4 ms·

I'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 co

by FRex 8y ago

I'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...

gkya 8y ago
It seems to me that people don't know their use cases very well, and then don't really know how to map that to hardware. That's okay for the "end user" type, but we're mostly programmers---professional or amateur---here I believe, and this is bad. I have never used a computer with more than 8 gigabytes of memory, and I haven't ever needed one. What I do with my laptop: run Emacs (negligible CPU, 200-300 megabytes of memory) and Qutebrowser (negligible resource usage, not always open) on Debian with a couple systemd jobs and Xmonad. I can easily get working on a RPi (theoretically, never tried), and my 4GB and 1.80Ghz (i3) laptop is way more than enough. If there was a codebase that required 30 odd gigs of ram, I simply won't run/compile that on my laptop. If I'm doing graphics, then I know I need a better machine for that. But people don't consider these variables, and buy the machine with biggest specs they can afford. And then there are those C++ programmers that are complaining they need crazy amounts of memory because templates. Now if a file takes multiple minutes to compile, the problem to fix there is obvious. But people choose to throw money and silicone at it instead. And they do whatever they want to do, but must quit their BS calling a machine like this weak. > 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 Yeah. We complain we can't have a decent laptop with FOSS and a couple years later when we have one we whine it can't hold entirety of english wikipedia in its memory or that it has a right shift key slightly shorter than what we like. So ungrateful.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  I also don't get it. Being a developer does not mean everyone is running hundreds of docker instances on their laptops. I am yet to own a machine with more than 8GB and most of the time it seats idle on 4GB, even when compiling C++ code.
  - gkya 8y ago
    I searched GitHub for the most starred C++ projects, and then downloaded and compiled Godot engine, because it did not require Docker and seemed fairly straightforward to build. The initial build took 30 minutes, then I added a random semicolon to the file editor/connections_dialog.cpp, and recompiled, it took some milliseconds shy of a minute, the bulk of which was not the compilation of that file (I re-ran the whole build, including linking; if I only recompiled that file it probably would be quicker, but I don't know how to use SCons). None of that process was seemingly bound by memory or processor capacity, in fact I continued my sunday computational tasks (i.e. watch silly videos, skim reddit) while it compiled, w/o any slow down. And this is a whole, complete, very widely used game engine, with included a game editor, which is obviously a graphical program. I wonder how quicker this program would compile on a machine like many people here claim they need to use.

by FRex 8y ago

gkya 8y ago

It seems to me that people don't know their use cases very well, and then don't really know how to map that to hardware. That's okay for the "end user" type, but we're mostly programmers---professional or amateur---here I believe, and this is bad. I have never used a computer with more than 8 gigabytes of memory, and I haven't ever needed one. What I do with my laptop: run Emacs (negligible CPU, 200-300 megabytes of memory) and Qutebrowser (negligible resource usage, not always open) on Debian with a couple systemd jobs and Xmonad. I can easily get working on a RPi (theoretically, never tried), and my 4GB and 1.80Ghz (i3) laptop is way more than enough. If there was a codebase that required 30 odd gigs of ram, I simply won't run/compile that on my laptop. If I'm doing graphics, then I know I need a better machine for that. But people don't consider these variables, and buy the machine with biggest specs they can afford. And then there are those C++ programmers that are complaining they need crazy amounts of memory because templates. Now if a file takes multiple minutes to compile, the problem to fix there is obvious. But people choose to throw money and silicone at it instead. And they do whatever they want to do, but must quit their BS calling a machine like this weak. > 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 Yeah. We complain we can't have a decent laptop with FOSS and a couple years later when we have one we whine it can't hold entirety of english wikipedia in its memory or that it has a right shift key slightly shorter than what we like. So ungrateful.

pjmlp 8y ago
I also don't get it. Being a developer does not mean everyone is running hundreds of docker instances on their laptops. I am yet to own a machine with more than 8GB and most of the time it seats idle on 4GB, even when compiling C++ code.
- gkya 8y ago
  I searched GitHub for the most starred C++ projects, and then downloaded and compiled Godot engine, because it did not require Docker and seemed fairly straightforward to build. The initial build took 30 minutes, then I added a random semicolon to the file editor/connections_dialog.cpp, and recompiled, it took some milliseconds shy of a minute, the bulk of which was not the compilation of that file (I re-ran the whole build, including linking; if I only recompiled that file it probably would be quicker, but I don't know how to use SCons). None of that process was seemingly bound by memory or processor capacity, in fact I continued my sunday computational tasks (i.e. watch silly videos, skim reddit) while it compiled, w/o any slow down. And this is a whole, complete, very widely used game engine, with included a game editor, which is obviously a graphical program. I wonder how quicker this program would compile on a machine like many people here claim they need to use.