5 ms·

So. Stupid. You can't choose Ubuntu and 32GB RAM at the same time. I need 32GB. Because modern developer applications are incredibly RAM hungry. My Jetbrains I

So. Stupid. You can't choose Ubuntu and 32GB RAM at the same time. I need 32GB. Because modern developer applications are incredibly RAM hungry. My Jetbrains IDEs eat up easily a dozen GB for indexes on my projects. gopls takes up a couple GB. Firefox fluctuates, but often half a dozen depending on how many tabs I have. Add in a few electron apps, and I'm at 27GB used right now. You can't even choose the top CPU option with Ubuntu, you're stuck with the i5. I want the multitasking performance. I'm currently on the previous generation Dell XPS 13 (9310), and I'm still satisfied, I'm not actually looking for a new laptop. But it was the exact same story when I was shopping for it. Impossible to get the developer edition, so I had to settle with getting it with Windows (and 32GB RAM) and setting up the dual-boot myself. Arguably it's more resellable because I can just wipe the Linux partition, re-merge the partitions, and it'll look pretty much stock. But meh. Worth mentioning that Linux Wi-Fi drivers for the model I have is terrible because they had two different chips they were using for XPS laptops and getting 32GB meant I would get that "upgraded" (but actually worse) chip. Had to fight with kernel upgrades to get a patch ahead of time to make it usable.

