3 ms·

None of that is necessary to develop software, and when you do want it, most of it doesn’t even have to run on your laptop. When did people become so helpless?

None of that is necessary to develop software, and when you do want it, most of it doesn’t even have to run on your laptop. When did people become so helpless? I was offloading interactive workloads via X11 back in the 90s, and these days it’s to a near-instantly provisioned public cloud instance. If someone can’t get by in a pinch with vim and a command prompt, then I don’t particularly want them in my crew. There”s a corollary to that old dictum, “a bad worker blames their tools”, and it’s “a good worker chooses good tools”.

scoopertrooper 5y ago
If you don't want to give me a decent machine, I don't think I want to be on your crew. Anyway, I generally work for big corporates that don't give the developers the ability to spin up arbitrary cloud workloads from their laptops.
- inopinatus 5y ago
  Oh, you’ll get a decent machine, but as the top comment conveys, developers that think this is a license to bloat need some firm correction, or simply weeding out. Not merely because their undisciplined code will be substantially more expensive to run, especially at scale, but also in particular because it’s correlated to being a useless towel in a crisis.
  - milkytron 5y ago
    > Oh, you’ll get a decent machine, but as the top comment conveys, developers that think this is a license to bloat need some firm correction, or simply weeding out. The thing is, I don't think a lot of businesses care about whether the software they create is bloated or not. Performance isn't valued as much as features or functionality. Teams for example makes repeated multi MB REST requests where websockets would probably be much more efficient. Until the business incentives are changed, I don't think we should expect much change (and maybe that does start with the developers).
- Wellshit 5y ago
  Eh, my work gave me a laptop and created a service for devs (virtual desktop) in the cloud. The laptop can't be used (security clampdown pretty tight, can't install anything useful) and the vd would die with 1 command (memory exhaustion), and had to go to their office to bring it back up.
peoplefromibiza 5y ago
I can survive hunting and farming my own food. unfortunately I can't get rid of teams and Intellij at work. I use Xfce on Linux and 32 GB of RAM are just enough to not encounter problems in my day to day job, imagine those poor folks using something like MacOS or Windows... At home I have a laptop with 4gb of RAM, it's usable, I use it to watch YouTube videos and as a media player. On Ubuntu the 4GB of ram are constantly used and the system also uses no-less-than 4gb of swap space (thanks fast SSDs for making my life better)
- bzzzt 5y ago
  Having used a Linux-based system and macOS I can tell you it's those poor folks using Linux that suffer most from bloated desktop applications. Recent macOS versions are really good at efficiently using the available memory so a 16Gb Macbook performs better under memory pressure than a 32Gb Linux box.
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    examples? except for the JVM/electron based apps that I am forced to use, all the Linux native applications are as good as any other system. Anecdotal, Firefox on Linux is the only incarnation of Firefox I feel comfortable using, I think it's between not great to terrible on other systems. I use WebKit based browser on other OSs. difference being I can tune the OS to work as I intend and the developer tools are some of the best in their categories, that's not true for the other two. MacOS is known for being slower and use more RAM on many developers task (docker, for example), but there are things you can only do on a Mac, iOS apps being one, and, honestly, I can't imagine using XCode with maximum 16 GB of RAM for the next few years. You might develop on MacOS, but then you deploy the artifacts on some Linux box, of course because there is no MacOS server offering, but I wouldn't do it anyway if I had the option. Windows as a server is not that bad either. I've worked with all of them in the past 25 years, Linux desktop experience is not as polished as it could be, but for sure it's not slow or bloated in general. Yes GNOME 40 is not great, GNOME 3 probably killed Linux on desktops, but I don't use it, so... even Plasma looks super snappy compared to MacOS these days. Claiming that Apple can double your RAM is a strong claim, that in my experience is not supported by any evidence. Perhaps the feeling of Apple system being faster comes from the fact that there are only relatively recent Apple machines around and it's rare to see some 8 years old Apple laptop still in use, while my 7 year old laptop with 64gb of RAM costed as much as an M1 Pro but can still do its job relatively well because I can put a lot of things in RAM, reducing the pressure on the rest of IO subsystem (I feel I have to specify that power efficiency is an order of magnitude worse than an M1, if battery life matters to you, Apple is ahead of the competition right now) But it's no secret that one of the strongest feature of Linux is giving new life to old systems. I still remember when I upgraded from Snow Leopard to High Sierra and everything became slower, sometimes unusably so. After 10.6.8 MacOS (best version of the OS I've ever used) has only got worse, in my opinion.
dpark 5y ago
> When did people become so helpless? I was offloading interactive workloads via X11 back in the 90s, and these days it’s to a near-instantly provisioned public cloud instance. If someone can’t get by in a pinch with vim and a command prompt, then I don’t particularly want them in my crew. Well back in my day we had to timeshare the punch card machine and our punch cards only had zeros. Ones were too wasteful and anyone who asked for them would have been fed to the lusers.
- inopinatus 5y ago
  I can only urge you to consider an upgrade from punched media to the new-fangled latest in magnetic drum storage, even if only in order to build a fuller appreciation for The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer [1] [1] http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

scoopertrooper 5y ago

If you don't want to give me a decent machine, I don't think I want to be on your crew. Anyway, I generally work for big corporates that don't give the developers the ability to spin up arbitrary cloud workloads from their laptops.

