7 ms·

Nothing beats working directly on a fast but quiet workstation sitting next to my table. At least for me, the productivity gains associated with quicker builds

by simfoo 4y ago

Nothing beats working directly on a fast but quiet workstation sitting next to my table. At least for me, the productivity gains associated with quicker builds, IDE resyncs (CLion, looking at you) or just being able to have email, chat, calendar and an active video conference running without making the system crawl to a halt or long latency spikes are huge. 3-4k for a machine that will likely last 2-3 years is nothing in comparison.

GiorgioG 4y ago
For the life of me I don’t understand why folks default to laptops for development. Yes portability is great, but most of us park our behinds at the same desk everyday. If I’m going to be out of the office (away from home) I take a laptop and remote into the desktop! Even M1 macs (I have one and love it), while powerful, just can’t hold a candle to a workstation class machine.
- terinjokes 4y ago
  I've asked for a workstation from corporate IT, because I'm nearly always working from the same spot, and would be okay with a Chromebook on the rare situations I'm working remote. The cost of a beefy (but properly cooled) workstation + cheap Chromebook isn't much different than a corporate laptop. It's just not an option being considered anymore.
- BozeWolf 4y ago
  I bring my laptop with me to other teams for questions. I also bring my laptop for presentations, demo’s and sometimes for refinements. I work at home 2 out of 4 days. And I am no exception. The whole company I work for does this. I cannot imagine working with a workstation. A big part of my team has crappy laptops and work just fine with a citrix client. I am a developer and do not understand how they deal with it, but the ba’s are ok with it!
- romeoblade 4y ago
  I have a work laptop, but do 99% of my work on an identical VM that sets on my homelab proxmox cluster. Working this way allows me to work from any device, even my phone or iPad from anywhere. It's encrypted, has all the standard security tools required for work, etc. Our VPN suite checks for all of that on connection. I have the added benefit of being able to provision with massive amount of resources that it'll only use when needed due to ballooning and quick backup and rollbacks due to LVM thin provisioning. I do have everything sync back to the work laptop so in the rare case I lose internet or have a hardware issue with the cluster I can continue working. But that's only happened once in the last two years when a completing fiber provider cut a fiber line on my property laying their own fiber. (Not their fault, my current provider had the markings off by 50', and even then the foreman gave me a gift certificates for the trouble)
- moduspol 4y ago
  What development are you doing where there's a notable difference between an M1 Mac and a "workstation class machine?" Is it just running a bunch of VMs? I don't doubt the tasks exist but it's got to be a list that's been dwindling for the last few years.
  - glandium 4y ago
    Not GP, but: Building Firefox on a macbook air or pro M1: half an hour. Fastest M1 max is around 15 minutes. Building Firefox on my Threadripper workstation: 5 minutes.
    - simfoo 4y ago
      This is also my experience. Large Rust/C/C++ code bases will easily compile 3-4x as quickly with a fast workstation as with a top end laptop. I blame thermal design and power limits
  - ohgodplsno 4y ago
    Android development, a clean build of our project on an M1 Pro is 15 minutes, a clean build from our build server (which is ultimately just a thick 11700K or something along those lines, so still relatively old) is 3 minutes. Thermal throttling is a bitch.
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    I think anyone who wants a large amount of RAM or who works on projects in compiled languages will easily notice the difference.
  - patrick451 4y ago
    At my job, our main software is a multi-million line c++ codebase. It takes most devs 45 minutes to an hour to compile without a fresh ccache, and this is a workstation with 8 physical cores. On my laptop, a fresh compile takes over 2 hours. This can be brought down to under 10 minutes with enough cores. Partly due to poor internal dependency management, it's pretty common that every git pull or rebase requires recompiling ~1/3 of the codebase and waiting multiple minutes to compile in an edit/compile/test cycle is common.
- senko 4y ago
  I'd love to do that, but my laptop's and workstation's state inevitably get out of sync leading up to "wait why doesn't this work ... spend a couple of minutes .. ah yes I did X on the other device". (Before someone suggest "use docker": then I'd need a more powerful workstation and laptop :-) And VNCing into my workstation from the laptop has all the drawbacks that Matthew described in the article.
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    My main professionnal OS in a Linux booting up from an nvme drive with an usb3 case adapter. The pro laptop I have been given only has a screen resolution of 1366x768 and 16GB of ram. I don't mind too much when using it as a desktop because I have 2 fullhd 24" screens but if I plan to be more mobile and work on one screen, or if I need lots of memory to boot containers and VMS I boot it on my personnal Lenovo. I also boot it sometimes on a desktop in my office while I boot the original windows installation of the pro laptop updating itself and not be forgotten. I use adhesive velcros so that the drive is secured on the backside of the screen and don't hang from the laptop.