secondcoming 4y ago
Same thoughts when I was shopping around, so I went for a Precision Mobile and upgraded it to 128gb of aftermarket RAM.
samhuk 4y ago
I came to say exactly this. Color me unsurprised that this is the top comment. In what world is 16GB and a mobile i5 "developer orientated"? Makes my head spin.
- tgv 4y ago
  I must say, I'm surprised that it takes that much memory. I've got a 16GB macbook pro, and it sits at a comfortable 9GB "app memory". I've got one config project open, one pretty large Vue/TS/HTML/CSS project, and two Go projects opened in VSCode, plus Chrome and Firefox, plus Outlook and Teams. And Emacs. I regularly run a Django docker project too, together with DBeaver and PyCharm, and still it doesn't eat up all my memory (although I do close VSCode in that case). Everything is memory hungry, yes, but it doesn't look like I need 32GB. Pricey machine, BTW.
  - faeriechangling 4y ago
    I like to run every OS at once and it takes a little memory although 32gb is plenty.
  - tuetuopay 4y ago
    macOS is very aggressive on memory compression and swap. When I still used a Mac for work, it said 11GB for sure as app memory, with a 40+ GB swap file alongside it.
  - varispeed 4y ago
    I have a similar setup, but on 32GB macbook pro it is using 22-25GB.
  - vbezhenar 4y ago
    I'm using 64 GB MBP and it usually eats all that memory (mostly for caches, but it definitely exceeds 20 GB even for simple tasks like IDE + Safari). I guess applications configure themselves differently according to max memory available.
    - xuki 4y ago
      Unused memory is wasted memory.
    - WhyNotHugo 4y ago
      Jeez, and I complain when my IDE gets close to 1GB.
    - tgv 4y ago
      Are you sure that isn’t file cache and such? The OS uses as much of it as it can.
    - Zandikar 4y ago
      I've never understood this complaint that software uses all of the available memory and the implication that that is somehow a bad thing. That's the whole point of memory. To load up as much of the software or user data as possible into a fast-access cache to reduce wait times on paging to storage. I'd be concerned if my applications weren't using all that's available. That'd be a huge waste of money. That's a lot like buying a house then being mad when you actually use all of the rooms.
- throwaway81523 4y ago
  I'm a developer, I'm using a Thinkpad X220 from 2011(?) with 4gb. Any heavy computation I need is done on servers.
- pydry 4y ago
  It reminds me of when the linux netbook took off like a rocket in like 2010/11 and then the next year every model was capped at 2GB because microsoft licensing...or something.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  In the same world most offshoring devs when they come on site, they bring a Dell or Lenovo i5 with 8GB, everything else is done in cloud instances.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  And me still mostly using a 8GB laptop for my development purposes regarding side gigs. The work laptop does indeed have 32GB, because containers everywhere, which is something I don't use at home or development side gigs.
bipson 4y ago
You can still wipe the disk and install just whatever OS you want, right? Dell doesn't force you to use the pre-installed OS? I don't understand the resale value either? You can always re-install windows? Do people pay more with the "original" Windows installation? Shouldn't you actually want to explicitly wipe before you sell??
- francislavoie 4y ago
  If you buy the Ubuntu version, then you don't have Windows on it at all. No license. Which is why the Ubuntu version is supposed to be slightly cheaper. But the general public, non-Linux users, will find it much less attractive if there's no Windows license, making its resale somewhat more difficult. And as I said, that is what I do; I bought the Windows version of the last-gen XPS 13 and installed Linux on it (dual boot).
  - bipson 4y ago
    You should know that I have two XPS13 in my possession, both with Ubuntu pre-installed, so I know the economics of it. I was questioning your logic. Are you concerned with it's purchase price or it's resale value? You can't have both, can you? I don't understand why you use dual boot, if you only care for Linux? Or maybe you don't? Then why complain? The capacitive top row renders it a clear "management" option anyway, I don't understand the appeal of it for development. I think you don't have your priorities sorted out.
    - francislavoie 4y ago
      I'm just pointing out a potential trade-off. I don't care that much about resale, but the slightly reduced price up-front is nice. Re dual boot, because if I do have a Windows license, I rather not just throw it away. I don't mind losing like 50GB of my storage just to keep Windows around in case I need to sell the thing or send it back for warranty. Doesn't hurt to have sometimes to test something in a Windows browser or whatever, from time to time as well (yes, VMs are a thing but meh, overhead and jank).
- 4y ago
Groxx 4y ago
I can't choose the top CPU with Ubuntu, but 32GB of RAM works. USA store. But this: >Capacitive touch function row is a hard no. I cannot wait for this fad to die.
- francislavoie 4y ago
  Dave2D does say the function row works better than the Mac's, for the ESC key anyway. https://youtu.be/6fPj6mj-M_k?t=232 https://youtu.be/6fPj6mj-M_k?t=232 Personally, I probably wouldn't mind it. I rarely use F keys these days, other than the occasional volume/refresh/brightness stuff. I'm not a vim user so I don't use ESC that much. I use DEL a lot though, so that might be annoying.
  - Groxx 4y ago
    Which is why Apple replaced that visual-display-only escape key with an actual key and a slightly smaller touch bar pretty quickly, yeah. Because having zero feedback on key presses is terrible. This one will be terrible too.
  - stavros 4y ago
    Vim users don't use the Esc key either. We have remapped it to something less inconvenient. If you haven't done this yet, I really recommend remapping Caps Lock to a Ctrl/Esc combination, it's in a really convenient position, unlike the two keys you'll use it as.
    - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