inopinatus 5y ago
Oh, you’ll get a decent machine, but as the top comment conveys, developers that think this is a license to bloat need some firm correction, or simply weeding out. Not merely because their undisciplined code will be substantially more expensive to run, especially at scale, but also in particular because it’s correlated to being a useless towel in a crisis.
- milkytron 5y ago
  > Oh, you’ll get a decent machine, but as the top comment conveys, developers that think this is a license to bloat need some firm correction, or simply weeding out. The thing is, I don't think a lot of businesses care about whether the software they create is bloated or not. Performance isn't valued as much as features or functionality. Teams for example makes repeated multi MB REST requests where websockets would probably be much more efficient. Until the business incentives are changed, I don't think we should expect much change (and maybe that does start with the developers).
Wellshit 5y ago
Eh, my work gave me a laptop and created a service for devs (virtual desktop) in the cloud. The laptop can't be used (security clampdown pretty tight, can't install anything useful) and the vd would die with 1 command (memory exhaustion), and had to go to their office to bring it back up.

peoplefromibiza 5y ago

I can survive hunting and farming my own food. unfortunately I can't get rid of teams and Intellij at work. I use Xfce on Linux and 32 GB of RAM are just enough to not encounter problems in my day to day job, imagine those poor folks using something like MacOS or Windows... At home I have a laptop with 4gb of RAM, it's usable, I use it to watch YouTube videos and as a media player. On Ubuntu the 4GB of ram are constantly used and the system also uses no-less-than 4gb of swap space (thanks fast SSDs for making my life better)

bzzzt 5y ago
Having used a Linux-based system and macOS I can tell you it's those poor folks using Linux that suffer most from bloated desktop applications. Recent macOS versions are really good at efficiently using the available memory so a 16Gb Macbook performs better under memory pressure than a 32Gb Linux box.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  examples? except for the JVM/electron based apps that I am forced to use, all the Linux native applications are as good as any other system. Anecdotal, Firefox on Linux is the only incarnation of Firefox I feel comfortable using, I think it's between not great to terrible on other systems. I use WebKit based browser on other OSs. difference being I can tune the OS to work as I intend and the developer tools are some of the best in their categories, that's not true for the other two. MacOS is known for being slower and use more RAM on many developers task (docker, for example), but there are things you can only do on a Mac, iOS apps being one, and, honestly, I can't imagine using XCode with maximum 16 GB of RAM for the next few years. You might develop on MacOS, but then you deploy the artifacts on some Linux box, of course because there is no MacOS server offering, but I wouldn't do it anyway if I had the option. Windows as a server is not that bad either. I've worked with all of them in the past 25 years, Linux desktop experience is not as polished as it could be, but for sure it's not slow or bloated in general. Yes GNOME 40 is not great, GNOME 3 probably killed Linux on desktops, but I don't use it, so... even Plasma looks super snappy compared to MacOS these days. Claiming that Apple can double your RAM is a strong claim, that in my experience is not supported by any evidence. Perhaps the feeling of Apple system being faster comes from the fact that there are only relatively recent Apple machines around and it's rare to see some 8 years old Apple laptop still in use, while my 7 year old laptop with 64gb of RAM costed as much as an M1 Pro but can still do its job relatively well because I can put a lot of things in RAM, reducing the pressure on the rest of IO subsystem (I feel I have to specify that power efficiency is an order of magnitude worse than an M1, if battery life matters to you, Apple is ahead of the competition right now) But it's no secret that one of the strongest feature of Linux is giving new life to old systems. I still remember when I upgraded from Snow Leopard to High Sierra and everything became slower, sometimes unusably so. After 10.6.8 MacOS (best version of the OS I've ever used) has only got worse, in my opinion.

dpark 5y ago

> When did people become so helpless? I was offloading interactive workloads via X11 back in the 90s, and these days it’s to a near-instantly provisioned public cloud instance. If someone can’t get by in a pinch with vim and a command prompt, then I don’t particularly want them in my crew. Well back in my day we had to timeshare the punch card machine and our punch cards only had zeros. Ones were too wasteful and anyone who asked for them would have been fed to the lusers.

inopinatus 5y ago
I can only urge you to consider an upgrade from punched media to the new-fangled latest in magnetic drum storage, even if only in order to build a fuller appreciation for The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer [1] [1] http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html