4 ms·

Whether or not a chromebook is adequate for cash-strapped students in my painful experience depends on whether or not your model has soldered RAM. Doing resear

Whether or not a chromebook is adequate for cash-strapped students in my painful experience depends on whether or not your model has soldered RAM. Doing research in school will likely have you opening a lot of browser tabs. Running Firefox on a non-ChromeOS Linux install is going to eat up more than the measly amount of soldered RAM that cheap Chromebooks offer.[0] I used Acer Chromebooks in college and very much came to regret this aspect whenever my machine slowed to a crawl the moment I opened an important PDF in Firefox. In hindsight, I probably should have set up zRAM on my machine, which expands the amount of RAM available by compressing it, just like ChromeOS does. However, as soon as I had money I chucked the Chromebook and bought standard a standard Acer notebook with upgradable RAM at a lower price than the fancy Chromebooks. [0] Don't underestimate this: at the moment I have hundreds of tabs open in a saved browser session, with htop pegging Firefox at 16GB RAM utilization! It goes down when I restart the browser maybe to 5GB or so, but it also doesn't matter much when you have 32GB or more available.

estaseuropano 5y ago
I dont mean to offend, but it sounds as if the problem is your workflow rather than the device. There's no reason to keep 100+ tabs open unless you don't know how to use bookmarks/citation software/save pages offline effectively. I also find myself with many tabs open once in a while, but if I see FF above 8GB of RAM I'm not going to think the issue is the hardware. Opening PDF in FF also always is a pain but there are plenty of lightweight readers.
- nicklaf 5y ago
  Yeah. The workflow I use for serious work actually ends up using less tabs because I tend to take care of stuff. I also bookmark/tag/close the important stuff. I talked a bit about my setup a few months ago in an HN post. [0] But just for casual browsing? I prefer to leave stuff open as a reminder to pick it back up again. My home office is also pretty messy in terms of books scattered about though, so this probably boils down to a personal preference. Come to think of it, maybe there's an analogy between people who keep their desk neat and tidy / those who program in languages requiring manual memory allocation versus those who like to leave books open and scattered / prefer the decreased mental overhead of working in garbage collected languages. :-P [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25612092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25612092
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> at the moment I have hundreds of tabs open in a saved browser session, with htop pegging Firefox at 16GB RAM utilization! This must vary by available RAM or something; I can get Firefox with 2000+ tabs (lazy-loaded) to run on a machine that only has 8GB of RAM. (Aside because someone always mentions: Yes, I know that many tabs is insane. It does work, though.)
- nicklaf 5y ago
  You know what, you're right: I was looking at the VIRTual memory allocated instead of the RESident memory column in htop. RES says only 8.8GB. Of course it's well known that linux pretty aggressively allocates virtual memory to processes so it's not surprising that the other one is so high (I have 32GB RAM and just as much swap).
martin_a 5y ago
> at the moment I have hundreds of tabs open in a saved browser session May I introduce you to the concept of bookmarking things, so you can find them later? I don't understand why anyone should have those many tabs open. That is not practical at all, I don't believe anybody who says something different, sorry.
- nicklaf 5y ago
  I'm not necessarily saying it's a good idea! Just that I would caution anyone considering running Firefox on vanilla Linux with less than 8GB of RAM. As for the 'hundreds of browser tabs' I mentioned, most of those aren't loaded anyway, and yet Firefox still eats up RAM, especially on sites like Facebook and Discord. I also whitelist Javascript using uBlock Origin, which helps some but really it's a losing battle--leaving hundreds of tabs open or not, there's no reason today to have less than 16GB of RAM on a modern PC. It's been a while since I've looked, but last I checked, pretty much every model that was price competitive with regular notebook PCs had no more than 4GB soldered RAM, which really is unacceptable. Looking on Acer's website, the only 8GB model is $929, which is about twice as expensive as what I can get by buying one of their non-Chromebook notebooks.

estaseuropano 5y ago

I dont mean to offend, but it sounds as if the problem is your workflow rather than the device. There's no reason to keep 100+ tabs open unless you don't know how to use bookmarks/citation software/save pages offline effectively. I also find myself with many tabs open once in a while, but if I see FF above 8GB of RAM I'm not going to think the issue is the hardware. Opening PDF in FF also always is a pain but there are plenty of lightweight readers.

nicklaf 5y ago
Yeah. The workflow I use for serious work actually ends up using less tabs because I tend to take care of stuff. I also bookmark/tag/close the important stuff. I talked a bit about my setup a few months ago in an HN post. [0] But just for casual browsing? I prefer to leave stuff open as a reminder to pick it back up again. My home office is also pretty messy in terms of books scattered about though, so this probably boils down to a personal preference. Come to think of it, maybe there's an analogy between people who keep their desk neat and tidy / those who program in languages requiring manual memory allocation versus those who like to leave books open and scattered / prefer the decreased mental overhead of working in garbage collected languages. :-P [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25612092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25612092

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

> at the moment I have hundreds of tabs open in a saved browser session, with htop pegging Firefox at 16GB RAM utilization! This must vary by available RAM or something; I can get Firefox with 2000+ tabs (lazy-loaded) to run on a machine that only has 8GB of RAM. (Aside because someone always mentions: Yes, I know that many tabs is insane. It does work, though.)

nicklaf 5y ago
You know what, you're right: I was looking at the VIRTual memory allocated instead of the RESident memory column in htop. RES says only 8.8GB. Of course it's well known that linux pretty aggressively allocates virtual memory to processes so it's not surprising that the other one is so high (I have 32GB RAM and just as much swap).

martin_a 5y ago

> at the moment I have hundreds of tabs open in a saved browser session May I introduce you to the concept of bookmarking things, so you can find them later? I don't understand why anyone should have those many tabs open. That is not practical at all, I don't believe anybody who says something different, sorry.

nicklaf 5y ago
I'm not necessarily saying it's a good idea! Just that I would caution anyone considering running Firefox on vanilla Linux with less than 8GB of RAM. As for the 'hundreds of browser tabs' I mentioned, most of those aren't loaded anyway, and yet Firefox still eats up RAM, especially on sites like Facebook and Discord. I also whitelist Javascript using uBlock Origin, which helps some but really it's a losing battle--leaving hundreds of tabs open or not, there's no reason today to have less than 16GB of RAM on a modern PC. It's been a while since I've looked, but last I checked, pretty much every model that was price competitive with regular notebook PCs had no more than 4GB soldered RAM, which really is unacceptable. Looking on Acer's website, the only 8GB model is $929, which is about twice as expensive as what I can get by buying one of their non-Chromebook notebooks.