      I still use <ESC>. Call me weird. I wouldn’t be so comfortable speaking for an entire legacy user base so casually.
      - stavros 4y ago
        > I wouldn’t be so comfortable speaking for an entire legacy user base so casually. I guess that's why you still use the ESC key. You need to break some eggs to make an omelette!
ergl 4y ago
> You can't choose Ubuntu and 32GB RAM at the same time. You definitely can though https://imgur.com/a/tL10iNZ https://imgur.com/a/tL10iNZ > You can't even choose the top CPU option with Ubuntu, you're stuck with the i5. You can select the i7-1260p option. Not the top one, but definitely not the i5.
- francislavoie 4y ago
  Well, not in Canada! https://www.dell.com/en-ca/shop/cty/xps-13-plus-laptop/spd/xps-13-9320-laptop https://www.dell.com/en-ca/shop/cty/xps-13-plus-laptop/spd/x...
  - ergl 4y ago
    That's weird! I can't imagine why they would restrict certain options based on country.
diffeomorphism 4y ago
Hm? I can pick the i7-1260P and 32GB with ubuntu just fine on the American website. Does the i7-1280P make such a big difference? Also, Dell seems to be either lying or incredibly incompetent: > As of today, the Dell XPS 13 Plus developer edition with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is available in the following countries Let's try the links they themselves put: - US: Yes - Canada: Yes - Germany: Nope - France: Nope - UK: Nope - Austria: Yes - Netherlands: Yes - Ireland: Yes - Italy: Yes - Switzerland: Yes - ... What is going on? That makes no sense.
- aliswe 4y ago
  VPN issue?
oakpond 4y ago
Why can't modern developer applications use less resources? (Partially rhetorical, partially genuinely curious about what's the problem here.)
- francislavoie 4y ago
  Jetbrains IDEs index your entire codebase for intellisense to make instantaneous suggestions as you type, etc. Those indexes across many vectors take up a lot of space. I don't see how it could take less, for a project of this size. It's actively useful for me to have it loaded in memory. Occasionally I run tools that provision an in-memory graph db to run some analysis, and that sometimes takes up to 16GB alone. Can't really reduce that either, it's just raw data. I don't see the RAM usage of these apps as a problem. IMO the problem is that Dell is not respectful of that need for RAM and they don't make it available to buy the specs I need.
  - oakpond 4y ago
    I'm not saying that it's not weird you can't get 32GB. I agree that's a problem. I just don't understand why these things have to take up so much memory. Why does it need to be all in-memory? How slow would it really be if you put some of that on disk? At the risk of sounding like a very grumpy old man: I still remember being able to build code with VC++6 and less than 1G of RAM, with a full desktop running. Nowadays it's like I cannot even compile a project with less than 8G of RAM in a terminal without risking a kernel freeze. What happened? Meh.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Containers craziness happened.
  - alyandon 4y ago
    Sounds like there is something wrong with your local installation. I work on a multi MILLION line code base with IntelliJ and it stays comfortably under 2 GB at all times. Maybe an errant plugin?
varispeed 4y ago
I have older XPS 13. I bought a M1 PRO recently, because I was tired of issues with my XPS 15 (which eventually died - won't power on). I wish I didn't have the mindset that XPS was enough for me. For instance when I am running tests on M1, they finish in about a minute, whereas on XPS I could go on a quick coffee break. Having ADHD it was a productivity killer. On M1 I can fire off tests, read something quickly on interwebs and then go back to developing in no time. Best of all, no distracting fans (it has fans, and sometimes they do activate, but I wouldn't know if I hadn't installed a fan monitor - they are that silent). > and setting up the dual-boot myself. Only good thing about XPS is that you can replace the NVMe drive. So when I bought mine, I also bought a separate NVMe drive and simply removed the one laptop came with and just installed Linux on a new drive. When my XPS died, I could buy a cheap used laptop (got a ThinkPad!) and put my XPS's drive in it and recover any data I needed. With M1 you don't have that option sadly.
- francislavoie 4y ago
  Check the benchmarks for Intel 12th gen vs M1. It's kinda crazy the leap they made from 11th to 12th gen on laptop chips. I will never buy an Apple product ever again, frankly. I hate their walled garden.
  - varispeed 4y ago
    I've been looking at these. The 12th gen only gets good results when connected to a charger and is dependent on active cooling. This is a deal breaker for me. I simply can't stand fan noise anymore. The silent operation was the main reason I decided to bite the bullet and bought M1.
archi42 4y ago
Got the 9310 dev edition as well. With 32GB of RAM, the biggest CPU and the touch screen (not 4k). However, since I wanted US keyboard layout (living in EU) & ordered via my employer, I had to go through our sales representative anyway; but I think I could configure it like that on the website (sans keyboard layout). That said, I'm not too happy with the Linux support in our model as well. I replaced Ubuntu with Arch (was the plan anyway) and had to fiddle with the fingerprint sensor, plus the WiFi is not suitable for pentesting (but worked out of the box on Arch). Bluetooth causes lockups, so I disabled that (maybe fixed with recent kernels?). Not exactly what I expected from a laptop that's sold with Linux. Next one will probably be not Dell.
n4bz0r 4y ago
> so I had to settle with getting it with Windows (and 32GB RAM) and setting up the dual-boot myself I've noticed many laptops that come with a Windows installation often have a separate recovery partition (about 4-5gb in size, which is about the size of a Windows ISO) that is used to 'factory reset' the device. If you have one, you should be able to safely clear the Windows partition, reformat it, and install Linux. When the time to resell the thing comes, you simply reinstall the OG system from this recovery image and get the OS in 'mint' (yet heavily outdated) condition. No bloatware lost! :)

