6 ms·

What 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 Sub

What 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 ago
That'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 ago
  Too many electron apps? :P
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Boy 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 ago
  That'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 ago
  What do you need 32GB for? Video editing? ML training on CPU? I have to imagine this is a minority.
  - OldHand2018 6y ago
    If someone needs 32GB then they need 32GB. The M1 is Apple’s low-end chip, currently available only on their cheapest computers. It’s like complaining that a Corolla can’t keep up with a Ferrari on a race track. The most charitable interpretation is that the person doesn’t understand the market position of the two items.
    - skohan 6y ago
      I’m just asking what would be a use case where you would actually need this
      - OldHand2018 6y ago
        My work desktop is 32GB and it falls over any time I try to create really big R data sets for others. I have to use a cloud machine with 64GB, and I run that out of memory most of the time when trying to optimize the production pipeline. They refuse to give me anything larger, so that's my upper limit. If anyone knows how to create giant .rds files without storing everything in memory first, I'd love to hear it.
      - macNchz 6y ago
        I find it easy to sneak up on 16gb of memory when running basic apps (editor, bunch of browser tabs, zoom, spotify) plus a complete environment for a mid sized web app (multiple services, dbs, message queue, caches, js bundler, workers etc), especially if I’m running tests and have mobile device VMs up. Pretty cheap insurance over the life of a machine to get 32gb of RAM and never have to think about it.
        foldr 6y ago
        Right, but that’s what swap is for. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you need more than 16GB.
        macNchz 6y ago
lasagnaphil 6y ago
Things really go haywire when you are developing C++ with clangd (the de-facto code analyzer for Visual Studio Code, CLion, etc...). It sometimes takes over 8 gigs of ram for just the editor. Also it takes a ridiculous amount of memory to just compile your code, especially if you're using Eigen.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mixmastamyk 6y ago
Indeed, as mentioned before, I used to "surf the web" in the 90s with 8MB of RAM. :-) 8GB is plenty for normal work, my current 16GB is plenty for development work including a 4GB Windows 10 VM running on top of Linux.

_gqhf 6y ago

That'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 ago
Too many electron apps? :P
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Boy 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 ago
That'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 ago
What do you need 32GB for? Video editing? ML training on CPU? I have to imagine this is a minority.
- OldHand2018 6y ago
  If someone needs 32GB then they need 32GB. The M1 is Apple’s low-end chip, currently available only on their cheapest computers. It’s like complaining that a Corolla can’t keep up with a Ferrari on a race track. The most charitable interpretation is that the person doesn’t understand the market position of the two items.
  - skohan 6y ago
    I’m just asking what would be a use case where you would actually need this
    - OldHand2018 6y ago
      My work desktop is 32GB and it falls over any time I try to create really big R data sets for others. I have to use a cloud machine with 64GB, and I run that out of memory most of the time when trying to optimize the production pipeline. They refuse to give me anything larger, so that's my upper limit. If anyone knows how to create giant .rds files without storing everything in memory first, I'd love to hear it.
    - macNchz 6y ago
      I find it easy to sneak up on 16gb of memory when running basic apps (editor, bunch of browser tabs, zoom, spotify) plus a complete environment for a mid sized web app (multiple services, dbs, message queue, caches, js bundler, workers etc), especially if I’m running tests and have mobile device VMs up. Pretty cheap insurance over the life of a machine to get 32gb of RAM and never have to think about it.
      - foldr 6y ago
        Right, but that’s what swap is for. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you need more than 16GB.
        macNchz 6y ago

lasagnaphil 6y ago

Things really go haywire when you are developing C++ with clangd (the de-facto code analyzer for Visual Studio Code, CLion, etc...). It sometimes takes over 8 gigs of ram for just the editor. Also it takes a ridiculous amount of memory to just compile your code, especially if you're using Eigen.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mixmastamyk 6y ago

Indeed, as mentioned before, I used to "surf the web" in the 90s with 8MB of RAM. :-) 8GB is plenty for normal work, my current 16GB is plenty for development work including a 4GB Windows 10 VM running on top of Linux.