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I'm surprised that people call this a weak laptop. Clicking through to the article I thought it would have 2-4GB RAM and a weak CPU. It has 16G of ram and a v
by gkya 9y ago
I'm surprised that people call this a weak laptop. Clicking through to the article I thought it would have 2-4GB RAM and a weak CPU. It has 16G of ram and a very recent 3.10GHz Intel CPU. What are you doing on your laptops? This is a deeecent laptop and it is 13". The software you use is crappy if you can choke this machine w/o running a bunch of VMs concurrently.
- roryrjb 9y agoYeah I agree with this, my Lenovo has the same CPU and 8GB of ram (the maximum) and I'm happy with the performance.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jcelerier 9y ago> It has 16G of ram and a very recent 3.10GHz Intel CPU. I had 16 GB of ram in 2010 and it was not even a top computer at the time
- kingofhdds 9y agoI don't know what you mean by "top computer", but 16gb is still not very usual amount of RAM in laptops even today.
- Freak_NL 9y agoFinding a laptop with 32 GB of RAM for sale is pretty rare even. Dell only seems to offer it on their Alienware laptops (over $3000 each).
- FRex 9y agoThey are rare (and it's hard to google for them..) but I got one in the summer of 2016 for just under 5000 PLN (about 1400-1500 USD and that already includes 23% Polish VAT)[0]. [0] - https://www.x-kom.pl/p/293547-notebook-laptop-156-msi-pe60-6qd-i7-6700hq-32gb-1tb128ssd-gtx950m.html https://www.x-kom.pl/p/293547-notebook-laptop-156-msi-pe60-6...
- bjpbakker 9y agoThey are pretty rare. Been looking for one myself for a while now. There are others, inclusing Lenovo and Systems76. They’re all top of the line though, same price levels as the Dell you mention. And I personally won’t buy Lenovo.
- Freak_NL 9y agoI bought my new work laptop from System76 in January this year with 32 GB RAM for around $1800 (including VAT paid upon importing the device into the EU). They are one of the few vendors that make it simple to configure a laptop with 32 GB RAM.
- jtreminio 9y agoTheir XPS line also has 32gb
- Freak_NL 9y agoI guess that XPS model is region limited? It's not showing up for me in the Netherlands. (Or their filter function is broken.)
- eugeniub 9y agoYou don't have a real computer unless it has at least 128gb of RAM.\s
- adrianN 9y agoDid you replace all the tools you used to use in 2010 with Electron versions of themselves or what changed since then?
- gkya 9y agoI make do with 4GB RAM and 1.8GHz CPU. If I need anything that exceeds the capacity of that, be it games or graphics or compilations, I invest in a proper device or service for that. And if you need GBs of RAM for each compilation, you have to fix your build system, switching from detrimental builds to incremental builds. We're talking about a thir-teen-inch laptop here, i.e. sth one can shove in the pocket of some older overcoats.
- opencl 9y agoDual core is pretty weak considering that the new 15W chips from both Intel and AMD are quad core.
- walrus01 9y agoin the year 2018 it's shipping with an 802.11n wifi interface in it. In a $1700 laptop. That's just terrible.
- FreedomWarrior 9y agoAre there AC adapters that don't require proprietary firmware to run?
- gkya 9y agoYou don't get the point of Purism's product line. The focus of their offering is freedom. The rest are peripherals---and more than decent ones, those are. Given their size, you can't expect them to compete with the big players in prices. But disabled ME and a modifiable laptop is worth that price.
- walrus01 9y agoThe totally closed firmware and ROM on the m.2 nvme SSD is no more or less open than a modern wifi card with full open source Linux kernel driver support, which has a closed ROM running it.
- FreedomWarrior 9y agoFor some reason wifi vendors typically ship devices without any radio firmware at all, but leave it up to the driver to load it. Rendering the device 100% useless without loading some external proprietary blob. Hard drives don't have that problem.
- andrewflnr 9y agoHard drives definitely have proprietary blobs on them. You just have even less visibility on them.
- hueving 9y ago
- agumonkey 9y agoI feel wastey when using a p8400 c2d instead of my l7500 c2d. I don't get people needs today.