secondcoming 4y ago

Same thoughts when I was shopping around, so I went for a Precision Mobile and upgraded it to 128gb of aftermarket RAM.

samhuk 4y ago

I came to say exactly this. Color me unsurprised that this is the top comment. In what world is 16GB and a mobile i5 "developer orientated"? Makes my head spin.

tgv 4y ago
I must say, I'm surprised that it takes that much memory. I've got a 16GB macbook pro, and it sits at a comfortable 9GB "app memory". I've got one config project open, one pretty large Vue/TS/HTML/CSS project, and two Go projects opened in VSCode, plus Chrome and Firefox, plus Outlook and Teams. And Emacs. I regularly run a Django docker project too, together with DBeaver and PyCharm, and still it doesn't eat up all my memory (although I do close VSCode in that case). Everything is memory hungry, yes, but it doesn't look like I need 32GB. Pricey machine, BTW.
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  I like to run every OS at once and it takes a little memory although 32gb is plenty.
- tuetuopay 4y ago
  macOS is very aggressive on memory compression and swap. When I still used a Mac for work, it said 11GB for sure as app memory, with a 40+ GB swap file alongside it.
- varispeed 4y ago
  I have a similar setup, but on 32GB macbook pro it is using 22-25GB.
- vbezhenar 4y ago
  I'm using 64 GB MBP and it usually eats all that memory (mostly for caches, but it definitely exceeds 20 GB even for simple tasks like IDE + Safari). I guess applications configure themselves differently according to max memory available.
  - xuki 4y ago
    Unused memory is wasted memory.
  - WhyNotHugo 4y ago
    Jeez, and I complain when my IDE gets close to 1GB.
  - tgv 4y ago
    Are you sure that isn’t file cache and such? The OS uses as much of it as it can.
  - Zandikar 4y ago
    I've never understood this complaint that software uses all of the available memory and the implication that that is somehow a bad thing. That's the whole point of memory. To load up as much of the software or user data as possible into a fast-access cache to reduce wait times on paging to storage. I'd be concerned if my applications weren't using all that's available. That'd be a huge waste of money. That's a lot like buying a house then being mad when you actually use all of the rooms.
throwaway81523 4y ago
I'm a developer, I'm using a Thinkpad X220 from 2011(?) with 4gb. Any heavy computation I need is done on servers.
pydry 4y ago
It reminds me of when the linux netbook took off like a rocket in like 2010/11 and then the next year every model was capped at 2GB because microsoft licensing...or something.
pjmlp 4y ago
In the same world most offshoring devs when they come on site, they bring a Dell or Lenovo i5 with 8GB, everything else is done in cloud instances.
pjmlp 4y ago
And me still mostly using a 8GB laptop for my development purposes regarding side gigs. The work laptop does indeed have 32GB, because containers everywhere, which is something I don't use at home or development side gigs.

bipson 4y ago

You can still wipe the disk and install just whatever OS you want, right? Dell doesn't force you to use the pre-installed OS? I don't understand the resale value either? You can always re-install windows? Do people pay more with the "original" Windows installation? Shouldn't you actually want to explicitly wipe before you sell??

