4 ms·

Oops, Acer, correct (that was also the price I looked up), thanks for the correction. The 16 GB version of the Macbook Air is more expensive, but I wonder how

Oops, Acer, correct (that was also the price I looked up), thanks for the correction. The 16 GB version of the Macbook Air is more expensive, but I wonder how much more RAM a Chromebook needs for similar tasks since most of the software runs in Chrome instead of native? I don't know US Thinkpad prices in detail, but you can buy the 16 GB RAM/512 GB SSD Thinkpad X13 AMD (no OS) for 1025 Eur (edu discount) including 19% VAT in Germany (https://www.lapstars.de/thinkpad-campus/x-serie-campus/x13-amd-campus.html https://www.lapstars.de/thinkpad-campus/x-serie-campus/x13-a...). This makes 861 Eur before tax (US$1042 at current conversion rates). Of course, in the end it's all a matter of taste and use case and I'm happy to see more variety in the personal computing market.

makeitdouble 5y ago
For the RAM use, I also think a 8Gb M1 MBA would be fine for most people, including the OP if they stay within the confine of the OS. Now, in CS we're one of the edge cases where booting VMs and parallel systems is part of the deal. In the Chromebook configuration it's actually 3 systems running at the same time so more RAM has a direct impact on performance. (point taken on the Thinkpad price, I also think if we settle on a refurbished Chromebook, we could so the same for the Thinkpad and perhaps get it a bit lower)
- johndoe0815 5y ago
  The increased complexity and possibly missing familiarity with the system running inside the VM has led me to abandon VMs for the OS and compiler construction courses I teach. Instead, we make sure that all programming exercises work on Linux, MacOS and WSL. My OS course covers operating systems from a system call perspective (POSIX, processes, synchronization and the usual things), but doesn't include kernel/device driver development, so we only had to cope with small differences in syscall behavior here. Supporting Linux/WSL and macOS was a bit more problematic for the compiler backend exercise due to subtle differences in the supported assembler syntax and linker behavior between Linux and macOS as well as some students who might already own an M1 Mac. Luckily, Rosetta happily executes the x86 binaries my students created using the macOS x86 crossassembler and -linker, so that turned out to be not a problem (I was hoping that a student would build an Aarch64 backend, but that didn't happen). None of my students seems to own a Pinebook or MNT Reform, so Linux/Arm was not a problem this year.

makeitdouble 5y ago

For the RAM use, I also think a 8Gb M1 MBA would be fine for most people, including the OP if they stay within the confine of the OS. Now, in CS we're one of the edge cases where booting VMs and parallel systems is part of the deal. In the Chromebook configuration it's actually 3 systems running at the same time so more RAM has a direct impact on performance. (point taken on the Thinkpad price, I also think if we settle on a refurbished Chromebook, we could so the same for the Thinkpad and perhaps get it a bit lower)

johndoe0815 5y ago
The increased complexity and possibly missing familiarity with the system running inside the VM has led me to abandon VMs for the OS and compiler construction courses I teach. Instead, we make sure that all programming exercises work on Linux, MacOS and WSL. My OS course covers operating systems from a system call perspective (POSIX, processes, synchronization and the usual things), but doesn't include kernel/device driver development, so we only had to cope with small differences in syscall behavior here. Supporting Linux/WSL and macOS was a bit more problematic for the compiler backend exercise due to subtle differences in the supported assembler syntax and linker behavior between Linux and macOS as well as some students who might already own an M1 Mac. Luckily, Rosetta happily executes the x86 binaries my students created using the macOS x86 crossassembler and -linker, so that turned out to be not a problem (I was hoping that a student would build an Aarch64 backend, but that didn't happen). None of my students seems to own a Pinebook or MNT Reform, so Linux/Arm was not a problem this year.