- nookoking 9y agoI'm surprised at this entire comment thread. > Dual core is pretty weak > I had 16 GB of ram in 2010 and it was not even a top computer at the time > It has 16G of ram and a very recent 3.10GHz Intel CPU. What are you doing on your laptops? This is a deeecent laptop What exactly are all of you people doing with your laptops? I'm running an old W500 Thinkpad at 2.8Ghz dual-core, 4GB DDR2, and a 500GB HDD. The only times this machine has struggled was when I was using a memory-leaking software (Firefox, etc.) or one that tried to load a whole large file into memory instead of chunks. If I need to work with heavy graphics I can stick an eGPU into the PCI express or an FPGA if I'm doing specialized calculations. But besides that, I don't understand why anyone needs all this gear.
- 0xcde4c3db 9y ago> What exactly are all of you people doing with your laptops? C/C++ project builds. Losing two cores just about doubles build times, and template-heavy C++ code makes the compiler want gigs of RAM all to itself. In principle I should do this on a desktop or server, but IT isn't on board with that.
- gkya 9y agoDo you do full recompilations all the time? Don't you use incremental builds? If yes, the compilation time should only rarely be a problem. But reading people's comments I feel like there are many projects out there using a shell script like "gcc -c a.cpp; gcc -c b.cpp; ...; gcc -o prog *.o" out there.
- nine_k 9y agoChanging something closer to the root of a large dependency tree triggers a lot of recompilation. The lack of real modules and reliance of `#include` in C++ makes dependency graphs larger than they could be.
- gkya 9y agoNot necessarily. Say I'm editing "bob.cc", and in the mean time edited "common.h" #included by many many files. While I'm editing "bob.cc", there is no need for me to rebuild the entire project until I want to see how it links to everything else (which can be postponed quite a bit if you have some tests); so I either run "make bob.cc" or "make test_bob.cc && ./test_bob". I don't know much C++ and all this is theoretical, but I think this is the ideal workflow with C/C++ development, and this is why incremental builds are useful, especially if the code is nicely separated into testable units.
- FRex 9y agoI'm not really that surprised myself. It's becoming increasingly more okay to just bleed resources and pay your technical debt off or lower your development costs by requiring users to have stronger machines. It's like implicit crow funding but in a very stupid way. Steve Jobs said it best in [0]. I recognized the author instantly (I know him because of his Pepper & Carrot comic which he notably does in an all FOSS set up and puts under CC-BY-4.0) and if he says the laptop looks nice, is quiet and works well for his typing and art then it should be a glowing endorsement but people are inventing flaws, pointing out the GPU is a weak integrated one, that the CPU is dual core and too weak for compiling lots of C++, that 16 GB of RAM is too little (I happen to have 32 GB but 16 GB is not little at all) and also totally ignoring that this is clearly a slick small ultra book (with an ultra lower power CPU [1]) and meant to run all FOSS with no fuss (feel free to steal that catchphrase), meaning no Windows, no AAA games, etc. I do personally use a more noisy, bulky and powerful laptop with even more than those "just 16 GB" of RAM[2] but I'd not call Librem13 weak, especially if it fits the owner's desired usage and does it in a slim and convenient for his travel patterns size. I do wonder if my perspective comes from the fact I try to use stuff the best and fullest I can. E.g. for 5 years (2011/2012 - mid 2016) I ran a bulky business-y hands me down HP laptop bought in like mid 2010 (IIRC) with a dual core Intel CPU, 2 GB of RAM, integrated weak GPU with support for only OpenGL 2.1, 500 GB HDD. It came with SLED preinstalled and the only Fedora spin it could run well was Xfce and before Fedora when I ran Windows 7 on it I had to disable Window transparency and all the Aero baubles. I abandoned it only after the keyboard broke and by that point the battery was no longer holding charge too so I decided it's not worth it to sink cost into fixing and upgrading it to fit the times (battery, SSD, new keyboard, more RAM, etc.) and moved to a brand new laptop and Windows 10. It wasn't a money issue (or I'd go with keeping that husk of HP alive) but more of a personality issue, I didn't do anything power hungry regularly so that laptop was very fine for my web browsing, learning PHP, C, C++ and Lua, doing university work, writing LaTeX, etc. and I knew I'd move back to Windows from Fedora which would be an effort in itself too. [0] - https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt [1] - https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/processor-numbers.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/processor... [2] - http://www.x-kom.pl/p/293547-notebook-laptop-156-msi-pe60-6qd-i7-6700hq-32gb-1tb128ssd-gtx950m.html http://www.x-kom.pl/p/293547-notebook-laptop-156-msi-pe60-6q...