francislavoie 4y ago
If you buy the Ubuntu version, then you don't have Windows on it at all. No license. Which is why the Ubuntu version is supposed to be slightly cheaper. But the general public, non-Linux users, will find it much less attractive if there's no Windows license, making its resale somewhat more difficult. And as I said, that is what I do; I bought the Windows version of the last-gen XPS 13 and installed Linux on it (dual boot).
- bipson 4y ago
  You should know that I have two XPS13 in my possession, both with Ubuntu pre-installed, so I know the economics of it. I was questioning your logic. Are you concerned with it's purchase price or it's resale value? You can't have both, can you? I don't understand why you use dual boot, if you only care for Linux? Or maybe you don't? Then why complain? The capacitive top row renders it a clear "management" option anyway, I don't understand the appeal of it for development. I think you don't have your priorities sorted out.
  - francislavoie 4y ago
    I'm just pointing out a potential trade-off. I don't care that much about resale, but the slightly reduced price up-front is nice. Re dual boot, because if I do have a Windows license, I rather not just throw it away. I don't mind losing like 50GB of my storage just to keep Windows around in case I need to sell the thing or send it back for warranty. Doesn't hurt to have sometimes to test something in a Windows browser or whatever, from time to time as well (yes, VMs are a thing but meh, overhead and jank).
4y ago

Groxx 4y ago

I can't choose the top CPU with Ubuntu, but 32GB of RAM works. USA store. But this: >Capacitive touch function row is a hard no. I cannot wait for this fad to die.

francislavoie 4y ago
Dave2D does say the function row works better than the Mac's, for the ESC key anyway. https://youtu.be/6fPj6mj-M_k?t=232 https://youtu.be/6fPj6mj-M_k?t=232 Personally, I probably wouldn't mind it. I rarely use F keys these days, other than the occasional volume/refresh/brightness stuff. I'm not a vim user so I don't use ESC that much. I use DEL a lot though, so that might be annoying.
- Groxx 4y ago
  Which is why Apple replaced that visual-display-only escape key with an actual key and a slightly smaller touch bar pretty quickly, yeah. Because having zero feedback on key presses is terrible. This one will be terrible too.
- stavros 4y ago
  Vim users don't use the Esc key either. We have remapped it to something less inconvenient. If you haven't done this yet, I really recommend remapping Caps Lock to a Ctrl/Esc combination, it's in a really convenient position, unlike the two keys you'll use it as.
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    I still use <ESC>. Call me weird. I wouldn’t be so comfortable speaking for an entire legacy user base so casually.
    - stavros 4y ago
      > I wouldn’t be so comfortable speaking for an entire legacy user base so casually. I guess that's why you still use the ESC key. You need to break some eggs to make an omelette!

ergl 4y ago

> You can't choose Ubuntu and 32GB RAM at the same time. You definitely can though https://imgur.com/a/tL10iNZ https://imgur.com/a/tL10iNZ > You can't even choose the top CPU option with Ubuntu, you're stuck with the i5. You can select the i7-1260p option. Not the top one, but definitely not the i5.

francislavoie 4y ago
Well, not in Canada! https://www.dell.com/en-ca/shop/cty/xps-13-plus-laptop/spd/xps-13-9320-laptop https://www.dell.com/en-ca/shop/cty/xps-13-plus-laptop/spd/x...
- ergl 4y ago
  That's weird! I can't imagine why they would restrict certain options based on country.

diffeomorphism 4y ago

Hm? I can pick the i7-1260P and 32GB with ubuntu just fine on the American website. Does the i7-1280P make such a big difference? Also, Dell seems to be either lying or incredibly incompetent: > As of today, the Dell XPS 13 Plus developer edition with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is available in the following countries Let's try the links they themselves put: - US: Yes - Canada: Yes - Germany: Nope - France: Nope - UK: Nope - Austria: Yes - Netherlands: Yes - Ireland: Yes - Italy: Yes - Switzerland: Yes - ... What is going on? That makes no sense.

aliswe 4y ago
VPN issue?

oakpond 4y ago

Why can't modern developer applications use less resources? (Partially rhetorical, partially genuinely curious about what's the problem here.)

