4 ms·

Buying a laptop online is a broken experience

5 points by Raed667 8y ago

reacharavindh 8y ago
> Needs to be powerful enough to run a text-editor like VS Code or Atom with some Node or Python in the background. Sorry, I had a chuckle to myself that in 2018, we are worried about computers capable of running text editors! Hail Electron and JavaScript ecosystem!
- Raed667 8y ago
  This is true. And I agree with you but modern "text-editors" are not really just text-editors. They come with git, syntax highlighting, debugging tools, etc... Not quite an IDE, but not notepad either.
  - fpoling 8y ago
    And people claimed that Eclipse was bloated. Yet I was able to run 5 years ago not one but 2 Eclipse instances on an ARM Chromebook with 2GB of memory compiling and debugging an Eclipse extension. This was in a crouton chroot [1] with few chrome tabs opened in parallel. When I edited the files that involved using a lot of IDE features for Java the system was snappy. The only time when I felt that the system was slow was when rebuilding everything. But that was expected given the slowness of CPU and RAM. So how can a text-editor that is not even an IDE require more resources... [1] https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton
    - Raed667 8y ago
      Eclipse is and has become even more resource hungry : https://imgur.com/a/TnS7CPi https://imgur.com/a/TnS7CPi
      - fpoling 8y ago
        This is trivially to deal with by a one or two of command-line arguments to limit Java heap to 256MB or less. This had an added benefit of making full GC faster so when it happened the pause was not annoying.
  - flukus 8y ago
    > They come with git, syntax highlighting, debugging tools, etc... 20 years ago Visual C++ 6 had all this (except for git), I upgraded my computer to 256MB of RAM to run it.
fpoling 8y ago
I have found reviews from https://notebookcheck.net https://notebookcheck.net rather useful with their notes about keyboard and screen mostly matching what I get on a physical machine.

4 ms·

Buying a laptop online is a broken experience

5 points by Raed667 8y ago

reacharavindh 8y ago
> Needs to be powerful enough to run a text-editor like VS Code or Atom with some Node or Python in the background. Sorry, I had a chuckle to myself that in 2018, we are worried about computers capable of running text editors! Hail Electron and JavaScript ecosystem!
- Raed667 8y ago
  This is true. And I agree with you but modern "text-editors" are not really just text-editors. They come with git, syntax highlighting, debugging tools, etc... Not quite an IDE, but not notepad either.
  - fpoling 8y ago
    And people claimed that Eclipse was bloated. Yet I was able to run 5 years ago not one but 2 Eclipse instances on an ARM Chromebook with 2GB of memory compiling and debugging an Eclipse extension. This was in a crouton chroot [1] with few chrome tabs opened in parallel. When I edited the files that involved using a lot of IDE features for Java the system was snappy. The only time when I felt that the system was slow was when rebuilding everything. But that was expected given the slowness of CPU and RAM. So how can a text-editor that is not even an IDE require more resources... [1] https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton
    - Raed667 8y ago
      Eclipse is and has become even more resource hungry : https://imgur.com/a/TnS7CPi https://imgur.com/a/TnS7CPi
      - fpoling 8y ago
        This is trivially to deal with by a one or two of command-line arguments to limit Java heap to 256MB or less. This had an added benefit of making full GC faster so when it happened the pause was not annoying.
  - flukus 8y ago
    > They come with git, syntax highlighting, debugging tools, etc... 20 years ago Visual C++ 6 had all this (except for git), I upgraded my computer to 256MB of RAM to run it.
fpoling 8y ago
I have found reviews from https://notebookcheck.net https://notebookcheck.net rather useful with their notes about keyboard and screen mostly matching what I get on a physical machine.