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Indeed, it is. 16GB is too constrained even for native Linux desktop environment.
by aodaki 6y ago
Indeed, it is. 16GB is too constrained even for native Linux desktop environment.
- rubyist5eva 6y agothis is just nonsense
- turbinerneiter 6y agoRunning Fedora/GNOME on an i5/8gb laptop, never ever felt memory constrained.
- cozzyd 6y agoMy 5-year-old laptop is an i5/8GB with Fedora/GNOME (my primary machine is a desktop) and that is usually ok, but there are certainly things I can't do (like use Google Earth while having slack or a web browser open).
- stjohnswarts 6y agoYou won't but I think some HN people have to push around a lot data and the fastest way to do that is to get as much of it in memory as possible. Others love their electron apps and docker suites and VMs.
- vetinari 6y agoLinux desktop environment runs fine with 4GB.
- ekianjo 6y agoGood luck compiling large sources on 4gb
- vetinari 6y agoSince when compiling large sources is a desktop environment? There are projects that you cannot link if you have under 32 GB; but that is not enough to say that desktop environment you use while compiling is unusable under 32 GB.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- anthk 6y ago2GB of RAM user here, done that with clang as it uses far less memory than GCC.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoI mean really how many people are recompiling their entire code base every single day? Is their make/build environment so bad that they can't trust incremental compiles? I'm getting along just fine on my 8GB laptop. I know some people work with big datasets and video and such but holy cow. Most of us are probably just writing code for a browser/backend/library/test and not pushing around terabytes of data.
- anthk 6y agoMaybe these people never heard of ccache.
- NullPrefix 6y agoCan confirm, my VMs default to 4GB of memory and run just fine.
- Zardoz84 6y agoLinux desktop environment runs fine with 2GB
- gspr 6y agoI think the people who claim that 16 GB isn't enough are insane, but it should be said: at 4 GB it does become a bit problematic to both keep browsers with a bunch of tabs open and do other things smoothly. If we keep modern website hogs out of the picture, I completely agree with you. I tally about 500-1000 MB doing my job – if I can close the browsers that I do admittedly need to read documentation.
- matwood 6y ago> I think the people who claim that 16 GB isn't enough are insane The problem is containers. Some development workflows appear to require running a container for every piece of software needed, and that adds up (and feels incredibly wasteful). None of my development workflow requires containers locally, so I get by just fine with 16gb.
- gspr 6y agoI wonder when the pendulum will swing back and people will stop this insanity. I can already picture the buzzwords people will invent to describe "apps running on the OS itself".
- UweSchmidt 6y agoThat would require people to clean up. Sometimes I squint at the installation requirements and then head over to hub.docker.com. I think it will get worse (i.e. more layers on top) before it gets better.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoYeah when you see "install this docker" OR "follow this 10,000 line install and compile guide" and then have to explain to your boss what you've been up to today.
- dmytrish 6y ago"A bare-OS application" sounds almost as cool as "bare-metal".
- stjohnswarts 6y agoYeah but throw in firefox or chrome and some electron apps and your processor will be crying and your memory starting to overflow.
- theodric 6y agoI suppose it's what you do with it. I use about 6GB of an 8GB system, with the rest allocated to buffer cache. Firefox, VS Code, terminals, mapping software...I can't use 16GB unless I spin up a VM.
- Toutouxc 6y agoWhat the hell, enough with this! My main dev machine until a few months ago was a Dell laptop with 8 GB of RAM on Ubuntu. I ran RubyMine on it all day, some Sublime, Spotify, Slack, MariaDB, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, and I had no problems whatsoever. The only reason it ever ran out of RAM was a memory leak in Firefox.
- _gqhf 6y agoThat's good for you and I'm glad you're happy but for some of us, considering the work with are doing, sometimes even 32GB is not really enough. Different people, different needs.
- tapia 6y agoToo many electron apps? :P
- stjohnswarts 6y agoBoy isn't that the truth. I actively avoid them but sometimes you just can't like with signal-desktop. I actually have to keep it running because I don't want to reach for my phone every 10 minutes. Something as simple as that interface doesn't need electron but oh well. Maybe a lite version with just text and contacts would be acceptable. I don't need stickers, gifs and emojis.
- Toutouxc 6y agoThat's fine, but people like these are mostly outliers in the dev community, they exist on Linux, Windows and even macOS and they definitely KNOW perfectly well what their requirements are and why. The post I was replying to said something very different and much weirder.
- skohan 6y agoWhat do you need 32GB for? Video editing? ML training on CPU? I have to imagine this is a minority.
- coldtea 6y agoIs it? Up until now most devs still go with 16 or even 8 GB laptops. 32GB laptops are far between (Macs or not), and much fewer people use desktops... And we used to run Vmware with Windows (on Linux) or Linux (on Windows) in 2005 just fine, on laptops with a couple GB at best... Dozens of devs I know in a company I work with have 8GB Macs (and 2-3 years old at that), and run Vagrant and Docker with no issue. And those are mostly Airs with shared GPU too... I think people with 32GB laptops hugely overestimate how many other devs also are on 32GB...
- TheRealDunkirk 6y agoI have a 2019 MBP with 32GB of RAM. I bought it thinking that I would be running a Windows VM under Parallels, on which I would then let my company install the execrable Microsoft "mobile iron" access control. (You know, the one where they can wipe the machine remotely.) But then they changed so that even machines with this enabled cannot access the company resources on Azure. It must be one of their own machines. (So what's the freaking point?) Anyway, if it would have worked out, that's definitely a use case for more than 16.
- GrinningFool 6y ago> no issue. Could this be because they don't understand how much faster it can be -- the slowness is an accepted cost of doing work? I've recently run virtualbox/vagrant/docker on an air from ~3 years ago, and it's painfully slow compared to my 3-yo system with 32GB RAM. It works perfectly fine, but it's slow. > I think people with 32GB laptops That may be true. It may also be true that people with 8GB laptops vastly underestimate the benefit of having more memory available for development workloads.
- aodaki 6y agoI mean, Android Studio eats memory too much.
- chupasaurus 6y agoI run KDE with other JetBrain's IDEs and a 2 GB VM in the backround every day and the maximum memory usage was 14 GB.
- mhd 6y agoFor a regular user, probably not. Contemporary dev work with spurious containerization on the other hand… Maybe some companies should give their employees two systems. Your average way too expensive bragging rights laptop, and a smaller older one which is the only one you're allowed to do your code review/productive commits on.
- dec0dedab0de 6y agoHow about an undersized laptop for testing and coding. But a personal server for under their desk with k8s already installed.
- mhd 6y agoPeople, for some kind of reason, really like their laptops. They also have more brand recognition, thus the "bragging right" part, when you get your new X1/Macbook every 2 years. And if you still work on your laptop but have your personal server box as a CPU slave, that still leaves some issues. You might be able to do your build steps on the machine, but your IDE still runs on your laptop, so that needs to be beefy enough -- never mind auxiliary applications like browsers, Photoshop, CAD etc. Also, it's quite hard to get a slow laptop with decent ergonomics, unless you buy used (not that much an option for companies). Also, once you go headless server, it's better to just put it online anyway, as you don't need 24/7 access
- gspr 6y agoAre you joking?! That depends entirely on what you're doing! I could do my day to day work on 16 GB just fine. I could probably live fine with 8 GB if I actively closed web pages that I didn't actually need to keep open.