  - dugmartin 4y ago
    If you do your work in VSCode you can setup the following pretty easily and it works really well (I use it to connect to my workstation in my home office when I work in a coffee shop on my laptop or the rare occasions I go into the office): 1. Install Tailscale (https://tailscale.com/ https://tailscale.com/) on your laptop and workstation and enable the "MagicDNS" (https://tailscale.com/kb/1081/magicdns/ https://tailscale.com/kb/1081/magicdns/) feature. This sets up a VPN mesh between your machines (and any other you add). 2. Setup you SSH keys so you can login via the "MagicDNS" domain name from your laptop to your workstation. 3. Install the VSCode Remote Development extension (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview) on your laptop and then open a workspace on your workstation via its SSH feature using the "MagicDNS" domain. It is surprisingly fast - you are just sending keystrokes/commands over the VPN and not rasterizing the host screen like you would with VNC.
    - 4y ago
- prepend 4y ago
  It’s sort of the same reason people drive big trucks into work every day. 5% of the time I need to travel with my laptop. I’d rather not maintain two machines. My daily dev is an 8cpu MacBook Pro. It’s not as fast as a proper workstation but I can take it anywhere with about 5 seconds prep time.
- methyl 4y ago
  > Even M1 macs (I have one and love it), while powerful, just can’t hold a candle to a workstation class machine Not really true. My M1 Pro is performance-wise very close to my previous desktop based Ryzen 5900X, but: 1. It doesn't take space on or below my desk 2. Auxiliary screen it provides is useful 3. I can unplug it any time and continue working from anywhere with the same performance, without having to sync up the development environment. Before M1 Macs I would concur, but right now the major reason to pick desktop is Linux availability (which is a subject to change with Asahi), not performance.
  - vetinari 4y ago
    I have M1 (the original) MBP and Ryzen TR2920X desktop (with oddles of RAM, multiple NVMe drives and 10 Gbps networking). The Mac, while significantly better than any Intel laptop I had before, still cannot hold a candle to the desktop, sorry. The desktop is much more power hungry, though.
    - TheTon 4y ago
      It depends on your workload and codebase. I have a Ryzen 5600X in my desktop and for C++ work, my M1 Pro is quite a bit faster for clean or incremental builds. The desktop is still useful/required for some of my work (using x86_64 windows with an nvidia gpu) but I default to the Mac for anything that could be done in either place. It also helps that I prefer the Mac tools so it’s not just about the CPU speed. That said, I’d rather find a new job than trade either system for a cloud desktop. I count myself fortunate that I’ve always been in a position to choose my computer and tools.
  - jackcviers3 4y ago
    My System76 laptop with Nvidia graphics is faster than the M1 Pro I have for work, has more cores, and 64G of ram means I can run all my communications stuff and an ide and a compiler and a local k3s and the machine won't break a sweat. However, the battery will drain in an hour and a half doing all that. Performance is definitely not an issue on non-arm machines. Battery life is.
- make3 4y ago
  wtf do you do with your CODING workstation that a M1 computer can't do?
  - lupire 4y ago
    Compile large code base.
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    Warming his office.
- afavour 4y ago
  > Yes portability is great, but most of us park our behinds at the same desk everyday. Got to take exception to that. I'm a developer developer an I'm still required to get up from my desk to attend meetings etc, and I need my laptop in them. Or pair programming. It is usually a different kind of work so there's probably a world where I could have a desktop and a laptop but inevitably I'd end up needing to do something the iPad can't do and get frustrated.
- indymike 4y ago
  > I don’t understand why folks default to laptops for development. I think there's a lot of cost/benefit that comes down to: depends on what you are building. I had lunch with a VR dev last week. He needed a big machine for huge MS builds. I do a lot of web and network programming, and a $1200 LG Gram (i7/32GB, 17" screen) is way more than adequate. The important thing is that employers understand that slow computers cost them a lot of money when they hobble developers with them.
  - vsareto 4y ago
    >The important thing is that employers understand that slow computers cost them a lot of money when they hobble developers with them. Sadly, that's not going to fly these days with those same employers thinking people slack off more often remotely vs. in the office.
    - gjm11 4y ago