francislavoie 4y ago
Jetbrains IDEs index your entire codebase for intellisense to make instantaneous suggestions as you type, etc. Those indexes across many vectors take up a lot of space. I don't see how it could take less, for a project of this size. It's actively useful for me to have it loaded in memory. Occasionally I run tools that provision an in-memory graph db to run some analysis, and that sometimes takes up to 16GB alone. Can't really reduce that either, it's just raw data. I don't see the RAM usage of these apps as a problem. IMO the problem is that Dell is not respectful of that need for RAM and they don't make it available to buy the specs I need.
- oakpond 4y ago
  I'm not saying that it's not weird you can't get 32GB. I agree that's a problem. I just don't understand why these things have to take up so much memory. Why does it need to be all in-memory? How slow would it really be if you put some of that on disk? At the risk of sounding like a very grumpy old man: I still remember being able to build code with VC++6 and less than 1G of RAM, with a full desktop running. Nowadays it's like I cannot even compile a project with less than 8G of RAM in a terminal without risking a kernel freeze. What happened? Meh.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Containers craziness happened.
- alyandon 4y ago
  Sounds like there is something wrong with your local installation. I work on a multi MILLION line code base with IntelliJ and it stays comfortably under 2 GB at all times. Maybe an errant plugin?

varispeed 4y ago

I have older XPS 13. I bought a M1 PRO recently, because I was tired of issues with my XPS 15 (which eventually died - won't power on). I wish I didn't have the mindset that XPS was enough for me. For instance when I am running tests on M1, they finish in about a minute, whereas on XPS I could go on a quick coffee break. Having ADHD it was a productivity killer. On M1 I can fire off tests, read something quickly on interwebs and then go back to developing in no time. Best of all, no distracting fans (it has fans, and sometimes they do activate, but I wouldn't know if I hadn't installed a fan monitor - they are that silent). > and setting up the dual-boot myself. Only good thing about XPS is that you can replace the NVMe drive. So when I bought mine, I also bought a separate NVMe drive and simply removed the one laptop came with and just installed Linux on a new drive. When my XPS died, I could buy a cheap used laptop (got a ThinkPad!) and put my XPS's drive in it and recover any data I needed. With M1 you don't have that option sadly.

francislavoie 4y ago
Check the benchmarks for Intel 12th gen vs M1. It's kinda crazy the leap they made from 11th to 12th gen on laptop chips. I will never buy an Apple product ever again, frankly. I hate their walled garden.
- varispeed 4y ago
  I've been looking at these. The 12th gen only gets good results when connected to a charger and is dependent on active cooling. This is a deal breaker for me. I simply can't stand fan noise anymore. The silent operation was the main reason I decided to bite the bullet and bought M1.

archi42 4y ago

Got the 9310 dev edition as well. With 32GB of RAM, the biggest CPU and the touch screen (not 4k). However, since I wanted US keyboard layout (living in EU) & ordered via my employer, I had to go through our sales representative anyway; but I think I could configure it like that on the website (sans keyboard layout). That said, I'm not too happy with the Linux support in our model as well. I replaced Ubuntu with Arch (was the plan anyway) and had to fiddle with the fingerprint sensor, plus the WiFi is not suitable for pentesting (but worked out of the box on Arch). Bluetooth causes lockups, so I disabled that (maybe fixed with recent kernels?). Not exactly what I expected from a laptop that's sold with Linux. Next one will probably be not Dell.

n4bz0r 4y ago

> so I had to settle with getting it with Windows (and 32GB RAM) and setting up the dual-boot myself I've noticed many laptops that come with a Windows installation often have a separate recovery partition (about 4-5gb in size, which is about the size of a Windows ISO) that is used to 'factory reset' the device. If you have one, you should be able to safely clear the Windows partition, reformat it, and install Linux. When the time to resell the thing comes, you simply reinstall the OG system from this recovery image and get the OS in 'mint' (yet heavily outdated) condition. No bloatware lost! :)