an extra 128MB of RAM, bringing the total to 256. I can't think of much it does now but couldn't then.

and0 10y ago

I'll be going on 5 years this fall, which is my planned update period. Aside from some newer games, though, everything is great. Compilation times okay, heavy web browsing feels fine.

user5994461 10y ago
It's been a few years since games can't run on core 2 duo. I had to processor because of that. (running at 10fps isn't running fine).

simias 10y ago

Does it matter for writing code though? I have an old crappy 32bit celeron laptop with 1GB of RAM that's about 10 years old and runs Debian. I still use it from time to time when I want to code on the go, it runs Emacs and Firefox just fine. If I were to change something I'd probably replace the crappy HDD with an SSD before I touch the CPU. And the screen resolution is pretty poor too. But performance-wise it just works. I guess the key element for me is that I basically use the same software stack now that I did 10 years ago. Same shell, same window manager, same OS, same editor, same compiler. Only the web browser has significantly evolved in this time span.

user5994461 10y ago
1GB of ram won't run eclipse or visual studio smoothly. It's definitely not gonna run any test VM.
- hedora 10y ago
  It should be ok for light docker usage. Builds might become memory bound. C++ compilers use lots of ram, and you might not be able to run one per core in parallel (assuming this machine has 2+ cores). I suspect some other languages are similar.
  - lultimouomo 10y ago
    It's only the linking stage that uses a lot of RAM and if you're building a single binary that's single threaded anyway. But if you need swap to link, it's going to take forever, and nowadays plenty of things need more than 1G to link (especially if you enable LTO)
- flukus 10y ago
  I remember when I first got Visual Studio, it used so much memory that it was the justification i used to get dad to spring for an extra 128MB of RAM, bringing the total to 256. I can't think of much it does now but couldn't then.