      If people are slacking off more when working remotely, then measures that make doing the job less frustrating seem likely to have outsized positive effects, by reducing that slacking-off. (Maybe I'm assuming I'm more typical than I really am. I know that when the work I'm supposed to be doing is frustrating and annoying I feel much more temptation to do other things instead.)
      - vsareto 4y ago
        I'm saying they're not going to see the logic of saving time with better equipment when they're complaining about people slacking off remotely.
  - raxxorraxor 4y ago
    True, employment costs out-compete costs for hardware very quickly. If your employee takes 10 minutes per day waiting on tasks because the system is too slow, you can instead buy a pretty decent rig every year.
    - 4y ago
- Test0129 4y ago
  You nailed it. Portability. Also if you're working professionally it's far easier to collect your property as a company when you don't have to pay oversized shipping costs for a desktop. Though rarely is a laptop in clamshell mode as good as a desktop. For certain things, I don't think they'll ever be. For example, graphics work and a lot of scientific work just isn't sufficient unless it's done on a desktop.
- duxup 4y ago
  Are most development environments high performance / high computer utilization environments? I was under the impression they were not. I couldn't tell you if I was on a laptop or desktop when I'm docked ...
- brundolf 4y ago
  It depends what you're doing. For a normal web dev workflow, I have yet to see my M1 MBP be anything but flawlessly responsive. I'm sure there are other workloads where it's different
- scarface74 4y ago
  Even in the bad old days when I did work in an office, we worked some days in the office and some at home. Even now that I work remotely, I still go home to see my parents for a week at the time and work from there. I definitely wouldn’t want to be dependent on the internet. Not to mention in less than a month, my wife and I will be doing the digital nomad thing working while flying across the country for a few years. My set up includes a portable USB C powered external monitor as a second display and my iPad as a third display. Of course I have a Roost laptop stand. If I need to spin up resources, I use my own (company provisioned) dev AWS account and it’s just there. Even the last 60 person startup I worked at would let us set up dev AWS accounts with the appropriate guardrails for development. We had CloudFormation templates to spin up environments as needed and we could just tear them down.
- paxys 4y ago
  "Most of us" absolutely don't do that. My company has 3000+ people, and I can say with certainty that every single person works away from their desk at some point in the day. I would quit my job in an instant if I had to be tied to a desktop at a particular spot all my life.
- temac 4y ago
  > Even M1 macs (I have one and love it), while powerful, just can’t hold a candle to a workstation class machine. My M1 Pro is faster in some workloads than a small Dell tower sold as a "workstation". Of course I could buy a huge workstation with a 250W CPU or some kind of insanity like that, but then I suspect its power efficiency will be 4 times worse than the M1 Pro. The Dell tower already makes quite a good amount of noise under load while being beaten by a mostly silent M1 Pro.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  Becsuse the business only provides you with one machine so if you need a portable one one day of 100 then it has to be a laptop. Buying or maintaining two devices per developer is too costly regardless of whether the pair (a cheap laptop and decent desktop) is cheaper than an expensive laptop.
- zmmmmm 4y ago
  I guess this is why I ultimately went for a fully spec'd Macbook Pro. It's the price of a car but the value of having workstation class performance anywhere I go makes it easily worth it.
scarface74 4y ago
What type of laptop are you use to using where that would make your computer crawl? I have none of those issues with my current M1 MacBook Pro 16inch. I have never heard the fan on my current MacBook. Now my older x86 one is a different story.
- hbn 4y ago
  I have the 2019 16-inch i9 MBP for work, and even that has served me pretty well for almost 2.5 years. I'm fairly conscious about what I have running at any given time, I force-quit out of apps that I only open occasionally to free up resources. Sometimes the fans will get going quick if I'm doing a lot (running Java services, in a Teams call, etc - on top of whatever the hell processes are being used by jamf, VPN, and zscaler) but I can't recall it ever "slowing to a crawl." It mainly just gets hot until I'm done with one of the big tasks the laptop is currently doing.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    So the issue is the corporate mandated malware. I usually lay the blame of performance issues on corporate malware for any modern Mac or Windows PC. But all video conferencing software sucks. I have to use them all on occasion depending on the client and usually the only one I actually keep installed instead of using the web version is Chime (yeah I know how do you say where you work without saying where you work). Oh I just notice you said you had an x86 Mac, yeah they all suck when it comes to fan noise and throttling
asdff 4y ago
Having access to a cluster certainly beats having a local workstation imo. Why settle for 1 node when you can have many?

