[HN Gopher] The pain of using budget notebooks as a software dev...
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       The pain of using budget notebooks as a software developer
        
       Author : L0g4n
       Score  : 4 points
       Date   : 2022-05-25 21:09 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.l0g4n.me)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.l0g4n.me)
        
       | necovek wrote:
       | The problem described is the problem of their software approach
       | (running a heavy IDE in a VMware Ubuntu VM on a Windows laptop),
       | rather than of the hardware. Unless the cooling setup is terrible
       | on L490, CPU and memory combo should be pretty comparable even to
       | desktop CPUs of today, and only the GPU will suck in comparison.
       | 
       | While I don't use "budget hardware", I am sure L490 is not much
       | slower than the same gen Thinkpad X1 Carbon -- though I actually
       | use even previous gen with i5-7200u.
       | 
       | If you are mandated to use Windows, exploring an approach using
       | WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) should improve things a bit. Or
       | make sure VMware is passing through (instead of emulating) most
       | of the stuff.
       | 
       | Modern software development is further slowed down by the devops
       | approach where you develop using the "same" (but never really the
       | same) dockerised setup as the deployed production. So you get a
       | 10s unit test runtime for a 15ms unit test.
       | 
       | I am never sure why developers accepted this, but in all the jobs
       | I've been, I only felt as if I was the only one frustrated with
       | this.
       | 
       | If nobody else feels the same frustration you do, don't be
       | surprised: others just take it for granted, but it is _NOT_ a
       | hardware issue.
        
         | brailsafe wrote:
         | That specific thing might kot be a hardware issue, but the rest
         | of it is. Large corps issue these giant plastic behemoths of
         | laptops that they buy in bulk, and they just suck so much ass
         | to use _as a notebook_. Heavy, bad to type on, low quality
         | screens sometimes, slow, locked down, giant but somehow flimsy,
         | meant to be used on a dock.
        
       | nojito wrote:
       | The L490 comes with a spinning hard drive configuration.
       | 
       | That explains most if not all of the slowness if your
       | configuration didn't come with an SSD.
        
         | kelnos wrote:
         | Last year I pulled an old Mac Mini out of mothballs, installed
         | Linux on it, and started getting really frustrated with it
         | slowing down and temporarily freezing all the time (not even a
         | GUI, just the console, and web pages it was serving). I
         | realized it seemed to be I/O related, and replaced the HDD with
         | a SSD, and the problems just magically disappeared. Was shocked
         | at the contrast; it had been so long since I'd used something
         | on spinning rust. Even Raspberry Pis with ok-ish SD cards were
         | more responsive.
         | 
         | Replacing a HDD with a SSD, as well as adding RAM, can do so
         | much for performance, without even thinking about the CPU or
         | GPU.
        
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       (page generated 2022-05-25 23:02 UTC)