by simfoo 4y ago

GiorgioG 4y ago

For the life of me I don’t understand why folks default to laptops for development. Yes portability is great, but most of us park our behinds at the same desk everyday. If I’m going to be out of the office (away from home) I take a laptop and remote into the desktop! Even M1 macs (I have one and love it), while powerful, just can’t hold a candle to a workstation class machine.

terinjokes 4y ago
I've asked for a workstation from corporate IT, because I'm nearly always working from the same spot, and would be okay with a Chromebook on the rare situations I'm working remote. The cost of a beefy (but properly cooled) workstation + cheap Chromebook isn't much different than a corporate laptop. It's just not an option being considered anymore.
BozeWolf 4y ago
I bring my laptop with me to other teams for questions. I also bring my laptop for presentations, demo’s and sometimes for refinements. I work at home 2 out of 4 days. And I am no exception. The whole company I work for does this. I cannot imagine working with a workstation. A big part of my team has crappy laptops and work just fine with a citrix client. I am a developer and do not understand how they deal with it, but the ba’s are ok with it!
romeoblade 4y ago
I have a work laptop, but do 99% of my work on an identical VM that sets on my homelab proxmox cluster. Working this way allows me to work from any device, even my phone or iPad from anywhere. It's encrypted, has all the standard security tools required for work, etc. Our VPN suite checks for all of that on connection. I have the added benefit of being able to provision with massive amount of resources that it'll only use when needed due to ballooning and quick backup and rollbacks due to LVM thin provisioning. I do have everything sync back to the work laptop so in the rare case I lose internet or have a hardware issue with the cluster I can continue working. But that's only happened once in the last two years when a completing fiber provider cut a fiber line on my property laying their own fiber. (Not their fault, my current provider had the markings off by 50', and even then the foreman gave me a gift certificates for the trouble)
moduspol 4y ago
What development are you doing where there's a notable difference between an M1 Mac and a "workstation class machine?" Is it just running a bunch of VMs? I don't doubt the tasks exist but it's got to be a list that's been dwindling for the last few years.
- glandium 4y ago
  Not GP, but: Building Firefox on a macbook air or pro M1: half an hour. Fastest M1 max is around 15 minutes. Building Firefox on my Threadripper workstation: 5 minutes.
  - simfoo 4y ago
    This is also my experience. Large Rust/C/C++ code bases will easily compile 3-4x as quickly with a fast workstation as with a top end laptop. I blame thermal design and power limits
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  Android development, a clean build of our project on an M1 Pro is 15 minutes, a clean build from our build server (which is ultimately just a thick 11700K or something along those lines, so still relatively old) is 3 minutes. Thermal throttling is a bitch.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  I think anyone who wants a large amount of RAM or who works on projects in compiled languages will easily notice the difference.
- patrick451 4y ago
  At my job, our main software is a multi-million line c++ codebase. It takes most devs 45 minutes to an hour to compile without a fresh ccache, and this is a workstation with 8 physical cores. On my laptop, a fresh compile takes over 2 hours. This can be brought down to under 10 minutes with enough cores. Partly due to poor internal dependency management, it's pretty common that every git pull or rebase requires recompiling ~1/3 of the codebase and waiting multiple minutes to compile in an edit/compile/test cycle is common.
senko 4y ago
I'd love to do that, but my laptop's and workstation's state inevitably get out of sync leading up to "wait why doesn't this work ... spend a couple of minutes .. ah yes I did X on the other device". (Before someone suggest "use docker": then I'd need a more powerful workstation and laptop :-) And VNCing into my workstation from the laptop has all the drawbacks that Matthew described in the article.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  My main professionnal OS in a Linux booting up from an nvme drive with an usb3 case adapter. The pro laptop I have been given only has a screen resolution of 1366x768 and 16GB of ram. I don't mind too much when using it as a desktop because I have 2 fullhd 24" screens but if I plan to be more mobile and work on one screen, or if I need lots of memory to boot containers and VMS I boot it on my personnal Lenovo. I also boot it sometimes on a desktop in my office while I boot the original windows installation of the pro laptop updating itself and not be forgotten. I use adhesive velcros so that the drive is secured on the backside of the screen and don't hang from the laptop.
- dugmartin 4y ago
  If you do your work in VSCode you can setup the following pretty easily and it works really well (I use it to connect to my workstation in my home office when I work in a coffee shop on my laptop or the rare occasions I go into the office): 1. Install Tailscale (https://tailscale.com/ https://tailscale.com/) on your laptop and workstation and enable the "MagicDNS" (https://tailscale.com/kb/1081/magicdns/ https://tailscale.com/kb/1081/magicdns/) feature. This sets up a VPN mesh between your machines (and any other you add). 2. Setup you SSH keys so you can login via the "MagicDNS" domain name from your laptop to your workstation. 3. Install the VSCode Remote Development extension (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview) on your laptop and then open a workspace on your workstation via its SSH feature using the "MagicDNS" domain. It is surprisingly fast - you are just sending keystrokes/commands over the VPN and not rasterizing the host screen like you would with VNC.
  - 4y ago
prepend 4y ago
It’s sort of the same reason people drive big trucks into work every day. 5% of the time I need to travel with my laptop. I’d rather not maintain two machines. My daily dev is an 8cpu MacBook Pro. It’s not as fast as a proper workstation but I can take it anywhere with about 5 seconds prep time.
methyl 4y ago
> Even M1 macs (I have one and love it), while powerful, just can’t hold a candle to a workstation class machine Not really true. My M1 Pro is performance-wise very close to my previous desktop based Ryzen 5900X, but: 1. It doesn't take space on or below my desk 2. Auxiliary screen it provides is useful 3. I can unplug it any time and continue working from anywhere with the same performance, without having to sync up the development environment. Before M1 Macs I would concur, but right now the major reason to pick desktop is Linux availability (which is a subject to change with Asahi), not performance.
- vetinari 4y ago
  I have M1 (the original) MBP and Ryzen TR2920X desktop (with oddles of RAM, multiple NVMe drives and 10 Gbps networking). The Mac, while significantly better than any Intel laptop I had before, still cannot hold a candle to the desktop, sorry. The desktop is much more power hungry, though.
  - TheTon 4y ago
    It depends on your workload and codebase. I have a Ryzen 5600X in my desktop and for C++ work, my M1 Pro is quite a bit faster for clean or incremental builds. The desktop is still useful/required for some of my work (using x86_64 windows with an nvidia gpu) but I default to the Mac for anything that could be done in either place. It also helps that I prefer the Mac tools so it’s not just about the CPU speed. That said, I’d rather find a new job than trade either system for a cloud desktop. I count myself fortunate that I’ve always been in a position to choose my computer and tools.
- jackcviers3 4y ago
  My System76 laptop with Nvidia graphics is faster than the M1 Pro I have for work, has more cores, and 64G of ram means I can run all my communications stuff and an ide and a compiler and a local k3s and the machine won't break a sweat. However, the battery will drain in an hour and a half doing all that. Performance is definitely not an issue on non-arm machines. Battery life is.
make3 4y ago
wtf do you do with your CODING workstation that a M1 computer can't do?
- lupire 4y ago
  Compile large code base.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  Warming his office.
afavour 4y ago
> Yes portability is great, but most of us park our behinds at the same desk everyday. Got to take exception to that. I'm a developer developer an I'm still required to get up from my desk to attend meetings etc, and I need my laptop in them. Or pair programming. It is usually a different kind of work so there's probably a world where I could have a desktop and a laptop but inevitably I'd end up needing to do something the iPad can't do and get frustrated.
indymike 4y ago
> I don’t understand why folks default to laptops for development. I think there's a lot of cost/benefit that comes down to: depends on what you are building. I had lunch with a VR dev last week. He needed a big machine for huge MS builds. I do a lot of web and network programming, and a $1200 LG Gram (i7/32GB, 17" screen) is way more than adequate. The important thing is that employers understand that slow computers cost them a lot of money when they hobble developers with them.
- vsareto 4y ago
  >The important thing is that employers understand that slow computers cost them a lot of money when they hobble developers with them. Sadly, that's not going to fly these days with those same employers thinking people slack off more often remotely vs. in the office.
  - gjm11 4y ago
    If people are slacking off more when working remotely, then measures that make doing the job less frustrating seem likely to have outsized positive effects, by reducing that slacking-off. (Maybe I'm assuming I'm more typical than I really am. I know that when the work I'm supposed to be doing is frustrating and annoying I feel much more temptation to do other things instead.)
    - vsareto 4y ago
      I'm saying they're not going to see the logic of saving time with better equipment when they're complaining about people slacking off remotely.
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  True, employment costs out-compete costs for hardware very quickly. If your employee takes 10 minutes per day waiting on tasks because the system is too slow, you can instead buy a pretty decent rig every year.
  - 4y ago
Test0129 4y ago
You nailed it. Portability. Also if you're working professionally it's far easier to collect your property as a company when you don't have to pay oversized shipping costs for a desktop. Though rarely is a laptop in clamshell mode as good as a desktop. For certain things, I don't think they'll ever be. For example, graphics work and a lot of scientific work just isn't sufficient unless it's done on a desktop.
duxup 4y ago
Are most development environments high performance / high computer utilization environments? I was under the impression they were not. I couldn't tell you if I was on a laptop or desktop when I'm docked ...
brundolf 4y ago
It depends what you're doing. For a normal web dev workflow, I have yet to see my M1 MBP be anything but flawlessly responsive. I'm sure there are other workloads where it's different
scarface74 4y ago
Even in the bad old days when I did work in an office, we worked some days in the office and some at home. Even now that I work remotely, I still go home to see my parents for a week at the time and work from there. I definitely wouldn’t want to be dependent on the internet. Not to mention in less than a month, my wife and I will be doing the digital nomad thing working while flying across the country for a few years. My set up includes a portable USB C powered external monitor as a second display and my iPad as a third display. Of course I have a Roost laptop stand. If I need to spin up resources, I use my own (company provisioned) dev AWS account and it’s just there. Even the last 60 person startup I worked at would let us set up dev AWS accounts with the appropriate guardrails for development. We had CloudFormation templates to spin up environments as needed and we could just tear them down.
paxys 4y ago
"Most of us" absolutely don't do that. My company has 3000+ people, and I can say with certainty that every single person works away from their desk at some point in the day. I would quit my job in an instant if I had to be tied to a desktop at a particular spot all my life.
temac 4y ago
> Even M1 macs (I have one and love it), while powerful, just can’t hold a candle to a workstation class machine. My M1 Pro is faster in some workloads than a small Dell tower sold as a "workstation". Of course I could buy a huge workstation with a 250W CPU or some kind of insanity like that, but then I suspect its power efficiency will be 4 times worse than the M1 Pro. The Dell tower already makes quite a good amount of noise under load while being beaten by a mostly silent M1 Pro.
alkonaut 4y ago
Becsuse the business only provides you with one machine so if you need a portable one one day of 100 then it has to be a laptop. Buying or maintaining two devices per developer is too costly regardless of whether the pair (a cheap laptop and decent desktop) is cheaper than an expensive laptop.
zmmmmm 4y ago
I guess this is why I ultimately went for a fully spec'd Macbook Pro. It's the price of a car but the value of having workstation class performance anywhere I go makes it easily worth it.

scarface74 4y ago

What type of laptop are you use to using where that would make your computer crawl? I have none of those issues with my current M1 MacBook Pro 16inch. I have never heard the fan on my current MacBook. Now my older x86 one is a different story.

hbn 4y ago
I have the 2019 16-inch i9 MBP for work, and even that has served me pretty well for almost 2.5 years. I'm fairly conscious about what I have running at any given time, I force-quit out of apps that I only open occasionally to free up resources. Sometimes the fans will get going quick if I'm doing a lot (running Java services, in a Teams call, etc - on top of whatever the hell processes are being used by jamf, VPN, and zscaler) but I can't recall it ever "slowing to a crawl." It mainly just gets hot until I'm done with one of the big tasks the laptop is currently doing.
- scarface74 4y ago
  So the issue is the corporate mandated malware. I usually lay the blame of performance issues on corporate malware for any modern Mac or Windows PC. But all video conferencing software sucks. I have to use them all on occasion depending on the client and usually the only one I actually keep installed instead of using the web version is Chime (yeah I know how do you say where you work without saying where you work). Oh I just notice you said you had an x86 Mac, yeah they all suck when it comes to fan noise and throttling

asdff 4y ago

Having access to a cluster certainly beats having a local workstation imo. Why settle for 1 node when you can have many?